Motivations In Brave New World

Two people, with the purest and best of intentions at heart, can cause chaos if their motivations differ. In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, the differing motivations and views of two of the protagonists cause many of the disagreements in this novel. This novel presents a futuristic society that divides people into five castes of widely differing intellects and mental capabilities. At the top of this society, are the World Controllers, benevolent pseudo-dictators, that shape society to maximize happiness, at the cost of freedom, through the use of cloning, conditioning, and drugs. The plot follows Bernard Marx, an Alpha-plus, who people ridicule because he is not like the other Alphas, that is, strong, tall, and confident. He visits one

As is the case for all the subsequent arguments, Mond defends the New-World view while John takes the almost extinct Old-World position. The crux of this disagreement happens at the end of the novel, when the government takes into custody Bernard, Helmholtz, and most importantly John for destroying a stash of the universally used drug, soma. They meet one of the World Controllers, Mustapha Mond, and after a short while, the guards take Bernard away because of his aggressive behavior, and Helmholtz follows him. This leaves Mond and John alone. John rapidly confronts him, “You seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness”. Mustapha Mond adds “There used to be something called God, before the Nine Years’ War.” He then shows John that he puts all the religious texts, like the Bible and The Imitation of Christ, not on a shelf, but rather in a safe. This shows that Mond, and by extension the New-World, believe that the concept of religion and God is so destructive, that only a select few of the brightest in the world should have access to it. He then justifies this position by stating that God “manifests himself in different way to different ways to different men” and to him, “he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all”. John finds all of this very disturbing, as it upsets his very classical world view. He even goes as far as to blame Mond

This argument happens again at the end of the novel, when the World Controller Mustapha Mond and the savage John are alone. Once again, Mond takes the New-World view, while John defends the Old-World position. The banning of all complex art confuses John, as he finds them “beautiful”, while the New-World feelies “are so stupid and horrible”. Having only read Shakespeare, he has an artificially high bar for what is good literature and entertainment, so even more than an average person, John finds cheap and fast divertissement are “goats and monkeys”, or in other words, pointless. Mustapha Mond clearly also understands this, as he reads Shakespeare, and probably agrees as well, but he has an excellent reason for not letting people create high art. People in the New-World are completely sheltered from love, problems, and pain, which are the main subjects all complex art is based on. Without these problems, the audience could not understand works like Othello, which John is particularly fond of. Mond encapsulates this New-World sentiment perfectly, “If it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if it were new, it couldn’t possibly be like Othello”. As a general overview, the fact society has progressed enough to be basically perfect in the New-World means that art has inadvertently been rendered incomprehensible to the great majority of the population. Even