Praew 11-03

October 14, 2016

The True Freedom

Have you ever feel like being control by the government? For many years, government
power has slowly crept into the lives of people. Aldous Huxley critiques modern governmental
institution in dystopia novel Brave New World. Set in London, far in the future where humans are
no longer born naturally. The World Controllers has created the ideal society where happiness is
brought through drug, predestined life, and many other things. Control and conformity replaced
freedom and persons right to the pursuit of happiness. Huxley uses soma, sleep teaching, and
predestined life as symbols to represent the concept of how the government control people and
create a happiness.

People in the World State use soma all the time as soma make them feel good and forget
about bad thing or any weird idea. Soma is the best tool the government use to control people by
sedates, calms, and distracts people from realizing that citizens of the World State are enslaved.
Mostly because of the way soma enslaves its users, which is happiness, everyone is trapped and
those are some tough chains to break. Why you dont take soma when you have these dreadful
ideas of yours. Youd forget all about them. (Huxley, p. 79). When Bernard started to talk about
freedom and being happy in their own way, not in everyone elses way, Lenina doesnt understand
want he mean by freedom because she thinks that everyone is free and happy therefore she tells
Bernard to take soma so that he will forget everything. This shows how the government use their
power to control people by providing soma to stop people from having ideas or thought of their own
to maintain social stability and create happiness and they do not need freedom to be happy.

Everyone in the World State received a sleep-teaching or hypnopaedia when they were a kid.
In Brave New World, there are no families or religious institution, therefore millions of youth learn
basic moral behaviour through hypnopaedia. Moreover, they learn to conform to the social norm
that society expects from them.Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do,
because theyre so frightfully clever. [] And Epsilons are still worse. Theyre too stupid to be
able (Huxley, p. 22). This is one of hypnopaedia that the World State use to teach children about
castes. The hypnopaedia makes the upper castes believe that they are better than the lower castes
and the lower castes are too stupid. On the other hand, the hypnopaedia provided for the lower
castes make them accept who they are without question anything at all. The government uses
hypnopaedia to brainwashing people to prevent them form questioning the society and be happy
with what they think is happiness and be happy with what they think is freedom.

In the World State, people cannot choose their own life and instead of that, their life are
predestined before they were born. Since people were embryo, they get different amount of oxygen
base on their castes and the lower the casts get the shorter the oxygen. The first organ affected was
the brain and after that the skeleton. We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as
socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future (Huxley, p.
10). The World State predestined people since they were born and the lower caste has to be stupid
and short and they cannot choose it. The government forces some group of people to born stupid
and those people cannot even argue with it because they are stupid. The government takes peoples
right since they were born and tell people that what they did is for peoples happiness. But those
people do not even have a chance to change their fate. The World State exchanges freedom for their
happiness.

In Brave New World, there is an ideal society where everyone has what they think is
happiness under control of the government by using drug, brainwashing, and a life which you
cannot choose your own fate. In order to create an ideal society where everyone is happy, they need
to stop people from having their own idea and this is why soma is provided for people.
Brainwashing or hypnopaedia is also important because using this kind of science, it will prevent
people from questioning the society. The castes are kept separate for the sake of stability; this way
there is no envy because each person can view members of a different caste as other. People may
think that this kind of society is good because everyone is happy and they do not need any freedom.
Why would anyone want to be inefficient and miserable? But the truth is, this is exactly what
freedom is. The freedom to be unhappy.