Mady Brand

Sara Price
Humanities
February 25, 2016
Brave New World Seminar Prewrite
1. The overall message of Brave New World is to consider what truly makes you happy and
what truly matters in life. Throughout the book, you see the comparison between a
dystopian society that conditions its people to believe that they are happy, happy with
possessions, status, relations, and soma, and a savage society where people worship,
survive off the land, and live in a more natural way. Seeing this comparison, you notice
happiness; more specifically, you notice why people are happy. In the civilized
dystopian society, people are happy, or should I say happy, because they have been lead
to believe that things like possessions or relations can make you happy, things that, if
they were not conditioned, would probably have indifferent effects. In this society, you
can see that they are not living truthful lives, but because of their conditioning that caused
this untruthful way of living, they are unaware of it. This books allows you to consider
the question: would I rather live an untruthful life that provides a constant sense of false
happiness or would I rather live an honest life and have to deal with pain, but get to enjoy
true happiness? From that question, you then consider: What can make me truly happy?
2. Brave New World has allowed me to think of the concept of happiness as an intangible
thing. Joy that comes from possessions or status isnt true happiness, it doesnt provide
you will fulfillment. True happiness is when you have a sense of fulfilment and that is
something that you cannot achieve by buying clothes or having sex. This book has really
showed me the extremes, between a world that at first seems perfect, a world where
everyone appears to be happy, where you can have whatever you desire, where you can
have whoever you desire, and a world that seems steps behind civilization where the
people in it live naturally and gain joy from the ideas that there is a god, from having
families and communities that work together, and from providing for yourself.
3. In Brave New World when John says, What you need is something with tears for a
change. Nothing costs enough here. (239), he means that people are not deserving of
happiness. In order to actually have happiness, you need to know what pain is. You need
to know how it feels to suffer in order to truly understand the essence of happiness; pain
and suffering is not something that people in this civilized society experience, so in
reality, they are just living constantly in a neutral state, but they dont know any better, so
they believe that they are happy. In order to receive something, you must pay the price

and what these people believe they are receiving is something that they have not paid for
and so they do not truly receive it.
4. I feel as though our society is mainly based upon beauty and comfort and very little of it
is actually based upon truth. We, as members of society, believe that we are expected to
meet some standard and achieving that is what will provide us with what we need. This
expectation provides you with unrealistic ideas about who we are supposed to be, but in
truth there isnt anyone that we are supposed to be. Our society values beauty, beauty in
appearances, in skills, and in status, but what beauty is in our society is a standard, a
specific place that we are told we need to be at if we want to be any good, a standard that
does not reflect the truth about what is really important. Comfort is just the same,
although there are some aspects to comfort that truly do make us feel good, most of the
comfort that is valued is all based upon a system of standards, of ideas about what it
means to live a comfortable live, what it means to be living in a way that people can think
makes them successful.