Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Humans have transformed their social organization, time and time again. Social separation has existed since the Neolithic Revolution. Very recently, we have begun to head down a dangerous path to what we can call a Brave New World. A “Brave New World” is one in which those in charge begin to intrude on the lives of individuals to the extent that the government has so much control that it begins to create human beings artificially. This path first started with encroaching technologies such as cameras and wire-tapping. Now we have begun to develop technology that reads people’s brain signals. Video surveillance has also become extremely advanced. It does not stop here. For thousands of years, humans have held a common belief that everyone is created in “God’s image” and our identity is natural. Today, humans are able to alter their identity before they are even born. This revelation is now seen in emerging technologies such as cloning, genetic engineering, and eugenics (improving the human race through selective breeding) (“Genetic Engineering”). This direction is embodied by the Nazis experiments in the mid-twentieth century. On the path humans are currently following, we will no longer know what it means to be “individual”. Humans will reach an extreme unlike ever before in which we will be placed in different classes before we are even born, as illustrated in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

The dangers of brain-detecting technology are frightening. What if the government could essentially “read our minds” and know what we were thinking at all ti...

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With all these encroaching technologies, we are headed down a path which may be inevitable. Human beings continue to stratify themselves into different groups. Eventually, we will discover that we are in a “brave new world”. Intruding technologies such as brain-detecting equipment and video surveillance are instruments for the government to control our thinking until we reach a uniform way of thought. Likewise, cloning and genetic engineering can potentially make all humans similar. It is possible that eventually we will reach an extreme seen in Brave New World in which humans are put into classifications before they are born.

Bibliography

Works Cited

Achenbach, Joel. “The Future Is Now.” The Washington Post 13 Apr. 2008: B01.

Farahany, Nita. “The Government is Trying to Wrap Its Mind Around Yours.” The Washington Post 13 Apr. 2008: B03.

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