Imagine a world where all of your fantasies can become reality. Imagine a world without violence or hate, but just youth, beauty, and sex. Imagine a world of perfect “stability” (42) where “everyone belongs to everyone else” (43), and no one is unhappy or left out. This sounds like the perfect world. But it’s not. Looks can be deceiving as proven in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World. In his novel, he introduces us to a society that strives to satisfy everyone’s wants and needs by inflicting pleasure in order to bring stability. However, in order to truly
achieve this stability, old world ideas relating to art, history, and religion are abolished, and are
replaced by new age technology. As a result, the people of the Brave New World now worship Henry Ford instead of God, use test tubes instead of natural birth, and use a hallucinogenic drug called soma instead of facing reality and the everyday responsibilities of adulthood. Although the appeals of this world are alluring and attractive, they are only a distraction to cover up a hidden truth that can even be seen in today’s society. The fact of the matter is, as technology advances, people are becoming increasingly more dependent on it, resulting in the loss of their own individuality as they inevitably fall to conformity. In turn, society inevitably succumbs to the oppression of what it has come to love, all to achieve stability.
     But is stability worth the cost of individuality? No. Without individuality, our emotions, opinions, and personalities would be nonexistent. In fact, it’s these characteristics that define the kind of people we are. Without them, we are not humans: we are simply mechanical clones. For instance, take the people of the Brave New World. Their rationality does not come from their hearts or their own minds, but from a machine that feeds them pointless, repetitive rhetoric to keep them happy, under control, and unaware. It is because of this that the people of the Brave New World are shallow, cold, and have no compassion for anyone else, but themselves because they are “conditioned” (40) to be that way. This is clearly evident with the way they react to death. They do not mourn the dead or conduct a funeral like we would. Instead, they burn and destroy the bodies the same way they try to destroy their past. They purposely forget people to prevent individuality. They live in a society that “objects to anything intense or long-drawn” (40), and they believe that “ending is better than mending” (52). It is for these reasons why marriages, parents, and natural births no longer exist in their world. In turn, the people have become completely self-centered and egotistical. What kind of person in their right mind would want to live like this? Clearly, individuality is not worth stability because it’s our emotions, whether they’re good or bad, and our freedom to chose what we want to believe that separates us from machines, and makes us human.
     Furthermore, as technology advances, we are gradually losing control of ourselves. In the Brave New World, technology has become the deciding factor of their judgements, and because of this, the people can not think for themselves and are not individuals. Their entire lives revolve around technology from the decanting process to the conditioning process, which serves as the basis for their entire knowledge. When the people become unhappy and stressed, they immediately turn to soma, which is a symbol of technology in itself. It is almost as if they are “slaves” (216) to it. In addition to this argument, the Solidarity Service is another example of how technology controls their lives. When Bernard goes to the Solidarity Service, he and twelve other people are “fused” (80) into one, so that they would “lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being” (80). In a sense, the service is like a factory and the people have become mass-produced identical products. Technology plays such a major role in their live that it seems impossible that they could live without it. Their dependence has become an addiction, and because of this, they have become products of technology: mindless machines.
      Clearly, one can now see that Huxley was trying to warn society about the dangers of becoming too dependent on technological advancements in order to achieve stability. As technology advances, we lose the drive to become individuals because of it’s many alluring distractions. As a result, we inevitably fall to it’s oppression. Our dependence on technological advancements is an addiction, one in which if it is not stopped, we can easily lose control of ourselves like the people in the Brave New World. Our individuality is not worth stability, and technology is not a substitute for human nature. If today’s society continues to rely
on new technology like the people of the Brave New World, then we will become products of technology: mindless, shallow robots.