Happy Delusions

Happy Delusions

Imagine living each day of life without entertainment, friends, family, and love. Relationships are non-existent, families are unheard of, and friendships are emotionally empty. Imagine a life without beautiful masterpieces, science experiments, and fulfilling faith. Imagine a life where everyone is ripped of true emotion, where people are man-made into specific classifications, each being less intelligent than the next, and where people are taught to dislike literature. Imagine a life where being happy is more important than living in truth. The truth is too difficult to deal with without the help of psychedelic drugs and promiscuous sex. Each and every man or woman sleeps with countless numbers of the opposite sex only to be left feeling empty and alone. Imagine a world where reading controversial literature is unacceptable, listening to certain music is prohibited, and watching a science fiction movie is detrimental. Instead of each individual being born with unique gifts and talents, they are man-made into what the government pre-determines them to be. With the censorship of art, science, and religion, the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, find living in truth difficult due to a lack of true emotional happiness.

The novel opens at the Central London Hatching and Centre with the director, Henry Foster, giving a group of boys a tour. During the tour, Foster shows the boys how one thousand identical embryos are scientifically generated to produce human beings. During the gestation period, embryos travel along in test tubes where they are tweaked into each of the five castes. Each embryo is carefully handled and placed in a specific way to ensure that it will grow into the perfect human, or at least what the hatchery believes to be to the perfect human. There are five levels of castes in which the man-made humans are destined: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon. Alpha’s are considered to be the highest classification of human and are destined to become the leaders and thinkers of the World State; and at the bottom of the barrel, the Epsilons, who are created to do the tedious manual labor. The World State is what Aldous Huxley portrays as the current, all powerful government. Nevertheless, human reproduction is controlled completely by the World State

In this monarchy of a government, sexual intercourse no longer represents creating a new life. Once a woman embryo develops into an adult, she is required to have a surgical procedure done to remove her ovaries which eliminates all human production. Woman and men no longer reproduce naturally; therefore, families do not exist. The mere act of sex is controlled by rewards from the World state for promiscuity and lack of commitment. It is heart wrenching to know the characters will never experience love, tradition, or faith. True happiness can only be achieved when humans are able to fully express themselves. The absence of religion creates an ominous shadow over the World State. With the absence of religion, a character like Lenina, who had a constant desire for sex, was not able to experience happiness on her own. Lenina found another way to escape from reality by using the drug, Soma.

Art, science, and religion are censored in the World State in order to control society. Huxley uses Mustopha Mond, one of the ten World State controllers, as symbol to express the use of censorship in their society. Mustopha Mond was a young scientist who was caught engaging in scientific research by the World State controllers. He was given the choice to either be exiled to an island or to become a censurer of new material. He chose the more unpleasant of the two choices; he chose to be the censurer of art, science, and religion. The Mexico Savage Reservation, a separate world apart from the World State, where society is full of love, tradition, and faith, is where an exposure of literature appears. To the members of the World State, the savages who inhabit the reservation are considered to be strange and unacceptable. Lenina travels with Bernard Marx, an alpha male, to the savage reservation for vacation. When they arrive, they meet a woman named Linda who experienced a head injury while vacationing with Henry Foster years ago. Later in the novel, we learn that Linda was impregnated by Henry. To save oneself from embarrassment, Henry decides to resign from the director position. Even someone who is highly regarded in the World State can make a mistake. Nevertheless, someone will inevitably break the rules by accident and be punished and sent to exile. Foster is a great example of how censorship and