Brave New World: Themes

In LitCharts, each theme gets its own corresponding color, which you can use to track where the themes occur in the work. There are two ways to track themes:

  • Refer to the color-coded bars next to each plot point throughout the Summary and Analysis sections.
  • Use the ThemeTracker section to get a quick overview of where the themes appear throughout the entire work.



 Dystopia and Totalitarianism

Brave New World is one of the two best known dystopian novels written in the twentieth century. The other is George Orwell’s 1984. Both novels envision future totalitarian societies in which individual liberty has been usurped by an all-powerful state. But the two novels show two very different methods by which the state has amassed its power. 1984 presents the rather more conventional vision of a totalitarian state, in which the government maintains power through surveillance, information control, and torture. Brave New World, in contrast, argues that the most powerful totalitarian state would be one that doesn’t overwhelm and frighten its citizens, but instead manages to convince its citizens to love their slavery.

 Technology and Control

Science and technology are two different things. Science is the pursuit of truth and fact in the various sciences, from biology to physics. Technology refers to the tools and applications developed from science. Science is knowledge. Technology is what you can do with that knowledge.

Brave New World raises the terrifying prospect that advances in the sciences of biology and psychology could be transformed by a totalitarian government into technologies that will change the way that human beings think and act. Once this happens, the novel suggests, the totalitarian government will cease to allow the pursuit of any actual science and the truth that science reveals will be restricted and controlled, even as the technologies that allow for control will be constantly improved and perfected.

 The Cost of Happiness

If you gave someone the choice between getting what they wanted and not getting what they wanted, they’d choose getting what they wanted every time. This satisfaction of desire, the person would believe, would make them happy. In order to maintain its stability, the World State in Brave New World ensures that all its citizens get exactly what they want all the time. In other words, the World State is designed to make people happy. This universal “happiness” is achieved in three ways: 1) The state uses biological science and psychological conditioning to make sure that each citizen is not only suited to its job and role but actually prefers that role to anything else, and therefore doesn’t want anything he or she can’t have; 2) Through the promotion of promiscuous sex as virtuous and the elimination of families or any long-term relationship of any sort, the government ensures that no one will ever face intense and unreciprocated emotional or sexual desire; 3) Whatever sadness slips through the cracks can be brushed away by using soma, a drug with no side-effects that gives the user a pleasant high and makes all worries dissolve away. All three methods are successful: in the World State, almost everybody really does seem to be happy all of the time.

But through Bernard, Helmholtz, the Savage, and even Mustapha Mond, Brave New World poses the question: at what cost does this happiness come? What gets lost when every one of an individual’s desires is immediately met? The novel’s answer is that the satisfaction of every desire creates a superficial and infantile happiness that creates stability by eliminating deep thought, new ideas, and strong passions. Without ideas or passions, mankind loses the possibility of the more significant fulfillments provided by the pursuit of truth in art and science, or the pursuit of love and understanding with another person. Brave New World argues that happiness and stability are fool’s gold, making adults into infants who do not care about truth or progress.

 Industrialism and Consumption

Brave New World criticizes the industrial economic systems of the era in which it was written by imagining those systems pushed to their logical extremes. The industrial revolution that began in the second half of the 19th century and sped up through the 20th allowed for the production of massive quantities of new goods. But there’s no value in producing new goods that no one wants, so the willingness of the masses to consume these new goods was crucial to economic growth and prosperity. It became an economic imperative, then, that people always want new things, because if people were satisfied with what they had they wouldn’t consume enough to keep the wheels of industrial society churning along. Some people would argue that almost all of advertising is an effort to make you, the consumer, consume things you don’t really need.

The World State in Brave New World has made consumption one of its centerpieces. All World State citizens are conditioned to consume. Hypnopeadic teachings condition them to throw out worn clothes instead of mending them, to prefer complicated sports with lots of mechanical parts to simple games, and to refrain from any activity like thinking or reading that doesn’t involve the payment of money for goods. It is as if the citizens of the World State exist to serve their economy, rather than the other way around.

  Individuality

All of World State society can be described as an effort to eliminate the individual from society. That doesn’t mean the elimination of all people; it means the conditioning of those people so that they don’t really think of themselves as individuals. What makes a person an individual? Having a sense of oneself as being separate, distinct, unique. This sense includes both the joy of one’s own talents and thoughts, and the sorrows of loneliness and isolation. These experiences of individuality are what are referred to as “the Human condition,” and everything in the World State is designed to avoid anyone ever feeling individual in any way, either through sadness or joy. But these safeguards aren’t enough for all the citizens of the World State, and they become aware of their individuality.