Reasons For and Forms of Oppression within Society

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How do the authors of two texts you have studied express the reasons for

and forms of oppression within society?

Question: How do the authors of two texts you have studied express the

reasons for and forms of oppression within society?

Oppression has always been evident within society throughout history.

Yevgeny Zamyatin in draws on the experiences of the Russian Revolution

in We, while Aldous Huxley uses his own experiences through family and

friends in Brave New World to question and contemplate the reasons for

and forms of oppression in society. In their own ways, each author

explores the influence of possible aspects of central authority,

including physical and psychological conditioning, and the loss of

individualism and concurrent over-collectivism, within their dystopian

worlds. Huxley’s World State presents a society in which the people

are conditioned to be hardly aware of their oppression, and

furthermore to love the stability it achieves, while Zamyatin’s One

State puts much more emphasis on the need and use of violent

oppression and rationality in the levels of science and technology

they explore. Despite these different approaches, however, both

authors present similar ends to such actions and warn of the

possibility of ominous futures.

In both We and Brave New World, the people are physically modified to

suit society. Zamyatin explores a world in which “no one is one but

only one of, we’re so identical.” Each person is given a letter and a

corresponding number, relating to whether that person is male or

female, with all males ending with an odd number, such as D-503 and

all females ending with an even number, such as I-330. Furthermore,

the peoples' physical appearances also help rel...

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...e nature of science

unguided by ethics is presented, a view not really expressed by

Zamyatin.

Both Brave New World and We express slightly different forms and

reasons for oppression in society though present similar ends. The

authors warn of a society in which the individual is lost to the

collective, and, more worrisome, where people may not fight their

oppression, but embrace it. Brave New World suggests that to be on

guard against the threat, society must be wary of the oppression of

pleasure, in which ecstasy allows adult society to descend to deep

immaturity. We suggests that ideology must not allow society to

objectify nature and deny morality and humanity. The overriding

effect of oppression in both the World State and the One State is the

loss of individuality; the essence of individualism is a problem to

the power structures of both societies.

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