Experiencing Brave New World in 1998 :: Aldous Huxley Brave New World Essays

Experiencing Brave New World in 1998 Since good literature transports the reader to immersion, absorption and sensation of plot, the successful literary experience often unveils a segment of the self's concealed character. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World immerses the reader in a State scientifically constructed to produce perpetual happiness without hardship. Six centuries into the future, a world leader has designed a civilization flabbily devoid of balancing challenges by eliminating illness, geriatrics, fear of death, passion and love, parenting, poverty, and pursuit of anything. Its inhabitants exist in a bureaucratically controlled state of stability sans emotion. Brave New World is the citizen's polar experience to the prehistoric caveman's solitary existence of self. Today we struggle individually to establish satisfactory symmetry between these two states of bureaucracy and independence while bench-pressing multi-weighted challenges. A journey to Brave New World's civilization of the ridiculous elicits an excell ent measure of the 1998 reader's centeredness between the self's grip of autonomy and its interdependence with State. Franz Boas, primo cultural anthropologist, subscribed that studying the varied threads of cultural tapestry (what's different) facilitates the understanding of culture. Published in 1932, Brave New World presented greater bureaucratic exaggeration to a general readership unengaged in the battle of the balance. Government was barely a gadfly on the barbell, while the 1932 self indeed included the entire village of extended families and neighbors bolstering each other. Sixty-six years hence, government has infiltrated human life stealthily, while the individual has gradually isolated itself with a transient society and fast-track economy bearing down upon the burden-lifter like additional weights. Although hardship labels remain the same, the 1998 challenge of dealing with these afflictions is more complex. Health and psychiatric practitioners caution us that balance is next to godliness. Therefore, we strive in solitude to balance corporate positions with family disasters, our yin wit h our yang, our left brains with our right brains, and most importantly, our debits with our credits. Our state of autonomy depends upon our frame of reference, for it is easy to remain autonomous without adversity. Consider the reaction of the Brave New World reader who has experienced a loved one's serious illness and painful death as a solitary struggle to provide emotional, financial and HMO medical support. Through the assistance of Brave New World, the reader subsequently tours "The Park Lane Hospital for the Dying, a sixty-story tower of primrose tiles. The air is continuously alive with gay synthetic melodies.