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Individualism In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

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Underprivileged countries view America as the safe haven for their troubles, a utopia in a sense. Many people believe “Hollywood” is the epitome of American culture, so only a handful of people perceive how appalling the society has become (Cooper). It is startling to read about how the characteristics written in dystopian literature Brave New World (BNW) by Aldous Huxley resemble American’s society today. The culture is dramatically altering due to advancements in technology and social media. An apparent caste system, the promotion of drugs, and an absence of individualism are all qualities, represented in the BNW, which supports the frequent statement, “Why America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.” The caste system dates …show more content…

BNW depicts a society where civilians fail to have emotional connections and think for themselves. A fellow Spanish teacher once informed me about how adolescents retain new languages and information better than high schoolers due to the age of their brain. In their early ages, the newborns are taken through hypnopedia. The government is ingraining particular information into the babies mind, brainwashing into thinking only what the government wants them to think. American standardized tests are formulated in the same way. The state of Indiana provides End-of-Course Assessments in Algebra, English, and Biology, and the tests are designed to make sure high schoolers are learning the information, regulating what students should learn. Students simply learn the material to pass the test in order to graduate, and they are bound to never use the information again. Similar to BNW, most citizens know their roles in the society, but many are unable to grasp and understand what that actually means. Is American society becoming like BNW? A study shows a correlation between arts education and creativity, critical thinking, and cognitive capabilities. Many schools are cutting this aspect of school due to financial motives, regardless of statistics proving that the arts are linked to lower dropouts and higher test scores (Taylor). Without arts studies in the next generation, most students will lose their individuality and creativity, creating a society more like

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In her article, Davidson explores our current educational system and its problem, she states “The problem, however, is the confusion of “high standards” with “standardization.” Our national educational policy depends on standardized tests, but it is not at all clear that preparing students to achieve high test scores is equivalent to setting a high standard for what and how kids should know and learn” (59). Despite excelling on these tests can be considered as overachieving or an elite quality, it does not however, test those skills that students may have acquired or are going to need to put into practice. Those standardized tests are also very limited and are not inclusive of other talents that a student might have. Just like the girl with the green hair in the middle school that Davidson visited, her artistic talents are never challenged or even considered by those educational standards.

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Brave New World, a novel written by Aldous Huxley explores an utopian future where embryos are chemically engineered to fit in a certain class and soma suppresses negative feelings providing its captor with spurts of energy. The people living in this “new world” are born into different castes such as alphas, betas, gammas, deltas, and epsilons. The alphas are the highest ranking people in the world state while the epsilons are the lowest ranking members and do all the jobs no one wants to do. This book is relevant today in the society in which we live. From relationships to technology, to economy many of the ideas and struggles in this novel have very much translated into our society today.

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Following the European Age of Discovery and Exploration in the 15th century, the world began to get partitioned off under the control of the European superpowers: the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English, and the French. Through papal decrees and wars, the shifting colony boundaries were chiefly determined by whichever proved to be the most powerful and influential empire. By the time Aldous Huxley began to rise to fame in the 1930s, the world ideology of the advanced Western white man had been in place for centuries. In a time of growing unrest, Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, functions as a criticism of the growing secular sentiments within the Western civilizations’ beliefs of the innate superiority of the cultures, government

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560 Words | 3 Pages

One of the most distinctive aspects of our society is that everyone is entitled to personal, individualistic thoughts and expressions. What might our world be like if no one emerged from the crowd? How would our society change if individualism no longer existed as a facet of humanity? In Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, individual thinking is suppressed by the government. Guy Montag, the main character, is a self-confident firefighter who sets fire to homes which contained books that would help a person to think on his own.

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451 Words | 2 Pages

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World depicts a society where efficiency is the primary concern. The world leaders use horrifying repetitive conditioning to shape individuals into acquiescent, infantilized citizens, stupefied into an artificial sense of happiness. The majority of citizens willingly follow the tide that infinitely crashed over them with wave after wave of parties, casual sexual relations, and the perfectly engineered drug, soma. However, the readers may find themselves disturbed, and possibly intrigued, at the lack of morality in this “brave new world”.

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822 Words | 4 Pages

“Homeless on Campus,” by Eleanor Bader is a summary of homeless students on college campuses. Bader taught English at Kingsborough Community College and she was also a freelance writer. This report explains how many students on college campuses are homeless and are trying to continue their education. Bader illustrates her points by writing about students that share their personal stories about their hardships. She also communicates with others who have insight and information about students who have no home and are going to college.

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771 Words | 4 Pages

The utopian society in the Brave New World can be compared and contrasted between our contemporary society using individualism, community and the human experience. The fictional novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932, is about a utopian society where people focus stability and community over individuality and freedom, but an outsider is introduced to intervene with the operation of the utopian state. In the contemporary world, people need to show individuality in their communities in order to survive, and to be human, one must show emotion, which is the opposite in the Brave New World. Individualism is very important in the contemporary world, but in the utopian state, individuals are conditioned to be the same as everyone else. They do not know how to be themselves.

