Comparing Brave New World 'And 1984'

Brave New World and 1984 Compare/Contrast Essay

Ronald Reagan once said, “Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.” This applies to the dystopian novels Brave New World and 1984 because in the novels, the governments control the citizens by holding them back from having their own ideas. To emphasize, in 1984, George Orwell uses the imposition of physical and mental pain on the citizens as a benefit for the government while in Brave New World, Huxley uses soma-a drug-to inflict “pleasure” on the citizens. In both dystopian novels the government controls the people with different methods in order to have absolute power over them.

To begin with,

In the novel, Bernard and Henry are conversing when Bernard starts to rant about dealing with with several problems at the moment. Henry tells him he should take some soma and adds that “a gramme is better than a damn” (Huxley 55). This saying means that he is better off taking soma, a drug, instead of dealing with, or resolving any problems. When the citizens take soma they are blocking out all their real emotions and replacing it with superficial happiness. The saying implies that if you take a gram a soma, you will be doing yourself a favor because then you will not have to deal with any of your difficulties. It is also important to realize that if all citizens take soma, they are ultimately benefitting the government because there will be no angry people and no one will have any reason to rebel or change castes. Another example of Huxley using pleasure as control over the people in Brave New World is when Henry and Lenina have a date and they are about to go back to Henry’s room. When they are about to leave they take even more soma which causes “a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds” (Huxley 77). Although soma inflicts pleasure onto the citizens of the World State, it restricts them from what is really going on outside of their heads. Soma sidetracks the citizens from reality which is a benefit for the World Controllers-the government- because the citizens are distracted, which means they cannot realize that they are in reality, prisoners of the government. Due to the fact that everyone is enslaved into happiness, the World Controllers are able to have absolute control because there is no one who can step and say that the way they live is not right. Given these points, through the use of soma, the infliction of pleasure is used by the World State to have entire authority over the