Happiness In Brave New World

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Total Happiness Comes With a Price Happiness is a gem that vanishes as quickly as it is obtained. So it is always wished for happiness to stay forever in the hearts and lives of mankind; without ever thinking about the repercussions total happiness will have. In the novel, Brave New World, the author Aldous Huxley portrays a society far in the future where all is well, and no one is ever unhappy. Passions run wild, drug use is not frowned upon but encouraged, and civilization survives with total happiness at its core. However, characters such as John, Bernard, and Lenina, (the protagonists of the book), show the problems with being happy, all the time. A society that puts happiness above all else, reveals that individuality and morals must…show more content…
After telling the students about primitive engagements and relationships, Mustapha Mond says, ‘“But every one belongs to everyone else,’ he concluded, citing the hypnopaedic proverb”’ (34). The thought of belonging to everyone for the sense of happiness, proves that being a unique individual, clashes with a happy based society. Moreover, each caste level has a prefixed fate that they cannot change or stray from. When John ask why everyone cannot be equal, Mustapha Mond tells him about stability and happiness, and progresses onto saying, “Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he’s got to run. He can’t help himself; he’s…show more content…
To begin, drugs are taken to uplift both the physical and mental state of Bernard, to achieve the sense of total happiness. While Bernard rants about the past and how it lead up to his day and age, Henry says to him, “‘Glum, Marx, glum." The clap on the shoulder made him start, look up. It was that brute Henry Foster. ‘What you need is a gramme of soma’” (46). Happiness is fulfilled with the stimulation of physical passions, making self-enlightenment pointless when there are drugs that can produce quicker and more precise, delightful effects. In addition, schools are restricted from teaching rational morals and must only teach irrational ones. Finishing his lesson on sleep teaching leading into moral education, “‘The students followed [the director] desperately scribbling as they walked and all the way up in the lift. ‘Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational’” (21). Naturally, rational morals stop some sort of pleasure toward humans, hence becoming incoherent with a society that is built around total happiness. Finally, having multiple relationships at a time is normal, and it is veered at as wrong and absurd not to have an affair. After finding out that Lenina is still with Henry Foster, her friend Fanny tells her, “…You know how strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything intense or long-drawn. Four months of
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