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1242 Words | 5 Pages

Ungar’s essay, Charles Murray discusses why a liberal arts degree is unnecessary in his essay, “Are Too Many People Going to College?”. Murray believes that the basics of a liberal education are indeed important, but that students should be provided the basics of liberal arts in elementary and middle school (Murray 223). In this essay, Murray cites E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” Hirsch Jr. and Murray believe that there is a “body of core knowledge” that all students should have, and that “this core knowledge is an important part of the glue that holds the culture together” but that this core knowledge should be taught in grades K-8 (Murray 224). Murray discusses how young children are much better at memorizing facts than adults are, to support his position that kids should be memorizing this core knowledge at a younger age (Murray 224).

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1898 Words | 8 Pages

According to Sigmund Freud, a renowned psychoanalyst from the early 20th century, “The critical, moral superego—or conscience—developed in early childhood, monitors and censors the ego, turning external values into internalized, self-imposed rules with which to inhibit the id” (“Sigmund Freud”). In Brave New World, the members of society utilize this process in which babies are being shock conditioned to dislike things such as books and flowers, so that when they grow older they will have no desire to read and learn history or go exploring in nature (Huxley 22). Superego can be seen in this scenario because at a young age the babies experienced severe trauma and developed a bad association with flowers and books. They will then grow up with the idea that they are not supposed to be involved with things, such as flowers and books, which they have been conditioned to dislike. This is done in order to keep the babies growing up to be what the government wants them to be, based on their childhood experiences.

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1013 Words | 5 Pages

Language as a form of mind control in 1984 and Brave New World Although one 's idea of Utopianism is unique to one’s beliefs, the genre of Utopian and Dystopian fiction is commonly tackled in novels, from which the authors convey the idea of a depraved society through detailing inhumane characteristics which would be seen unacceptable to any world citizen. In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and 1984 by George Orwell authors create tyrannical governments responsible for a set of callous actions such as the eradication of freedom of speech and ideological control over their population’s mentality. These wrongdoings are achieved through the application of methods that obligate people to act as machines, such as the ad campaigns in Brave New World and the implementation of the Newspeak dictionary in 1984. As Orwell creates the ministry of truth as a means to demonstrate the lack of ideological freedom in oceania, Huxley discusses the concept of World Controllers and the use of SOMA as examples of the alienated society of Brave New World.

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665 Words | 3 Pages

The problem with our Education system in America is that they teach us worthless stuff in school like an example of this is they teach the students things that they will never use when we become adults. Many schools don’t focus on the important things that the students need when they go for a job instead schools continue to fill the students heads full of math and english now i’m not saying that math and english aren't important is just that they teach the students english and math that that the students will never use in their life or will ever help the students in life. A speaker that we watched in class by the name of Ken Robinson talks about how schools don’t ever encourage and reward creativity but instead gives awards to students who

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896 Words | 4 Pages

Why Have Arts in Schools? President Barack Obama once said, “The future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create.” In schools, one of the most overlooked and underfunded subjects are the arts. During the 1930s, art education was greatly supported in the U.S. However, as time progressed the focus of education shifted to more standardized tests, science, and math.

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912 Words | 4 Pages

For years, Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) struggled to reform Bates Middle School’s, a highly diverse and largely minority populated school, performance as indicated by state standardized testing scores, which were 14-27% behind the county average. “Bates was marked for Corrective Action (the third and highest tier of school improvement) by AACPS” (Snyder, Klos & Grey-Hawkins, 2014, p. 3). To improve student engagement and achievement the school decided to apply a different curricular approach that focused on “the integration of art into the academic content curricula [to provide] a logical approach to address the variety of students’ intelligences that are reflected in their different learning

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1200 Words | 5 Pages

In our everchanging world dominated by technology, many education systems have emphasized courses in the science and mathematics departments to adapt students to the next generation world while leaving the humanities behind. While some may argue this move is logical, many educators believe that the arts and humanities are important to us due to the fact that without them we wouldn't be able to explore an entire range of experiences and emotions, resulting in an empty miserable life and society. As Dean Robert R. of the McCormick School of engineering wrote “Arts and humanities are vital to this new world. The primary reason: without a grounding in these fields, an entire range of human experiences and emotions will forever be invisible to us.

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Modern day schooling forces students to fit a mold only a select few can fill by creating too much structure and having an overbearing emphasis on math and science, when other, less structured extracurricular activities can promote respect, discipline, and teamwork. Most would agree that, in early stages of life, art is a detrimental and necessary part of any child’s early development and education. In fact, Pre-K through third grade’s education curriculum is usually centered around promoting early creativity and a fondness for learning. Kids learn math by counting colorful pieces of bricks. They learn both science and the basic principles of functionality by playing with train sets and toy cars.

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