...Brave new world & The Time Machine Comparative Essay Society is defined as “the aggregate of people living together in an ordered community” (http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/society). Every nation on this planet is comprised of many societies which all differ in their own ways. As time passes, society itself changes. The morals or beliefs that a society once stood by overtime, radically change to form a newer, revolutionized set of ideas. Fields like science and technology reach their most advanced states. Members of a society can also change. In most cases, members develop according to the new rules or ideals that are of the norm. Some changes are for the betterment of society while others prove to have more negative impacts. These are all changes one can expect when time travelling. Although, one cannot prepare themselves for the societies I have recently seen. Throughout my time travelling I have never come across two societies so strange. Both societies were of terrifying living conditions. One can easily draw about similarities to categorize them as dystopias however; the individual societies differ from each other in many ways. The two dystopian societies differ greatly in aspects of individualism, gender relations, and social hierarchy. The two societies hold opposing views on individualism. The first society was known as The World State. This society was one that gave technology a high, almost religious-like importance. The ruling class had all of...
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...Scientism and Technocracy in Brave New World Introduction Brave New World is well recognized as a dystopian novel, in which Aldous Huxley satirically criticized scientism and technocracy. In this new world, science and technology was paramount. It dominated all aspects of human life. Humans were mass produced in laboratory and factories; human moral value were moulded by sleeping teaching; human emotions were controlled by soma. The overuse of science and technology reduced humans to one-dimensional man without individuality and the ability of critical thinking. Human beings were used as tools for political and economic purposes. The thesis is to study scientism and technocracy, the "improper application of science to human life", from two aspects: the interference with human physical life and the elimination of human spiritual life. Scientism and Technocracy Scientism, according to Zhu Wang, is "an excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and technology to solve all human problems including spiritual crisis" (194). It is "the authority of natural sciences, dominating all aspects of human life and rejecting religion, philosophy, art, and literature" (194). In Brave New World, Huxley depicted a dystopian society to condemn the excessive use of science and technology which eliminated human individuality and civilization. He pointed out in his Complete Essays Vol.6 that science was "the reduction of multiplicity to unity….the theoretical reduction...
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...INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust ~ Jesse Owens. 1)It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog − Archie Griffen. 2) Nothing lasts forever. Not even your troubles − Arnold H Glasgow 3) There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle − Albert Einstein 4) Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave – Mary Tyler Moore 5) Being strong means rejoicing in who you are, complete with imperfections − Margaret Woodhouse 6) If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place − Nora Roberts 7) I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed − Michael Jordan. 8) The only place you find success before work is in the dictionary − May V. Smith 9) Where hope grows, miracles blossom − Elna Rae 10) A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing − George Bernard Shaw 11) Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent − Eleanor Roosevelt 12) It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's...
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...Chapter 4 In this chapter, Gatsby tells nick all about his past. He says things that are very unlikely to nikc and he mentions and shows his disbelief. Gatsby makes claims of being connected to most wealthy and outstanding people in the country, and being from the world war. Towards the end of the chapter Nick learns that Gatsby loves Diasy and wants nick to arrange a meeting in order for Gatsby to come and meet her once again. Jordan is the one who informs nikc of this plan. A- Nick B- “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge” C- Nick is very self relying, and has a lot to say to himself about everyone around him, but on the outside is very softspoken and humble. This is a good quality, and he is a very honest and trustworthy individual guy, but is often shy and a bit awkward. D- Nicks main role in this story is that he’s the narrorator, and all of these events are based on his life. He is a very down to earth guy, calm and collected with a bunch of crazy events and people surrounding him. Instead of being in surroundings thatmirror him as a person, he is almost in an opposing environment, rivaling his ways of living. “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.” This quote goes to show a category for most characters in this book, for example Gatsby is a pursuer and a busy man. While someone like Daisy is the pursued. Being a go with the flow type of woman, instead of a go getter. A main symbolic item is that...
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...dominant theme.” To what extent do ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World’ depict a dehumanised society? Both Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ certainly deny humanness to the characters in their novels. Kelman defines humanness as having two key attributes, identity and community. Dehumanisation occurs when these are removed from society. It is true that individuality is denied to citizens and although the community remains, it is subverted in order to fit the government ideal. It can therefore be said that dehumanisation occurs as people are denied and identity and the true meaning of community which is the perception that a person is part of an interconnected community of individuals. Dystopian literature serves to critique the current social and political conditions by looking at potential conditions. Both novels were written when the fear of growing totalitarian governments was present. The novels are a prediction of what may happen to society if this power grows worldwide. In 1946, Orwell wrote "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." Around the time Huxley wrote ‘Brave New World’ there had been huge discoveries made in science and technology, Huxley took these and created a dystopia that uses technology to trick citizens into loving their slavery. The governments in both ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World’ dehumanise people in order to maintain their...
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...concepts. There is usually a figurehead or a comparable concept that is worshipped by the populace. Citizens are perceived, whether they truly are or not, to be under constant surveillance by the authorities. There is also a strong sense of nationalism and citizens have a fear of the outside world and those that are outside their bubble. The society is generally stratified socially, economically, and politically causing a majority of inhabitants to live in a dehumanized state. For almost everyone except the protagonist, the society is a perfect utopian world. The melting away of this illusion is the journey a dystopian novel usually takes the reader. I can see these echoes of similarity between We and the many other great works of dystopian science-fiction such as Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and, for this discussion, Orwell‘s novel 1984. Both stories depict a post-apocalyptic world that has come into existence after a nuclear war has realigned the all of the previous geographic, political and social boundaries of the “old world”. Both stories are told by a government bureaucrat of sorts, living in a peculiar, yet glorious, futuristic society. Both describe an insipid world where the desire for consistency, social order, and reverence had crushed almost any reminisce of true humanity, individual freedom, or emotion. Consequently, the fellow citizens of these societies have become warped, brainwashed caricatures of human beings and their interactions resemble that...
