Aldous Huxley's Futuristic Vision

The futuristic society envisaged by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World is a utilitarian sanctuary in which all social efforts have been coordinated to produce stability and harmony. In this world, personal liberties are quashed in the name of empty pleasures and mindless, sensory delights that, in spite of their dehumanizing effects, do nonetheless produce and perpetuate a gloss of "happiness" that sustains the citizenry. Genetically engineered and hypnopaedically conditioned to accept even enjoy one's station in life, the typical citizen in Huxley's future is free in a critical sense: free from want, from ambition, from the angst of uncertainty. When one is inexplicably melancholy or agitated by "dreadful ideas", there is always soma, the wonder drug that, upon consumption, ensures that one will "forget all about" troublesome things and be jolly (70). For all intensive purposes, Huxley's future is crime-less, placid and singularly pleasant: an endless stream of "agreeable sensations (169)."

In such a world as this one, many of the problems that plague present-day society have been utterly sidestepped. Were a criminologist to visit Huxley's future, he or she would find little to examine. The social order in the Brave New World (BNW) is fixed; it is not fluid and dynamic. In this, the mechanisms for maintaining social control reside not in law but in genetics, mind-control and pleasure manipulation. Thus, it is not reasonable to assume that crime as it is understood

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Category: Literature - A