Brave New World Response

 

Why is it that in an age where our "security" is hailed by our government as being of the utmost importance, I feel at my most insecure?  The people who I thought "protected and served" me as a sixth grader turned into the bad guys before my eyes, not because their behavior changed, but because I became aware of their true behavior and underwent a change of perspective.  The juxtaposition of gangsters as heroes and uniformed authority figures as thugs shook my foundations- rebuilt who I was from the ground up, as it should.

 

What Brave New World boils down to is conditioning, and whether you accept it or not, you have been conditioned.  Your individuality, or at least a portion of it, has been stolen, smashed, sacrificed to gods by men who have no right to sacrifice that which is not theirs.  Who we are, what we are, has been denied us by society. The animalistic nature of man still pokes through; light shines around the corners of the cardboard plastered to the windows.  And that is just what we all are, as a society and as individuals- animals.

 

We are conditioned into believing some drugs are "good" while others are "bad."  Without experiencing a drug for yourself, how can you know whether or not it falls into either of these vague categories?  What baffles me is the fact that most people are fed drugs of some form their entire lives, but are fine with it because it is legal or socially acceptable.  These same people then refuse naturally produced drugs or drugs that have limited repercussions but to expand one's consciousness- preferring to stick with the societal mind-numbing drugs they know.  As Huxley explains, soma is "All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects." [Page 54.]  Whereas the mescal of Brave New World is dirty- used by the "savages."  Politicians pour alcohol on the masses, while hiding the psychedelics that have been proven to be of medical use in the back room.

 

"Civilized" society, both in Brave New World and the real world, views the users of psychedelics or other illicit drugs as dirty or primitive.  Mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, and their many brothers, sisters, and cousins are considered by many (who have never researched the drugs themselves) to be detrimental to one's health, morally wrong, or simply unworthy of use due to their legality.  At the same time, the FDA approves countless killer drugs; the richest drug companies get to be the legal dealers.  America's "drug war" is in itself a physical representation of Brave New World.  People in this "free" country are currently serving life sentences for marijuana related offences; meanwhile the pharmaceutical companies whose drugs either don't work or cause addiction themselves are profiting more and more.

 

We are not innately "good" or "bad."  We do not adhere to morality, but create it.  Through dogma and tradition humanity has built a society in which its true potential will never be known, because of perceived morality; morality which is in itself conditioned, engrained in us through a similar societal caste to that of Brave New World.