This study will argue that, in the confrontation between John the Savage and Mustapha Mond in Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen in Aldous Huxley's utopian novel Brave New World, John the Savage offers the more compelling argument. Mond argues that the leader of the "perfect" society has changed the focus of humanity "from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness" (Huxley, 1969, p. 155). However, it is precisely the presence of truth and beauty which make life brim with the possibility of true "happiness." The happiness of which Mond speaks is not true happiness, but rather the benumbed and dehumanized complacency of robots. Even animals have more true happiness than the people of this "utopia."
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 rather acknowledges the suffering which comes from that freedom, and, in fact, passionately embraces the negative results of freedom: "I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin. . . . I'm claiming the right to be unhappy" (Huxley, 1969, p. 163).
When Mond argues that this includes the "right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have litt...