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...things.” He persists that happiness only comes when one is free from materialistic desire.. The monk also suggests suffering is crucial to perceive true happiness. Brave New World embodies the same concept, does true happiness exist without suffering? Aldous Huxley purposed soma to be the object that eliminates suffering and, consequently, the characters think they are happy due to soma and conditioning. In the consumer utopia of Brave New World, citizens are conditioned to be happy, but do not experience true happiness because they are not willing defy the utopia, are not suffering, and are not liberated from soma. Defying the utopia is not in the best interest of the citizen considering genetically breeding requires little to replace them, but they are conditioned to believe they are in the best situation. “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them” (Huxley 234). In chapter two, the Director used a mild-electric shock to condition the children to not like books. If the children would have not been shocked, they would...
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...something they do can make a change within their world. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this theme in dystopian works helps us better understand ourselves and what drives the audience to make changes in their world. Both Cuarón and Orwell explore man’s nature to strive for change when faced with inequality, given something to cultivate hope for revolution, in their own dystopian works. In this case, the motifs presented in both works,...
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...into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full sized adult” (4). With the help of technology, identity and the purpose of nature have been obliterated. By destroying the idea of the individual, the only thing left is to meet the fairly simple needs of the people. As a result, this makes the individual dependent on the state to not only provide for them, but to have complete control over all of society. Including the individual's knowledge of the natural world, the impression of god and a sense of their placement within the system. Throughout the novel, Brave New World the idea of a utopian society is questioned to be compatible. In other words, one could argue that the citizens in the novel are satisfied and happy. While another...
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...One of the primary themes in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World is the idea of social stratification and the caste system. Within this universe, people are engineered at birth to fit into a certain caste in order to maintain stability. At first it may seem that the upper castes hold the power over the lower castes. However, because the lower castes enjoy their position in society, this cannot be the case. Instead, Huxley makes the argument that although the lower castes seem happy with their lives, they do not know any better due to the World Controllers’ conditioning, and are not leading full lives at all. None of the conditioned castes are allowed to enjoy the same sort of intellectual and personal freedoms that the upper class World Controllers do. In this way, the World Controllers are the elites who maintain total power over the lower social castes. Taken at face value, it may seem as though the power inequalities occur within the individual castes. The upper-caste Alphas and Betas do not associate with the lower Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, believing themselves to be superior. Furthermore, the lower castes...
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...This fear is exemplified from his guilt after committing a crime, for fear that he would get found out and punished. This direct perception he has of the world, to just be fearful, is setting a tone for the rest of the book. A morose and fearful setting that shrouds over the story. When he dreams once again, he dreams of a dark-haired girl, showing his repressed desires to have a relationship with someone, yet unallowed by the government. In Chapter 4, Winston begins to go to his job, and what we begin to see is that he works as someone who destroys obsolete documents. This is probably has a slight correlation to the previous chapters and the obvious gaslighting that occurs, especially in front of his own eyes. What he has to do at work today, is that he has to fabricate a new individual who he calls “Comrade Ogilvy” and must substitute him in place of Comrade Withers, a previous affiliate with...
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...a. The brave new world that Aldous Huxley creates overtly deviates from today’s world. However, disturbing correlations between our world and his do exist. The idea of synthesizing all human life in a lab represents a more apparent distinction of Huxley’s world. His society even denounces natural birth as something almost unnatural. Huxley illustrates his society's disgust with natural birth when Lenina, a main character and denizen of the new world, visits a Native American Reservation. The warden of the reservation tells her that, “. . .in the Reservation, children still are born, yes, actually born, revolting as that may seem. . .” (Huxley 102). His society also prevents its people from aging, “[They] keep their internal secretions artificially balanced at a youthful equilibrium,” which emulates another difference of the new world (Huxley 111). One...
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...lengths are taken in society as well such as eliminating monogamy and childbirth, because they either cause unhappiness or pain. Postman compares this addiction to happiness to the addiction to entertainment. He makes the point of if anything is not posed to society as a form of entertainment, then it is viewed as not as truthful, much like those in Huxley’s novel that if monogamy sometimes leads to unhappiness, then it does not have a place in their world. The most important aspect to bring from Huxley’s novel, is that it does not have a happy ending. This “perfect” society turned out to be not so perfect after all, even causing one of the main characters to become so unhappy that he commits suicide. This relates to what Postman is trying to prove, that if we too become obsessed with entertainment that as a society we will become unhappy. This is where the phrase “amusing ourselves to death” comes from...
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...power. In Brave New World, it is shown that power often ends up in the hands of those who do not stop for anything for the sake of progress. In their desire to create a utopia, they end up creating a dystopia in which society ends up in a condition as confused and deprived as that of time before the present. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, customs from the past are juxtaposed with those of the World State in order to provide the bleak interpretation that people will end...
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...“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell” (“Aldous Huxley”). The World State, in Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, is a controlled society where drugs are the center and motivation of religion. The citizens are merely brainwashed picture-perfect clones used to conceal the conspiracies of the impertinent government. Huxley incorporates uncanny mood, concealed context, and spine-chilling foreshadowing in Brave New World to show that an ideal, happy, and well organized society cannot be achieved without the use of drugs and complete control over population, thoughts, and emotions. Throughout the novel, uncanny mood is included in the text to portray the emotional attachments the World State citizens have towards drugs. In the World State,...
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