A journey through Brave New World
Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931. This is no coincidence he wrote such a dystopia at that time. Indeed, capitalism and mostly mass culture were booming in Europe: culture was becoming more and more accessible and affordable to everyone. To...
In Brave New World, Huxley depicts a society in which people are totally manipulated. To create such a controlled world, media play a key role in the story. One of the means used to control people in the dystopia (meaning here an undesirable fictional...
Propaganda is a way to influence and manipulate people’s opinions, to make them think as one wants them to. Propaganda messages are mainly broadcasted thanks to media or advertisements. Although a neutral term in its original sense, it has acquired since...
Thinking is useless, or that is, at least, the way people in Huxley’s Brave New World “think” (if we may use this term, considering the fact that we just said that they don’t). If people have such an idea of the act of pondering, it is precisely because...
Television, newspapers, radio, songs, internet: all of these are mass media present in today’s society. Everybody has access to them and is inevitably confronted to them in everyday life. As a consequence, everyone is influenced. Their effects on the...
Having an opinion on something means having access to various different sources of information, in order to think about it, and form a judgment. In the past, not so long ago, there used to be a diversity of points of view and ideas in mass culture. But...
The “World State’s motto” in Brave New World is the most relevant and obvious example of the existence of a unity of thinking in its society. Indeed, based on the French “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” (“Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood”), Huxley creates...
In his essay Brave New World revisited, Huxley gives a strong definition of dictatorship, of manipulation, and above all, sheds light on the contrast between two types of mass control. This is a quite important point of the study as long as it gives us...
Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual;...
The phenomenon of mass attraction exercised with Hollywood, the Marilyn Monroe Lady in Red among other things is a "deja vu" kind of mass seduction, even if, in our time and especially in the 20th century, it takes another pattern, wearing the coat of...