Miyog
05-24-2005, 06:07 PM
By offering us a glance at a world in which all that can make one unhappy has been systematically deleted from society, and then demonstrating that there will inevitably be those individuals that cannot accept this, Huxley is illustrating a basic, yet often overlooked, trait of human-beings: conflict drives us, and without it we are left with a nagging emptiness. The very fact that most readers are repulsed by the civilization presented in the novel shows, quite well, how much Mankind in dependent upon a continuing cycle of strife and resolution. Though, in the New World they have a remedy for this need in the form of adrenal shots and soma and so forth. I guess the overall challenge of this book isn’t to consider whether human beings could be perpetually happy, but rather whether we could be perpetually happy if that happiness extended from artificial means?