How Dystopian Fiction Starts to Resemble Reality
When we talk about dystopian societies, what comes to mind is a grim world where everything is controlled through fear and life sucks. That is the image most have when it comes to a dystopian society, but that is not how Aldous Huxley envisioned it. In his novel Brave New World, he writes about the exact opposite of this. It is a society that is centered on people being happy all of the time to maintain social stability. Sadness is a thing of the past, when you feel it, you just take a drug and feel happy again. Family doesn’t exist anymore, people are artificially created in a laboratory, leaving no room for mistakes. However nice this type of society may seem at first, it is just as bad as the grim dystopia you had in mind. Happiness in Brave New World is empty, it is not genuine happiness, it is pleasure. The concepts in this novel resemble a lot of aspects of our reality today as well, such as the importance placed on happiness, keeping people busy, and putting less importance on the family. Let’s see in what way Brave New World resembles our reality today.
Dystopian Fiction
No Time to Think
People’s days in the story are structured in a way that they have no time left for themselves. Work is often stretched out, even if they do not have any productive work left to do, simply to keep them occupied for a long enough time. When these people get off from work, they are expected to be with someone else or do activities with others like sports or other social activities. Lenina, one of the main characters in the book, is even disturbed by Bernard’s wanting to be alone. When he asks her to spend time alone in nature, she responds: “But I don’t want to be alone.” It is ingrained in the citizens to always want to be with someone, and never to be alone.
The reason society wants them to feel this loathing of aloneness and the reason a person’s life is structured in a way that keeps them occupied and accompanied is because of what solitude allows you to do. Being alone allows you to think, and there is a reason why society in Brave New World doesn’t want its people to do this. If they did have time to just think, they would start asking questions about their society and how and why it works. Any questioning could create dissatisfaction or differing opinions, and this would cause societal instability.
Another way they keep their citizens’ thoughts under control, especially their negative and pensive thoughts, is by drugging them. When people have their breaks from work, take a vacation, or simply don’t feel exactly happy, they take a drug called soma. It has no side effects and makes the person who takes it instantly happy. When they take it, they stop worrying and thinking, and simply feel happy.
Making sure their citizens do not have any time alone, and when they occasionally do have their time alone giving them soma, makes sure their citizens don’t think. This works to maintain the stability of this brave new world.
Society Centered Around Happiness and Pleasure
In Brave New World the most important thing for people is happiness, especially happiness in the form of pleasure. They are constantly entertained and flooded with dopamine from entertainment, sports, sex, etc. Things such as hard work, pride, or achievement are unimportant in this society, the only thing that matters is pleasure, and feeling happy. It becomes the absolute focus of every citizen and the end goal for every person.
A large part of why they want to keep people happy is because when everyone is happy the society remains stable. If everyone was not constantly happy, you would get suffering as well. And with suffering comes discontent and instability, something the world controllers want to avoid. People need to be happy all the time so that they do not get any negative thoughts that could disrupt society.
In the story, John makes the point that being happy all the time makes life meaningless and empty. The world controller Mustapha Mond says he agrees that happiness is empty. Happiness in combination with tragedy would achieve a much higher form of happiness, they agree, but this kind of happiness is volatile and unstable and is therefore not good for society as a whole. Even the world controller understands the issue with a life centered around pleasure, but pleads the case that it’s good for social stability.
Soma exemplifies this focus on happiness and pleasure. When people in Brave New World feel unhappy or confronted, they take soma and they feel good again in spite of whatever situation they are in. This drug serves as a crutch for people to fall back on when life confronts them in some way. This means they never learn to deal with hardship or suffering because these concepts are eliminated from their society, all for the sake of social stability.
Non-existent Family Structure
In this brave new world where babies are manufactured, there is no need for a family anymore, in fact the family is even a threat to the stability of the society. When people in the book even hear the words mother or father they are disgusted, it’s a concept that seems perverse to them. There is no genuine reason or an experience they’ve had why they believe this, they have simply been conditioned by society from childhood that they just have to loathe the family structure.
