Technology has been revolutionized and will continue to grow exponentially in the future. In the twenty-first century, technology has made a huge impact on people daily activities. Many have already started relying on electronic devices to pay their bills, purchasing a plane ticket, or even for a task as simple as turning on a light. Since technology has taken control of human life, producers have increased production to satisfy the consumer’s need. Coincidently, ninety years ago, the author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote about the same concept on how technology is taking control of people’s lives. Taking away their humanity and leaving only a superficial reality in their society. In Brave New World, the author portrays how the growth of technology can not only influence society but desensitize society as well. Allowing technology to govern life, will lead people to a dehumanized one’s own morality, reality, and their true identity.
Citizen in Brave New World cannot understand the definition of morality. From the time of birth, citizens of World State has been governed by a totalitarian government. The hypnopedia is a sleep learning method where the government hypnotizes their citizens to feed and condition them with a specific set of information for their propaganda. For example, every night these citizens are told to repeat the hypnopedia proverb of, “Everyone belongs to everyone else” (Huxley 46). This proverb means that no one belonging to a certain individual they are sharing their self-body together just like a community property. Being born into this world, people are taught to live their lives in a very specific way, such as speaking and acting in a manner that is approved by the government. This eliminates the good versus evil that humans are innately born with. The government encourage their citizens to have sexual intercourse with multiple people and believes that it is socially and ethically acceptable. For example, when Fanny talks with Lenina about how terrible it is to be a monogamy, she states that “…at your age, Lenina! No, it really won’t do. And you know how strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything tense and long-drawn” (Huxley 46). This shows that Lenina cannot stay with one particular guy; she has to move on to another one as quick as possible. Ethically in reality, if a person is sleeping with multiple partners, it is morally frowned upon in this social norm for many reasons. This is because one’s emotion is not something that should be messed with. In a relationship, affectionate emotions lead to one being attached to the person that they love. This attachment does not come in easily, as it takes time and effort to build a trusting relationship. In addition, from a religious standpoint, using Christianity as a viewpoint, God shares the knowledge that every individual should love their wife and become one with them in life building a strong lasting relationship. In Brave New World, Huxley clearly conveys to his audience that the technology is controlling every aspect of human life.
To say that the reality of the citizens living in World State is fictional would be an understatement. The government provides a happy pill called Soma. This drug will take away their true happiness and leave them with just the superficial happiness. They allow people to feel happy all the time and do not allow humans to experience other emotions. This prevents one from learning how to handle and control their emotions when faced with a challenging objective. They have an emotionless citizen living in a perfect controlled world. When people are emotionless they are not aware of their surroundings and are just stuck living life in an autonomous way. As a result, when Bernard tries to show Lenina the real weather in the sky with the little black foam cloud, Lenina tries to turn back the radio where it states that, “…skies are blue inside of you” (Huxley 89). Lenina tried to avoid the true world element because she thinks that it is horrible and not as pretty as what she usually thinks it is. Another example that shows how technology dehumanized their reality was when Bernard and Lenina went out to the New Mexico reservation, and while out on the reservation, Lenina had run out of her Soma. As an example, she started to uncover her real emotion, started to cry and states that it is, “Too awful! Oh, I wish I had my soma” (Huxley 110). Lenina immediately feels distress and uncomfortable with her new surroundings. This can conclude that advancement in science destroys all the ugly truth in reality, as a result, it produces a fragile and useless human being like Lenina. This is exactly what has happened in today society, people are avoiding their negative emotion and not learning to understand their emotions in a way to fully mature and develop the mentality to learn how to solve things out. Today’s world all this augmented reality technology has been incorporated into video games, humanoid robots, and recreational drug to help people escape from their reality.
In World State, there is no uniqueness as no one has been able to fully express their true identity. The World State is a totalitarian government where everything from the behavior to the image of one’s self must fit into the perfect idea community. To achieve this stability of a perfect world, the Bokanovsky process was developed. The Bokanovsky process will bud the egg and soon, “every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-size adult” (Huxley 17). Obtaining a fertilized egg and creating an exact copy of them into identical daughter cell has led the government of World State to take human cloning on a massive scale. The government has the authority to randomly select which caste the fetus is going to be in. The caste ranges from alpha, who is the most intelligent caste to an epsilon who is in the lowest caste. There are five different castes in World State, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Each caste does have their own unique characteristics that differentiate them. However, within each case, they share no individual uniqueness. Contemporary, this process of cloning has already been using in today’s world. An animal such as sheep has already been cloned before, Dolly. Now, the trends in today’s society is that people are doing plastic surgery to perfect themselves to their ideal type. If this trend continues to grow, produce will try to invent more advance technology to meet their consumer satisfaction need. Therefore, the next invention might be a one step away from creating this perfect ideal type to whoever their consumer wants to be.
Conclusively, with the advancement of technology, Huxley portrays how the innate knowledge and characteristics of humans are being suppressed, leading to the destruction of one's morality, reality, and identity. People can notice in today’s younger generation, they are really diving in the growth of technology. They can create anything from their imagination, both from a technology or science standpoint. Citizens should contemplate and fears the that this advancement in technology is within a reach to create a perfect society.