Brave New World

 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a satire about a society in which people are labeled and classified into groups or castes. They are conditioned to behave a certain way since they are born. Anybody who dares to think original thoughts or to crave solitude is considered dangerous and weird. These people are treated like misfits and are deported to a distant island.

  In Brave New World everybody is supposed to be happy, but this happiness is not true happiness. It is loveless and synthetic. It is based on the consumption of goods. Human beings are deprived of love and compassion, and those who dare to do something differently are treated with contempt and sent away.

  People are  encouraged to consume a drug called “Soma” to feel good and “happy” all the time.  In this male dominated society sexual promiscuity is the norm. Yet the sexual act is meaningless.
   Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Word is the description of a conformist society in which art and science are considered threats to their stability and their so-called “freedom”. They have to be muzzled to satisfy the interests of the status quo. Literature, for example, is of no interest to people because they fear that it will make them feel sad, so they shy away from it just as they reject anything that is thought-provoking. Literature carries the risk of awakening the possibility of dealing with original thoughts.

 Even though the individuals in Brave New World believe they are free they are all expected to behave in predictable ways.  Anything that is considered unconventional or that strays from standard patterns of behavior is treated with distrust, and so the root of the irony is that this world is neither brave nor new.

 Interestingly, George Orwell expressed his concerns about banned books in his popular novel 1984.  Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, portrayed a society in which there was no need to censor books anymore because people did not care about literature altogether: since a very early age they were conditioned to believe that literature  was boring, depressing or a threat to their stability.

 Soon after the publication of 1984, Huxley wrote a letter to George Orwell. I will share a fragment of this letter:

“My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and those ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

“The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude or by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.  The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.”

Home

 "A modern astronomical view says that everything in the universe is moving uniformly away from everything else in all directions into space, so there is no center point in the cosmos at all. We live with no fixed reference point. From one perspective, this understanding produces the desolate feeling that there is no home. But from another perspective, this realization shows us directly that every point is home. We are free; we do not need to fix on a single center for refuge, for safety. This is love, this is happiness, where our refuge is unbounded, and we are always at home."
 Sharon Salzberg (From her book "Loving-kindness")

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.

There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

Czelaw Milosz

Happiness

 "In the midst of winter, I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer." Albert Camus

   Last Saturday I attended an international film festival at the university in the city where I live.What you  can see with a four-year old child is limited, but we managed to watch two documentaries. One of them was called "Happy".
       Seeing this documentary confirmed my ideas on happiness. Let me share with you some of the most important points:
-Once the basic needs are covered studies found that more money will not make people happy.
-Those who associate happiness with money and material possessions are less happy than people who associate happiness with family, friends and things they like to do.
-Forty percent of our happiness depends on our genes. People under the same circumstances will have different levels of happiness.
-Studies showed that when people help each other, there is a release of chemicals in the blood that are associated with feeling happy (endorphines, dopamine, oxytocin). On the other hand, when people compete they feel stressed.
-People feel happy when they are "in their zone", which means that they are engrossed in doing something they love to do; during this time, they let go of worries and anxiety.
-Exercising and having fun make people happy. Again, this is associated with the release of brain chemicals I mentioned above.
     Happiness is  not a complicated emotion to me. Being with my daughter, my husband, helping others, doing things I love, looking at the sunset, staring at the naked branches of the trees in winter, being in touch with nature are some of the many things that make me happy.
   This doesn't mean that I never feel sad, anxious or worried, but I think my happiness has to do with a sense of gratitude. It has to do with embracing the present without fretting over the future...
   What makes you happy?