In class, we played the devil's advocate and asked why the world in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was not, in fact, more free than ours. Is it not the ultimate liberation to have no responsibility towards free thought or creativity, or making life choices? In this imaginary world, Henry Ford is revered as a god because he was the genius who conceptualized the assembly line, this efficient, uniform system of creating. For this efficiency and perceived freedom, the people of Brave New World sacrificed all art, science and religion. Anything that connotes creativity and expression instead of practicality and efficiency is seen as irrelevant.
This is not freedom. I see freedom as the right of a person to think and act the way they are inclined. People are not inclined towards uniformity; if they were, the human race would have died out thousands of years ago. People are inclined towards individuality, and it is in this individuality that we find freedom. In a world where no one is dissatisfied because they are programmed not to be, the people are not free. In a world where no one can express their feelings, in a world where people are robbed of their feelings, the people are not free.
1 comment:
Hey Daniel, I thought your comments on individuality were especially interesting and I agree with you. It reminds me a lot of conversations I've had with my mom, actually (ha) even going back to when I was little, and we'd talk about how important tolerance is, and how you have to accept people even if they were different from you. Basically, her point was that if everyone was the same, the world would be a pretty boring place. And you take this one step further when you said the human race would have in fact died out long ago were it not for individuality. Cool way to sum it up.
Also, your blog made me think of another possible result of uniformity (and mundaneness) that my mom and I have talked about. Whenever I'd have a bad day, she would tell me that if it weren't for the bad ones, we wouldn't be able to appreciate the good days. The people in BMW didn't have the freedom to appreciate anything in terms of its relativity to good and bad, so I think also in that way they were definitely not free.
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