Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Is there a villain in Huxley's Brave New World?Who is the villain and why?

In Brave New World, the villains are
found by looking behind the names: Marx, Ford, Lenin, Benito Hoover, Trotsky, Watson,
Malthus, and Pavlov.  All of these real people are satirical targets for
Huxley.


  • Marx and Lenin were Communists and
    Socialists who sought to make everyone equal, without status.  This only led to abuse by
    the totalitarian government and the death of the
    individual.

  • Benito Hoover is a combination of Benito
    Mussolini and Herbert Hoover, both ineffectual government leaders who subvert individual
    rights and freedoms for the sake of government control.

  • Pavlov and Malthus abuse science and likewise undermine
    the individual.  Pavlov said that humans can be conditioned and manipulated by stimuli.
     Malthus believed in population control because, he said, the masses would drain the
    state of its resources.

  • Ford, as you know, developed the
    industry standards of mass production.  He was also a known
    racist.

Taken together, these men of
government, industry, and science are ridiculed in the novel for trying to achieve easy
and cheap goals at the expense of individual freedom and rights.  Huxley saw a new world
order in which the government could control the masses all in the name of science and
industry.  Not only was Huxley correct, but it all began the year after the novel was
published in 1933 when the Nazis came to power.

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