The beginning ( the paper)

In the novel, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, the theme of happiness from different viewpoints plays a major role. The happiness in this new world is one of scientific creation and false pretences. This happiness is psychologically and drug induced—an instant gratification that the new world promotes. The reader further understands this scientific version of totalitarianism in the new world when the savage come to the new world to show what happiness truly means. To the savage, a foil in the theme of happiness creation, happiness is his “deliberately attempt[s] to set up obstacles for [himself] which will impede the easy realization of [his] desires” (science and conscience in Huxley’s a brave new world, 315). The entrance of the savage, John, into the story brings a level of understanding to the reader because, through John, the reader can associate the society of today to the society of the new world. His opposing views of the happiness in the new society bring about a connection between his world—the world of today—and the new world—the world of totalitarianism and false happiness. In the new world, there is a seemingly human happiness that is only created by and underlying scientific brainwashing and large doses of drugs. The science of the new era becomes a substitution for happiness, family and education. These ideas that are presented in the Brave New World are not ideas that are new to literature. Huxley takes many of the main themes in the novel such as the tragedies of science, futuristic utopia, and scientific satire. Many of his ideas were taken from Shakespeare, as the savage clearly quotes, Bertrand Russell, and H. G. Wells. This novel of generational differences and blended ideas is a satirical manifestation of the importance and reality of happiness and the prevention of this joy due to scientific advancement.
As the novel declares satirically, happiness is created and pain is explicitly prevented in order to maintain a secure and content society. This self-proclaimed happiness is created, not achieved, but the people of the new world find that they know nothing better than this false happiness. This new world of technology and brainwashing is a world of simple bliss, not educated and refined happiness. The contentment found in this futuristic society is of “idealistic pretensions, it is a utopia” (ira page 44). The manifestation of this utopia is ill founded, however. In this world where all seems to be bliss and everyone proclaims that “everyone is happy now,” not a single person can justifiably claim true happiness. Only the happiness that is created by high doses of soma and by mental brainwashing is seen or felt by the people of this science-bred society. In this world happiness is created instead of won; the happiness that is shown is not based on relationships and love, odd things of the past, but rather on brainwashing science. As the test-tube people grow, they are trained, brainwashed, to believe that they are happy, yet they have nothing that makes them happy, only the belief that because they are told that they are happy, they must be so. The concepts that make a person truly happy have been eliminated for existence and made forbidden such as family and advancement in life. The “conflictless, nonsuppressive consumer society” (peter 313) of the new world shows that people are only in existence to consume; people are simply created so that their bodies can consume the products that they make. As the novel proclaims, satirically, happiness is created and pain is explicitly prevented in order to maintain a secure and content society. This self-proclaimed happiness is created, not achieved, but the people of the brave new world find that they know nothing better than this false happiness.(580)