Brave New World essays

Brave New World essays In Aldous Huxleys novel Brave New World, Mustapha Mond believes that every person lives their life inside of a bottle (223). Plato used a similar line of thinking as Mustapha Mond in his Simile of the Cave. The cave in this case is considered the bottle. Monds statement is valid for the rest of the citizens in the Brave New Worlds World State, as well. One of the main themes in Brave New World is how human conditioning creates a bottle, or glass box, and although some bottles are, as Mond says, ...relatively speaking, enormous... (223), all people do live in some sort of a metaphorical bottle. This bottle controls what they believe and how they react to different situations in life. By bottle, Mond means certain surroundings as well as personal thoughts that remain somewhat constant. Constants can be broad, such as weather conditions that we are used to, or much more introverted like what time of day a person always goes to sleep. In a sense the bottle is our own individual culture that determines how one acts or thinks. Constants within the bottle can be sociological, such as what is considered acceptable, and what aspects of life in the society are considered normal. What is considered normal and acceptable is learned since birth, from observing and obeying parents, friends, and the rest of a given society. What is normal and acceptable are different for every culture that ever existed. These differences can sometimes be completely opposite and sometimes result in conflicts of racism, murder and sometimes even as extreme as war. Each persons bottle is created by different experiences along with different influences. Different people in the same society will have similar enough backgrounds that they will likely react in similar fashions to the same circumstances. As Professor Erchak wrote in his essay on culture...