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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 acceptùeven enjoyùone'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 in the 21st century can possibly even exist in the BNW. Indeed, the impetus for criminal behavior has, in many respects, been eliminated by Huxley altogether.

The caste system established in the BNW is insurmountable for those operating within it. Citizens cannot rise above their stationùnot because structural injustices arbitrarily favor some individuals over othersùbut because citizens are genetically designed to occupy certain castes. In this, Hux...

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Aldous Huxley's Futuristic Vision. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:25, April 16, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1703733.html