While it may seem like an obvious fact that the society created in Brave New World is not suitable for people because we are robbed of our freedoms, maybe the new society is what would be best for us because it gives us happiness, and isn't that something that almost everyone wants and strives for?
The society they have formulated ensures that everyone is happy, their desires are contended, and no matter what their rank is in the cast system, that they are happy with their social rank and conditioned to like what they do. What is it that makes the new society established really all that bad if everyone is content?
My intent is not to justify the ways of the society in the book, but just to provide a different viewpoint than most people who simply claim that everything in the book is terrible and they need things to change.
While everyone in the book may seem happy, it is an artificial kind of happiness that is provided by means of soma, and cruel conditioning that forces them to have certain beliefs they may not have had otherwise. The new world also defines happiness for us, when we currently are given the right to the pursuit of happiness, whatever happiness means to us, and not made to enjoy some mainstream form of happiness that the leaders may give its citizens. We should be able to feel every emotion, be given the opportunity to find out what happiness means to us personally, and have a chance to reach our own personal goals.
-Julissa Martinez
Of course everyone wants happiness, but the question is do you want to feel the pain to get to happiness or blur it all away with soma? After reading both books it seems soma is the main distraction for the real world, tv being our soma. Perhaps people like to feel nothing as if everything is gone away, but after the "soma" diminishes off then what? No matter the situation people need to remember you can't just ignore the feelings and in Brave New World they constantly do that.
ReplyDelete