The Prohibition Era In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a satire written in 1932, in which he comments on the social issues and human behaviors he observed around him. In his political commentary he condemns the clinical and capitalistic nature of society. Huxley witnessed the rise of promiscuity, vices, class and racial divisions, and the introduction of mass production, and in his novel he addresses what will happen when humanity allows these issues to take the position of beauty, art, and love.

In his novel he has a totalitarian government run by 12 world controllers where the citizens are conditioned from birth to believe that their sole purpose in life is to produce and consume for the better of society. Each of the major characters reflect one of the

The Prohibition Era might have influenced Huxley as seen how in his fictional society the citizens are rely heavily on the drug Soma. Similar to how during the Prohibition Era, people were doing all they could to keep their alcohol, even going so far to smuggle it and sell it illegally. He satirizes the dependence these people had on their vices, by having the World State citizens have Soma be their crutches. The 1st Academy Awards might have influenced” the feelies” that are present in Brave New World, in that they both promoted the distraction from the real social issues and let them escape in fictional movie worlds. Huxley writes in his novel, “...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....” Showing how necessary it was to keep the utopian peace they society claimed they had by keeping its citizens distracted. With the rise of Hitler began the idea of a totalitarian government and the extermination of all foreign and alien ideas and people. In Brave New World, the World State is governed by a select few and their rights are strongly limited if not completely absent, and those who oppose this form of government are isolated to