The Loss of Individuality in the Strive for Power: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

The love of Power and its grasp on humanity is exemplified in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Huxley’s dystopian society, access to power is limited; it is allowed only to those who have been conditioned to gain it. "We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or […] future Directors of Hatcheries." Power in Brave New World initiates from eliminating choice but also from giving the illusion of choice, thus, erasing any conception of choice. In other words, it allows people to miss the freedom they don't have; in this case, such control is exerted through pre-conditioning. The struggle for power in Brave New World clarifies how one can forget their principles while losing any sense of individualism they may have once had. With the reaffirmation and the deconstruction of gender roles in Brave New World, Huxley explains how the temptation of power can manipulate one to discard all semblance of individuality. This is done through the characters of Bernard Marx, Mustapha Mond, and John the Savage. The desire for power has the ability to corrupt the mind and cause one’s moral ground to crumble. It strips one of their ethics and individuality because in the pursuit of power they lose themselves.

In Brave New World, people are not born, instead, they are created through Bokanovsky's Process, "a series of arrests of development" by which millions of eggs bud and form a nearly endless supply of human embryos (Huxley 6). Before a person is even contrived, workers at the Conditioning Centre determine his appearance, his level and function in society, and even his intelligence. Incidentally, bokanovskification is "one of the major instruments of social s...

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...ver them is not as demoralizing. Through Bernard Marx, Mustapha Mond, and John the Savage, Huxley illustrates how humanity covets power and is willing to abandon all other pursuits to obtain it.

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Huxley , Aldous. Brave New World. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1932. Print.

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