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Consumerism In Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World

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In the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley explains the idea of consumerism to create a utopia filled with happiness. Consumerism is a movement to protect consumers from useless and misleading goods by providing them with new and advanced products. The world controller, Mustapha Mond believes that religion, reproduction, and emotions of individuals are irrelevant and does not bring happiness towards the community. As a result, he decided to create a society that uses consumerism. The Brave New World portrays consumerism as a replacement for religion, reproduction, and emotion in hopes of finding society’s eternal happiness. To start off with, the Brave New World gets rid of the concepts of religion. The state thinks that believing in God does not lead to eternal happiness, but instead, brings sadness and pain to the community. They know that when a person dies, the individuals are usually shedding with tears and have the feeling of frustration, thus defeating the purpose of happiness. To resolve this issue, the state decides to use soma to relieve people from their ¨sins¨ and be happy about death. Soma is a type of drug that makes people feel happy no matter how bad the situation is. Mustapha Mond explains to John, ¨Anyone can be virtuous now. You carry at least half your morality about in a mottle. Christianity without tears...¨ …show more content…

Aldous Huxley points out that the society does not need religion as long as they have soma as their ¨God¨. Using science, human are instructed to complete specific jobs based on their class and that their lives can be easily swapped by another individual. By disposing people's sadness and frustrated emotions, they will forever have the feeling of happiness. Even though using consumption puts the entire society in a manipulative state, people are considered to be genuinely happy with their

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In modern Western civilization, based on Aldous Huxley’s personal views, he implied warnings about the future of modern society throughout Brave New World. Huxley implied the dangers of technology, a big government, degrading humanity and its implication; therefore, modern citizens should be consequently thinking those dangers and how it still applies to modern civilization. If Huxley observed the daily life of modern students in western civilization, he would point out how life in Brave New World is similar to life today through technology, consumption, and how we see each other. Consumerism makes the community and economy stable, which is the goal of the society in Brave New World. In the novel, the buying and selling of goods and services are important to them in their consumer economy.

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