Optimisim and Pessimism in the Brave New World and Psycho-Pass
In Brave New World and Psycho-Pass, the authors utlize aspects of positive thinking and negative thinking to criticize contemporary passivity of people through their rationality and identity. It is controversial whether a society needs to suppress individual feelings or identity to form an utopian ideology where lack of conflicts contributes to its rigid stability. The conflicts, resulting from people’s individually different notion and value, may cause a social chaos that entails a risk of demolishing the society. Yet, it constitutes freedom of speech to assert one’s ideal future of the society. Particularly, recent advanced technology, the Internet, arouses people’s interest in…show more content… The truth about the society is unethical and disturbing; people are predestined to operate as a small component of the machine, and the society expels ‘barbarians’, who cause the malfunction of the machine, to an island. The other components are manipulated, or rather willingly, by the society with distractions such as ‘somas’ and imprudent sexual intercourses to cover the truth with the happiness. Happiness is the ultimate positive emotion to achieve for human beings and provides them with a motivation to further the happiness by meeting the needs of human desires. Therefore, positive thinking takes place in achieving those desires. However, it is feasible for people to likely have instant gratification since the fulfillment of the feelings concludes no discontent against the truth; if one’s particular need is met then he or she obscures the deferred gratification. Benito Hoover constantly offers a soma to Bernard Marx when he encounters a melancholy moment. (Huxley 61) It indicates that the drug fulfills their sexual pleasure yet deprives them of a chance to think and analyze a problem of the truth. It encourages him to admit and accept disturbing circumstances and to find ‘positive’ aspect of them, and then he satisfies with it. This utilitarian notion is well visible and distracts the people away from their freedom at…show more content… An individual is defined as "a single person, animal, or thing of any kind; a thing or being incapable of separation or division, without losing its identity; especially, a human being; a person." (G & C. Merriam Co) Those features that define a single person fertilize his or her thinking process based on the one’s value and education. Brave New World utilizes its sarcasm against the education and value that particularly influence characterization. One is that he criticizes the contemporary excelling technologies blunt personal identities and duplicate as one through social influence, culminating in accepting a situation and conformity through positive thinking. Individualism and personal identities are highly detained in Brave New World Society. Brave New World opens with a vision of a Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The advanced technology grants the power over God’s ability to the humanity, artificially cloning and conditioning babies. Those identical babies are not born, instead are created in the process of Bokanovsky’s for the society. In the process of conditioning embryos and babies, the Director explains the biotechnological predestination to the students that babies supposed to grow as low caste does not receive sufficient oxygen to form normal physical and mental