Brave New World Book Review

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." This beautiful quote is from the famous genius, Albert Einstein. It’s important to understand the significance of imagination because Brave New World is when you take imagination for granted and the world is solely based upon knowledge, nothing more.

Haven’t you ever pictured that one perfect world where life was so trouble-free and all the difficulties in life would vanish as easy as turning that light switch right there next to you, on and off. Beautiful and tranquil yet technological and scientific equal easiness; these describe the only world one would want to live in right—wrong. Brave New World has the power to greatly influence your thoughts of a look into the future where we thought everything would be awesome with flying cars and magically-appearing meals; however, if we had the technology to create these nearly impossible ideas, then scientific development would have reached a new high of complete domination where science became a part of all we know. The scariest part is the truth: We ARE on the path of Aldous Huxley’s astounding vision of ‘’an all-too-possible future’’.

Hatcheries and conditioning centers, powerful soma drugs, Malthusian belts, feelies, hypnoaedia, a strict caste system, and the extinction of individuality are examples of the factors Huxley’s New World revolves around that somehow keep social stability and peace, but at the cost of life’s truest pleasures like art and literature. As Oscar Wilde once said "Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals." That says it all for the World State is a brainwashed society keeping its citizens under complete control mentally, which has the power to frighten a reader by giving a clear visual of how the world would become were a person to control the world entirely.

Aldous Huxley’s masterpiece is a work of excellent entertainment while warning his readers if not everyone that our ways now will eventually become like the citizens of his fictional world. Quoting Buddha, "We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world," clarifies that who we are is what our world will become. Through the obvious changes in attitude and beliefs of this current society, it shouldn’t be a surprise as to how our world will be at least twenty years from now. Just think a little.

There’s a reason why a façade is placed on a book and Brave New World does not mean a world of bravery I once thought it was, but maybe just the opposite. Now I want someone to tell me not to judge a book by its cover. That’s the first inference a reader usually makes because of the cover. Because of that we can have an idea of where we’re going or sometimes, where we’re not going. This new world is nowhere near bravery; it takes real courage to face every obstacle in life. Tears and smiles give us reason to appreciate our world. Then again, it may take real daring guts, a new kind of bravery, to exterminate our society to make a perfect one, utopian or dystopian.