The result of having no family structure is that it gives people no solid base. Relationships they have with people are fleeting and long-term relationships are seen as odd. It’s in fact very normal that everyone in the society is constantly promiscuous, this is exemplified in the slogan that people use all the time: everyone belongs to everyone. The lack of any long-term social relationships means that people are essentially quite lonely, even while they are always with somebody. Being this lonely and having no family gives people no solid base to go from, no people to come together to do something or to talk to, and nothing to fight or even really to live for. The lack of a family makes life empty.
Dystopian Reality
Too Occupied With Work
Just like in Brave New World, people are kept busy with work all the time. Everybody works all the time, man and woman, and no matter how much they work, they can’t work enough. This means that people do not have a lot of free time, especially with their family or friends. They don’t have much alone time, except when they commute to work. This results in people not having time to think or to spend good time with their loved ones or raise their children, with all the negative consequences that come with that.
It also, just as in Brave New World, gives them no time to really think things through or to start to ask questions. People are too busy with work and are exhausted when they come home. All they want to do then is to relax or spend time with their loved ones, the last thing they want to do is think about what is wrong in society and what to do about it.
Emphasis on Happiness and Pleasure
One of the most striking subjects that comes to the forefront of Brave New World is the idea of always needing to be happy, something that can be seen in our society these days as well. There is constantly an emphasis on everyone needing to be happy all the time and enjoying everything they do. There is nothing wrong with being happy, but the dangerous thing is that people today often confuse happiness with pleasure, just as in Brave New World. Being happy is seen as doing things you like all the time, the dopamine you get when you watch a movie or eat good food. These are a part of happiness, yes, but they are not what happiness is all about. In fact, trying to be happy all the time and setting it as a goal is the surest way to become unhappy.
True happiness is higher than just simple momentary pleasure. It’s much more complex than that, and it requires one to be unhappy for some of the time of their life. Happiness can only be felt in contrast to its opposite: unhappiness. If every moment of your life would be happy, it wouldn’t feel happy. You would be so numb to it that it would feel neutral, because you can’t measure it against something else. But when you have highs and lows, you have periods of happiness and unhappiness, you can truly feel the difference between the two. The only way you can know that you are happy is that you’ve felt what it’s like to be unhappy for a while. Like the yin and yang, there can be no happiness without unhappiness.
In the book, when people are not happy it is seen as odd and as something to be treated. Therefore, when they don’t feel happy they take a drug to feel happy again. The same idea applies to society today. When we don’t feel happy, or even depressed, it is seen as having a disease, not something that is part of life or even essential to happiness. We often resort to drugs, whether we do this in our own time with alcohol or other substances, or with doctors prescribing depressed people with medication, being unhappy is often seen as a disease and something you want to get rid of as soon as possible. As stated before, happiness is not achieved by simply pleasure, and it certainly can’t be fabricated by drugs. In fact, one of the necessary ingredients to happiness, is unhappiness.
The Decline of Family
Nowadays, the family is not seen as the crucial institution it once was. Many people these days don’t want to have kids and create a family anymore. They believe they are just a nuisance and are too much work. For this reason, people today decide not to have few or any kids at all. This has culminated in a rapidly declining birthrate, therefore a rapid increase in immigration to compensate for this, and a takeover of foreigners who come here in large numbers that do want to have lots of children.
Another reason why the family is under attack is the normalcy and acceptance of promiscuity. Today, it is expected of people, men and women alike, to sleep with many people. This means that having a few long-term relationships is replaced in many cases by having many short-term relationships. A result of this is that families are formed very late or not at all, and this makes it more difficult to start a family and have children. Also, people are encouraged to not start a family as early as possible, but to wait as long as possible, which results in not having enough time to raise many children.
Another part of this is that men and women alike work all day, every day, and they need to do this just to have a comfortable standard of living. The result of this is that the man and the woman are not at home, don’t have time to raise kids, and if they do decide to have kids, these kids are raised more by their school or daycare than by their parents. This way, kids don’t get the attention they need, families are not stable or available, and having a family becomes less and less attractive. The ideas about family are not as extreme as in Brave New World, but they are trending more towards them.