Brave New World Synthesis Essay

Synthesis Essay #3: “Our Direction: A Brave New World”

Paralyzingly forbidding lifelessness filled the callous laboratories, where embryos were genetically engineered and conditioned for their caste and occupation. In this dystopian society, concepts and principles, such as individuality, tranquility, reclusion, marriage, love, and diversity, are tremendously neglected. This is the picture that Aldous Huxley paints in his satiric book Brave New World, in which the society turns to the drug soma to fix a majority of their problems, isolates threats, such as innovative outcasts, on islands away from the main populations, and spends all its time being “happy.” Though Huxley’s depiction may not portray the future, which we now call our modern

In Huxley’s Brave New World as the one of the ten Controllers of the world Mustapha Mond explains, the drug soma is Christianity without tears, meaning in their society, instead of turning to God in a state of crisis, the citizens turn to soma, which makes them “happy” and high without any of the negative side effects that a religion may have. Essentially, soma is just a quick fix, a way of covering up the negative emotions that may occasionally lead to people questioning all that their world stands for. In this way, soma is similar to some antidepressant drugs, such as the class of antidepressant drugs tricyclics. According to Laura Ann King, a psychologist and the author of the textbook Experience Psychology, “[t]ricyclics reduce the symptoms of depression in approximately 60 to 70 percent of cases” (493). This implies that, like soma, tricyclics do not cure depression but masks it and its symptoms. Tricyclics are an entire class of antidepressant drugs, which means there is not solely one drug that, like soma, covers up the negative emotions; there are many. As King explains, depressive disorders, disorders in which one suffers from depression, are common (450). This means that it is common for people in our world to take antidepressant drugs, like the class tricyclics, to suppress the negative emotions that depression constantly brings up. This

If anything, we definitely seem as if we are everything, except even remotely close to that type of world; however, we may not distant from that world due to electronics. According to the article “Mobile Mindset Study,” a study, conducted by the means of an online survey by Harris Interactive from May 8 through 10, 2012, among 2,097 adults ages 18 and older, concluded that 30% of those surveyed admitted that they check their phones during a meal with others. If you keep in account that this survey has a limited opening, age range, situation, and sample size, this signifies that well over 30% people use a phone in the presence of friends and family. Also according to the article “How Your Cell Phone Hurts Your Relationships” written by Helen Lee Lin and published online on Scientific American, “. . . a recent set of studies by Andrew K. Przybylski and Netta Weinstein of the University of Essex showed that our phones can hurt our close relationships.” This means that well over 30% of the population are hurting and possibly destroying their relationships with others, which can lead to the decline of meaningful relationships among people. As Nicholas G. Carr states in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, “[t]he seduction of technology are hard to resist . . .” (224).