Dystopian Journal #3

Huxley warns his readers that, if citizens of a society are given eveything they want and need, many interesting ideas and actions will disappear. Mustapha Mond describes it well when he meets with the Savage. Mond says that people are happy now, and that happiness is not interesting. If a society is happy all the time, there will be no war, no passionate stories of love, and altogether nothing to titillate oneself with. Huxley's society is one in which people are conditioned to be satisfied with the position they are at in life all of the time. There is nothing to make them upset because they get everything they want. There is no love, therefore a huge, interesting part of life is lost. No one has a need for war, so courageous battles for freedom are nonexistent. Helmholtz finds it difficult to write interesting things, and he wishes for more, but he lives in a society where there are no problems or controversies that require interesting opinions that Helmholtz can write about. So it's interesting that, when this society has lost so much and is so stable, there are still people in the society that are discontented. They miss that which they have never experienced, they question their surroundings. It's an interesting message that Huxley tries to send, but an unconvincing one. This situation seems highly unlikely, as it involves so much science and technology. We, The Handmaid's Tale and 1984 are, to me, more effective in spreading a warning abut then-present day trends, because they deal with corrupt bureaucratic or corporate-run governments that had happened in the world before. Huxley deals with an advanced technology that had never been imagined, never mind occurred. The only hope in the society is that people abandon the cushiness of their society, leave the technology and go out into the "savage" world to experience love and war.

word count: 272