Suffering & Freedom

It is true that with art, religion, beauty, truth and freedom come suffering, but that suffering is the price one pays for experiencing the highest emotions, sensibilities and aspirations which are accessible only to a truly free human being. Again, to be fair to Mond's argument, it is undeniable that with freedom come the consequences of suffering. The point is that the individual human being, to have his or her mean anything, must be free to choose what to do and think and feel. The people in this utopia have had their freedom to choose conditioned out of them. They are trained from birth, and genetically controlled before birth, to accept their lot and therefore they are not even aware of freedom.

What makes John's argument compelling is that he does not romanticize freedom, but

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ciety. Yet even in the midst of those horrors, the prisoners experienced happiness, even if it meant only that the camp to which they were sent did not have a gas chamber, meaning that the mundane tortures they underwent without the threat of death by gas were instead seen as enjoyable: All through the night and late into the next morning, we had to stand outside, frozen and soaked to the skin after the strain of our long journey. And yet we were all very pleased! There was no chimney in this camp and Auschwitz was a long way off (Frankl, 1984, 56). Of course, there is much more to Frankl's book than noting the joy of not facing imminent death in a gas chamber. The thrust of his logotherapy is the championing of the individual's freedom to search for and discover meaning in his or her life: "Once an individual's search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering" (Frankl, 1984, 141). The stealing of the individual's freedom to find his or her own unique meaning in life in Huxley's utopia is what simultaneously steals from him or her the possibility of finding true happiness and of enduring suffering in a human way instead of as a drugged and conditioned
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Auschwitz Frankl, John Savage, Alan Watts, Brave World, Thomas Merton, Jews Nazi, Mustapha Mond, huxley 1969, true happiness, Search Meaning, , Aldous Huxley's, brave world, truth beauty, search meaning, huxley 1969 163, human happiness, mond argues, freedom choose, death gas, man's search meaning, frankl 1984,
Approximate Word count = 1669
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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