Community, Identity, And Happiness In Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World

A quick perusal through any bookstore will prove one thing: people like the idea of fighting a system. Freedom from an opressive government is an ideal that most countries, or at the very least most citizens, fight for. It's one of the most explored ideas in popular fiction and one of the most volatile concept in real life. In America, and much of Europe, freedom comes hand-in-hand with pleasure. We have the right to say what we want, believe what we want, and to pursue happiness however we want, within moral boundaries regulated and upheld by the government. However, it's not difficult to imagine a country, or a future, with a stronger dichotomy between freedom and pleasure. How would you go about fighting a system that asked you to chose between the two? Aldous Huxley's novel A Brave New World explores this hypothetical scenario, presenting it's readers with a government which uses the motto of “Community, Identity, and Stability” as a means to preserve happiness and destroy freedom. Each of the main characters of the novel – Bernard Marx, John the Savage, and Helmholtz Watson – struggle against a certain aspect of the government's motto in their attempt to find fulfilment through both freedom and happiness. I believe that the best way to fight the system in the novel is to fight Stability.

For the Utopia in Brave New World, Identity is your role in society. It's being exactly like everybody else: exactly who you were genetically modified to be. Because of this, the government forces a conformist agenda down the throats of people from the second they're born. Anybody who is different from what he or she is supposed to be is an outcast. Because of this, it's natural that Bernard would fight against this concept. Almost 10 centi...

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...attain stability at any cost is what has caused the Utopia in this book. To fight against somebody controlling you with happiness, you don't need to hurt yourself. If you're mad at somebody who feeds you, you don't starve yourself. Neither do you eat out of their hand the second they affirm you as an individual. You simply accept who they are, and that what they are doing is wrong, and you move on. This is Helmholtz's view. He is simply searching for greater feelings than can be found in the New World. He doesn't want to take Violent Passion Surrogate; he wants to feel emotions and express emotions and be and touch and breathe something true and beautiful and powerful and important. He accepts his exile and looks forward to living in a place where people feel real emotions, where he will feel real discomfort and be around other people who feel the same way he does.