World State Motto Brave New World

The Motto of the World State is Community, Identity, Stability. With detailed reference to the novel, how do you view this in relation to individual freedom? “Community, Identity, Stability. ” — The motto that shapes and defines the entire civilized world. Civilians like Lenina believe that the motto has given them their individual freedom. “I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays. ” (Page 79) Ironically, Huxley was trying to convey the exact opposite message. The motto really speaks of a heavy price paid — freedom in exchange for collective happiness.

Freedom to feel, freedom of identity, and the freedom to know and create. It is too heavy a price, perhaps, because freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. To ensure a community where “everyone belongs to everyone else”, individuality must be entirely eradicated. Babies are mass-produced upon order in hatcheries according to castes, like lifeless dolls, existing only to ensure the smooth operation of the world.

At the stage of an embryo, every citizen of the World State has its caste, gender, physique, career, and mental capacity predestined.

Further conditioning and hypnopaedia molds everyone’s character according to the Controller’s suggestion – “Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of these suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. ” (BNW, page 23) In other words, the whole being of the entire human race is controlled by the few World Controllers.

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Physically, mentally and spiritually. There is nothing left of humanity. People grow up with an indisputable set of morals and character already built into them, having no ability to choose who to be and what to think.

Masses of humans behave, talk, and think in the same way. Even if there is a chance to be different, they aren’t able to make that choice. They are confined in their minds; prisoners behind the invisible bars of predestination. Because “when the individual feels the community reels” (Page 94), emotions were to be reduced to the most superficial form possible to scaffold social stability. Firstly all family relations must be completely abolished. People no longer know what monogamy, romance, families, and mothers are, and along with that, stripped of the right to practice them.

Then there is the use of soma. As Mustapha Mond exclaims, you can now carry half your morals around in a bottle, because the slightest bouts of any negative emotions can be instantly cured by the drug. Like ostriches, the whole civilized world chooses to bury themselves in their soma holiday in face of the tiniest adversity. Living in that bubble of false happiness, they have lost all ability and freedom to have emotions. John the Savage believes that being happy all the time is a prison on its own, and he claims the “right to be unhappy”.

After all, being a human, even at its most abject and abased state, is about the right to feel, to love, and to hate. The citizens of the World State have also lost their right to know and to create. They are all intellectually degraded, even for an Alpha Plus. Watsons himself, the most distinguished Emotional Engineer admits that the hypnopaedic lines he writes are “idiotic, writing when there’s nothing to say”. (Page 194) Mustapha Mond explains the reason why they couldn’t afford to have people become too intellectual.

After centuries of war, famine, poverty, diseases, heartbreaks, and chaos, one day The Ford came along and decided that it is too hard to be a human being. So he wiped out all arts, history, religion, emotions, and relationships in an effort to “shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. ” (Page 194) In fact he reduced the entire humanity into a game of numbers and equations. Mond admits that “It hasn’t been very good for truth…But it’s been very good for happiness”. (Page 194) The motto and the entire World State wouldn’t be possible unless everyone succumbs to Ford’s ideology.