There is a great amount of controversy in the world today. Some people say that progress is bad, some say it's good. Truthfully, I think progress can be good and bad, like everything in the world today.
Before electricity, we human beings had to do most everything by hand. But that was the reality of the time period. Now we have almost every job done for us with the push of a button. With the push of a button, we can turn on a vacuum and take it for a walk on our carpet while it picks up everything from your floor (some vacuum cleaners will even navigate independently), something we would otherwise have had to do on our hands and knees with magnifying glass. With the push of a button, we can grind our coffee and gleefully toss the manual coffee grinder out the window of history. And with with push of a button, you can send your otherwise noisy toddler into a contented coma by setting them in front of Blues Clues. The upside: you've got a babysitter that you can be sure with whom your child can be happy who charges almost nothing. The down side: your taking a beautiful day of healthy excercise from your growing toddler. Gradually, as he gets older, he will graduate from Blues Clues to Spongebob to CSI: Miami, and get a whole load of commercials in between telling him he needs to look one way and act another. The TV is not only a babysitter but a teacher. As he is watching, he will be subconsciously taking notes in his mind. But this is not about he television. This is about a force. A force that very few of us redognize, or choose to recognize. Whether its politics, industry, or any other major issue in our country, something is trying to lead us somewhere.
This is exactly the concept Aldous wrote about using different means. He goes to extremes, creating a world where the government actually has formulas for different types of people, where they will end up, who they will relate to, etc. This is their method to keep everyone content. The people at the hetchery use hypnopaedic phrases to work ideas into a childs brain without teaching them directly and making subconsciously them feel that they always knew what the hypnopaedic messages told them. That way they have no reason not to believe them. They take away the ability to perceive anything other than what the people have at their disposal.Of course, every barrel has its bad apples. So, naturally, they fish them out and ship them off to Icelend so that the rest of the world may be safe from them and their dangerous ideas and philosophical questions.
In writing Brave New World, Aldous Huxley attempted to warn us of a terrible future that he foresaw. There have been other authors who have done this. For instance, George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. They are two different books, with two different backdrops behind the same overall problem. A future without freedom.
We must be careful as we progress. That is an obvious message Aldous Huxley was trying to give us when he wrote Brave New World. He wrote it in 1931, before Hitler's dictatorship and World War II, so he had little indication of a future of warfare. But the 1920's and 30's were the bridge of time between antique and modern, and he, being more intelligent than most, saw progress at it's fastest and most sudden. In his alarm, he gave us an early warning.
So to those of you reading this, heed his warning. Be aware. Don't sink into the dream world that we'd all like to believe reality.