The incompatibility

The Incompatibility of Happiness and Truth In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley portrays a society with predestined social caste, lack of emotional relationships, and willful dissolution found in a hallucinogenic drug. In the present day World State, ones life long potential is designed and blueprinted into embryos. Social standing and credentials are defined and programmed into set castes. Each caste defined and taught to know and understand a set definition of personal satisfaction and happiness. John the Savage and Mustapha Mond the Controller debate the price at which happiness tolls; the loss of truth. Each individual defending and feeling the loss of a separate truth. John having known the pleasures and pains of human truths. The Controller knowing the loss or lack of truth in knowledge. The personal desire to strive for truths is the basis of what the World State society can not allow in order to maintain happiness. Personal relations, love and loss, are undefinable, but John’s understanding of Shakespeare helps to portray his relating to illegal and unexceptible feelings. The works of Shakespeare showcase what the World State is trying to eliminate. Finding it difficult to relay intense emotions unknown to World State society, John makes reference to Shakespeare. ” Only in Othello’s words could he find an adequate vehicle for his contempt and hatred.” (p. 219) Understanding human emotion and experience both positive and negative defines John’s intention to defy the social norm. John Stuart Mill said, ” the greatest happiness of the the greatest number would best be achieved by allowing as much freedom of thought and action as possible.” (On Liberty) Questioning authority and promoting rebellion, in the pursuit of happiness. Happiness found and known through emotional experience and undefined personally responsible decision making. The Controller’s debate of truth is personal, in that it’s a debate in himself. He refers to his work in science in past, and his past desires to achieve and understand. Science is a definable truth. Unable to harmonize with World State society in that it questions what is possible. Huxley executes the idea by stating, ” change is a menace to society”. Science is incompatible with stability, and has to be controlled as to not undo what it helps to define. The controller understands the terms of maintaining happiness. Achieved by conditioning unquestioned acceptance of personal satisfaction. Though John’s ideals for the right to truths and the Controller’s obligation to maintain a state of undisturbed function conflict. They share the knowledge. The understanding of bigger, better ideas to be known. The difference being the Controller’s exceptance of ignorance. He chose the happiness of other people over his own as a punishment for seeking truths. John questions the World State, just as he had. In a sense the Controller relates John to his past self. Even relating islands to freedom, in that they are populated by individuals above the genetic programming. Those that are capable of seeking out personal truths. Each man right in their own argument. In the second part of the debate, the two men discuss religion and it’s role in World State. Religion is an unconditional guideline and exceptance of beliefs that unifies groups of people. In conjunction with Soma it is also a tool and example of technology and the World States control over society. Instant satisfaction found in the drug washes out personal reaction and religion preaches laws of conduct. Promoting the communal living and social classifying that the World State stand for. Religion’s demands of compliance and told truths, conflict with the ideas and ideals of unknown truths that both John and the Controller obtain. The Controller’s collection of old religious documents, further highlights his intrigue with understanding the change he helps to control. The adjustments made to views of God or religion, and the controlled options are in a sense his search for truths. Their conclusion is just as before known. That controlled happiness and knowledge of truths can not coexist. That understanding experience or not is arguable, and that the right to truths is undefinable.