Expansion: Brave New World

Title: Brave New World

Date: 1931

Nationality: English

Creator: Aldous Huxley

Medium: Paper and ink

http://humanitariannews.org/20130115/brave-new-world-liberal-dystopia-pt-i

In Brave New World, Huxley outlines a future society where all pain and discomfort are removed in order to attain stability and supposed “happiness.” One character, the Savage, speaks out against this and determines that he would rather suffer and feel even horrible things instead of merely floating through life in “happiness.” He says that he is “claiming the right to be unhappy” (Strong and Davis, 731). Through this story, Aldous Huxley is subtly arguing that in order to have meaning and feel joy, you also have to feel the negative and be open to the experiences of life. This artifact is valuable because it shows another way of expansion: the need to appreciate the full range of good and bad in order to truly learn. In other words, we might expand through negative experiences as much as we do through positive experiences. Only when we are open to both good and bad can we fully learn experientially and scholastically instead of staying in a rut of comfort. Nothing of value can truly be learned without expanding in all directions. For example, we don’t learn a new concept without realizing we might have been wrong before. We don’t learn to improve from our mistakes unless we see the bad our mistakes have done in the first place. We don’t fully learn the beauty of life till we have seen some of its horrors. It is vital for my civilization to understand this type of expansion because without this understanding, they might not make the choice to grasp concepts that only the suffering in life can teach them.