Monday, September 21, 2009

Brave New World and its extremities.

Okay, I'm gonna collect all of my thoughts here and spit them out in random order. So.. I guess progress and efficiency has become the central core of a thriving, seemingly and distortedly improved society that has abolished meaning, and I say meaning in the most general connotative form of the word. Before I go into anything else here, let's backtrack a bit.
First of all, what is meaning? What is there to compare to that will aide in defining the meaning of something? In my opinion, meaning is when you declare that an emotion has been brought about by a given event or occurrence. When human emotions are stimulated, meaning is created and can then be used as a comparison to what a meaningful life or meaningful situation is.
In Brave New World, meaning is abolished when emotions are destroyed and time is altered to begin on a certain date, the time Ford was born. With the assembly line the central focus of existence, the satirical exaggeration of what life has evolved into spins out of control and creates an image of productivity and efficiency, which has made "taking in the moment" and slowing down time to reminiss upon times of happiness completely obsolete.
BNW has this twisted conspiracy that happiness is forever cycling, and keeping everyone "happy" is the way life should be..lived? If that could be classified as living. I'm not saying that the way current society, our society, is the correct way to live or that it is the only way to live, but it is what I have to compare to so I'm just gonna run with it here. Every emotion possesses its compliment, happiness and sadness, love and hate, etc. Without the expression of one, the other becomes unknown. Who are these absurd people to define what being happy is if they have never been sad? If events never occur that bring about excitement, smiles, any gesture of derivative of happiness, then how they compare is beyond my realm of understanding here. I feel like I'm ridiculing a world that is not my own, and just because it is not my own, it becomes wrong, which is supposed to make my opinions of them right? I don't see the logic in this, I feel like a 1984 citizen, ridiculing the unknown because I have never immersed myself into someone else's body of water. We as humans are completely subjective regardless of how much we try not to be. Out of instinct, it is who we are and is instilled in our every fiber and strand of DNA. From my perspective, I see family as the sun and all other aspects of one's life the revolving planets that orbit, evenly spaced, creating a solar system that is one's existence. Forget existence actually, it is our life because it possesses meaning. BNW believes family to be the antithesis of society. To have a family means that others, all others in the world, have been excluded from a family's unconditional bonds. These bonds create the barriers between every person that exists in our world. We are walking bubbles, and invading one's bubble is an invasion of morals and family values. BNW has popped all of its bubbles with a giant needle and then used that needle to craft an assembly line that, I guess satisfies, the needs of acceptance by everyone and eliminating any private space or unconditional bonds that one could possibly possess. How this author came up with this is beyond me. Touche.

1 comment:

  1. Ohhhh my goodness! Heather you're blog was so interesting! It really got me thinking. I know we're not supposed to be commenting on one another's figurative language, but I really liked all of your metaphors that you used to explain you're feelings on how you felt hypocritical for ridiculing the society. Especially, "I feel like a 1984 citizen, ridiculing the unknown because I have never immersed myself into someone else's body of water." Geeze that's seriously good stuff!
    Okay, well on to your analysis, you did a superb job also. I really enjoyed your whole analysis of how each emotion has a compliment. When you said,"Every emotion possesses its compliment, happiness and sadness, love and hate, etc. Without the expression of one, the other becomes unknown." I totally agreed with you. I also believe that these people are not experiencing true happiness, just an artificial one. Because in reality, you cannot truly be happy unless you have experienced some sad or hard times that allow you to appreciate that happiness. Well,you did an awesome job and I really enjoyed your blog.:)

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