Tragic New World

The novel, "A Brave New World", presents much commentary on today's society about personal happiness, over consumption of goods, and use of pleasure over morality. At the beginning of this novel, the most prominent theme that the reader is aware of is the uncomfortably the reader has about the lack of personal morality in the futuristic society and the overabundance of use of technology.

This social commentary on the future makes the reader uncomfortable because people tend to rely on morality as a form of comfort. In this futuristic society, there is no morality because being happy is the only reason that people live, and with the forced lack of morals, people seem to be happy with not knowing that morals exist. It is confusing for people who read this novel to understand a world without morality and a world where education is not formed by experience but rather by voices that are heard during sleep. The knowledge that small children are encouraged to partake in sexual play is baffling to a society where such activity is explicitly forbidden. Even more shocking is when we see the child who does not want to participate in such play taken to the psychiatrist because this is abnormal behavior. Not only is this shocking to the reader but it is also a subject of squeamishness because in today’s society, and even more in the time in which the novel was written, such topics being discussed were and are not publicly acceptable.

Another baffling sight that readers experience in the beginning of reading this novel is that technology is used for everything. People are created by, educated by, raised by, amused by, and changed by technology. It is amazing to see a whole society without a single family or a person who is born. The threads of society seem as though they couldn’t exist without the moral and loving center of a family unit, and yet in this novel, families are explicitly acting against. Every thought that the people of this new society think is given to them by machines that teach and enforce moral lessons. The people who live in this society actually believe this teaching is for the better because “everyone is happy now.” People are happy because they are taught that they are happy and because they are given drugs if they do not feel extremely happy. This is a wild state of humanity that is almost tragic. People can never be truly happy if they do not know what the alternative to happiness is or if they do not have anything that makes them happy, as in a relationship or an accomplishment, except the thought of being happy by tricking their brains with hard drugs.

It is almost an appalling idea of a society being completely decided before you are born. Knowing that each person’s future is determined while they are being created and no one can get around their creation, means that no one can create themselves, they are simply created and told what to think and how to act. This story is a seeming tragedy of the future of the world (523).