Brave New World Essay

People view life as their own to do with as they please and let repercussions and consequences are damned. Life has been taken for granted and maybe, because of the many different factors that everyday life has to offer people we’ve become conditioned to being selfish. People truly begin to believe that it is their right to exist and live and suffer as they see fit to and one can’t but wonder; are they wrong? In Aldous Huxley’s book “Brave New World”, humans are conditioned to live and be a certain way. They are created to not question, to not think, to not feel; they are created to be less than human but more than mindless puppets in a perfect society. Don’t people have a right to selfish and live the way they want to, despite the fact that we, ourselves, may not be anything other than marionettes to a higher power. Don’t we have a right to live freely? No matter how conditioned we may be, shouldn’t we still be given a choice? The ability to feel and understand one’s emotions are a profound no matter how much an individual is conditioned, yet the devastation that the feelings can leave in their wake are enough to make one wonder if it is worth the effort to fight for unhappiness.

Huxley portrays conditioning as something natural that everyone within the Brave New World is familiar with. The conditioning itself keeps balance and stability in the place, but with stability and peace there comes the steep price of losing what makes a person human. Lenina doesn’t know any better than to do as she has always been doing, she can’t comprehend what John, Bernard and Helmholtz feel: “I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays” (Huxley 91). The people who were created within that society don’t know what unhappiness is and they believe that they are in fact free and that their lives are their own to live. In a world based around false pretenses and conjured up pseudo happiness, the individuals become something...