Museum of Resistance and Resilience

Brave New World

Brave New World is a fictional story written by Aldous Huxley. Set in a futuristic World State, each citizen is conditioned in their sleep at birth and assigned into predetermined castes based on their intelligence and labour. With reproductive technology, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning, the book explores a world without defiance and opposition. Every citizen is conditioned to enjoy their caste and are forced to take a happiness producing drug called Soma. Bernard Marx, the protagonist of the story, works with sleep conditioning and disapproves of the society’s methods of maintaining peace and order. Similar to The Giver, Brave New World exemplifies the situation in which a single individual challenges the system of society. Although we all dream of living in a perfect world, our ideas of utopia often parallel with homogeneity. If everyone is conditioned to think the same way and are unable to form their own opinions, the world will become one without any conflict and thus, become dull. We must ask ourselves, although we strive for equality, to what extent is equality unequal? Would we rather live in a world where there is pain but happiness as well or live in a state of indifference?

Contents of this annotation: