Bravery in Sadness

It is crazy to imagine a world in which happiness is created and relationships and love are things the past, are things of forbidden nature. In the brave new world, when we see the agony and pain that the mother of the savage goes through because of her "uncleanliness" of being a mother, we, as readers are baffled. We learn a lot about society through the eyes of this savage who has learned about the culture outside of his reservation, but is educated in the ways of the days when people were free to live, to feel pain, and to love.
Through the savage’s reaction to the false happiness of the people in the “civilized” world, the reader can see how pained the people with no lives to call their own must need this false happiness of learned reactions and soma can contribute to a more stable society. The savage is uncomfortable in the fakeness of the world around him because he knows that true happiness only comes when one can experience true grief to gauge true happiness from. It is hard to believe that a society that can be so much advanced from the place, in which we live currently, can be so utterly corrupt. The savage sees this corruption without the eyes of forced belief of perfection. This knowledge of the possibility of a totalitarian government being able to control so much about a society that people do not even think their own true thoughts is entirely frightening. What would a world become if people were who they were going to be from the day they were conceived? The world would never be better than it was because no choices are available to be made. Every day would be as the last and no one would have the chance for improvement and failure. Once Bernard Marx finds this savage, a boy who was born from a woman who had been created, not born, this is his only chance for his true happiness, his lifting in life. As an alpha plus he innately understands that happiness stems from lack of grief, not from drugs. He realizes his need for ability to achieve and found this through recognition, something that a seemingly communistic society does not advocate or even understand. Once his fame and achievement goes away, he realizes that in the society in which he exists, greatness has no place and achievement is even frowned upon because people must follow the learning and engineering they have been created with.
It is a tragic ending when the savage runs away from the society because he cannot handle the fakeness of the world and the understanding that no person can truly be better than anyone else. Without learning and without ability for excellence, no one can make himself better. This is frightening for people who have been through hard times and know that happiness is only judged against the hard times you have had. When happiness in a society is characterized by how high you can get on a soma vacation, life is not worth living and the savage sees this. Life is made so that people have a potential to succeed or fail, be happy or sad, not so that the world appears perfect but is secretly distressed (548).


My Jstor articles:
"Brainwashing and Totalitarianization in Modern Society: by Edgar Schein
"Brave New World and The Tempest" by Ira Grushow
"Science and Conscience in Huxley's Brave New World" by Peter Firchow