Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall....... Oops, false advertisement...Brave New World Reaction Paper

Brave New World Revisited, for me, was two things, redundant, and more interesting than Brave New World. It was redundant perhaps because of the way Huxley links everything together. The entire book could be summarized in a sentence, by taking a single angle or aspect and building around it. But there are many, the central issue being unclear as the start of a circle.

            So to begin. I believe Huxley to have blessed solace in death from his worst nightmare. Do not misunderstand, my life is completely fine, no nightmares or such, I suppose, humans have not mutated, that much. But then why am I sitting with my legs folded neatly beneath me in a chair, and doing an infinite number of things in front of a computer screen? This one spot, consumes so much time. Huxley addresses “non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television, and the cinema”, now in the 21^st century, called movie theatres, how fancy, lets add a British accent. He argues that it is for “…the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation”(Huxley 267).

            Oh the horror of entertaining TV shows to waste away my days! People in our day and age have more quote on quote “free time” than that of the past, (though admittedly, I never have enough time), as our entire society is built around efficiency and speed. But are these entertainments as dangerous as Huxley suggests? Perhaps we are not so well protected against the propaganda techniques today’s ‘dictators’ rely on, “repetition, suppression, and rationalization”, as would have liked to believe (Huxley 268). We have the freedom of the press. But at its core, it can be rotten.

            For three fundamental reasons. The first is because, this means that anything can be said, whether fact or fiction, distractions and lies or truth. Gone are the days in which written or published word could be granted as true (Huxley 266). Wikipedia my friends, is the starting point of all research, and the endpoint on the open interval at which Wikipedia is not included in a works cited. The second, is because in the midst of distractions, we ignore the facts that demand attention, our energies being spent on lighter, happier, and less brain taxing subjects. Third, we place ourselves in a position of vulnerability, because the instruments of delivering propaganda, through technology, have become a necessity to which our eyes are always firmly glued to. We accept commercials between movies and TV shows as a fact of life, even as the time spent watching useless junk being advertised is nearly equivalent to that of the show itself.

            Without an education, the freedom of press means nothing, because we will not be able to utilize it properly. “The people cannot be safe without information” (Huxley 266). But there is no use in an endless supply on knowledge if we fail to sift through it properly, after all, in Brave New World, books weren’t banned, people were simply conditioned to associate them with unpleasantness. In addition, it is often the Power Elite who control the media, rather than small newspapers with vastly differing viewpoints. Mass communication can be dangerous, because it can impose the same single idea on the masses, shaping and thus controlling the minds of the whole of society. The conditions under which the government has less control over the mind, good conditions, are key to democracy and freedom.

“Liberalism” Huxley says, “flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity” (Huxley 263). I find Huxley’s logic to ring true in this logic, because as he points out, a permanent crisis, overpopulation included, puts the government in a position of more power and control, and over-organization tries to make people the same, into a machinery, not exactly the ideal conditions for breaking to mold as a liberal. Though the liberal of his world of Brave New World would be considerable conservative by our modern standards. I am not certain that the culture shock would not kill him (Huxley, the liberal, or otherwise).