• Engelsk
  • Utdanning: Vg2
  • Karakter: 5
  • Ord: 1417

Innledning
Are you living a truly happy life, if the happiness you feel is chosen for you, and you´re not allowed to feel anything else?

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley poses the question: is it better to be happy or free? Is life in Brave New World, with their different castes, a better way of living than today's modern free society?

In this essay I will be looking at whether the people living in Brave New World are satisfied with the society, I will look at how they organize the society into different castes, and I will argue that there is a relationship between happiness and freedom.

Utdrag
The Betas can be associated with the middle class. They are intelligent, but also heavily conditioned. They have their sex and soma, and therefore do not feel any desire to be free or to change the society.

A good example of this is the character Lenina who is a Beta. When Lenina speaks with Bernard, an Alpha who is very intelligent, Bernard shares his thoughts about him wanting freedom to form his own opinions and be freed from how conditioning is affecting his mind.

Lenina gets very upset about this blasphemy, and instead she just wants to have sex with him. Alphas do the work that requires the most intelligence and can be viewed upon as today's upper class or political and cultural elites.

Most of the Alphas are perfectly fine with how the society is organized, but not everyone. Some Alphas are so smart that they can think away from their conditioning and form critical thoughts.

This is what Bernard has developed. But it’s not only the Alphas that are being sceptic of the society. In Brave New World, there is a savage named John.

John grew up in a savage reservation, an area where the people are left untouched. Savages go through pregnancies, have families, marriage and religion.

When John is brought out to the civilized society, he feels that the freedom is taken away from him right away. “But I don't want comfort.

I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” (204) John does not want to be happy; he wants to be free.