Brave New World

Consumerism Consuming Society College

“Money doesn’t buy happiness.” Throughout history, this concept has been heard time and time again and has been proven to be true. People can continuously purchase material items, but in the end, those items can never satisfy a person’s innate need for love and connection. As people buy such objects, they are making a poor attempt at filling a missing void in their lives. In the 1920s, this ideal began to loose its significance as society became swept up in consumerism. Shopping became people’s favorite pastime and the ever-expanding consumption of goods began to set the standards for happiness. Aldous Huxley experienced the rise in the sales market and saw the negative influence that it had on society as consumerism began to dominate people’s lives; consequently, Huxley wrote Brave New World to depict an exaggeration of the world if society continued to participate in mass consumerism. Huxley intended for his novel to be a warning to the public of the ramifications from consumerism and to ensure that his imagined dystopia does not become reality.

In his novel, Huxley illustrated an assembly line that, rather than producing cars, produces human beings instead, making "the principle of mass production at last applied to biology”...

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