Mechanical Utopia Angela Viti Beckon

In Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, he creates a utopian society that achieves happiness at the expense of humanity. Though thoroughly repugnant to the reader, the world Huxley creates seems almost plausible because he fashions it out of societal problems he saw in his lifetime, many of which we still encounter today. Objects and machines replace real emotions, and the result is a streamlined existence that neglects a true sense of humanity. By comparing man's life in the "brave new world" to the machines that surround them, Huxley creates an assembly-line lifestyle in which consumerism and hedonism are paramount, and individuality falls to the wayside.

The World State is a society in which economics take precedence over emotion. Almost from birth, the society conditions children to consume, and mechanization quickly becomes part of this consumption. When lecturing the children, the Director says, "imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. Nowadays, the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games" (20). Here, he...