John's Words | Teen Ink

John's Words

February 7, 2012
By Anonymous

O, brave new world, have you lost your humanity? Your soma, conditioning, meaningless feelies - what good is your happiness if there is nothing to compare it too? Escaping what makes us human with your soma, with your pleasures that are equally laughable to myself as my society is to you - it sickens me to see this fallen world. Have you forgotten what it means to be human, hidden it outside of your bottled worlds? Forgotten what it means to have emotions with your escapist methods, forgotten what it means to be searching for yourself with your false pretense of community? You have even forgotten what true progress and science is, replacing it with weak bodies of thought, rejecting the invaluable philosophy which so makes us ourselves. For these are the things which make us human, to have emotions, self-identity, philosophy; this is all that separates us from the beasts. O brave new world, what have you become?

Foolish, foolish, brave new world; you embrace happiness as your god, with your soma and feelies. But what is the meaning of happiness if there is n’e’er any sorrow? How can you stand this community where you never gain this perspective, kept in the dark, only told that “everybody’s happy nowadays,” that there is nothing but happiness? Your world rejects true emotion, in favor of stability; but again, where is the meaning in stability when instability has been eradicated? Your brightest thinkers, they begin to free themselves from your enslaving, hampering soma, but you insist on banishing them to islands. Helmholtz, Marx - you send them away as though they are the pestilence and disease which your decanting has dealt with, afraid that their true emotions may be infectious. Yet this seems contrary to your ideology of community, as humanity is meant to share emotions, to indulge in each others elation and to weep for another’s sorrow. This is a key part of being human - the emotional victories and tragedies are what make our life so meaningful, what shapes us into who we are - but I suppose you have rejected this, too.

O, brave new world, it is a wonder that your people are not claustrophobic with the size of the bottle you enclose your people within; a disgrace that you do not give them room for self actualization. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs1, you have certainly satisfied their physiological and safety needs, and I congratulate you for this; but your love and belonging, you have destroyed the precious bond of true love, replacing it with your concept of “everyone belongs to everyone else” - but what what then separates us from beasts, letting all sexual activity run unhindered by restraint? But more so than this, you have capped the bottle at the level of esteem - you have destroyed the need for self-actualization, replacing it with cold, hypnopædic lessons. There is not individuality in your cold world, only your ideas, like a prison encapsulating all of society under an unwavering roof - those Alpha-pluses who attempt to satisfy this need are met with the islands. All of your Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, sent through Bokanovsky’s process, each a mirror image of each other - what individuality is there in that? Your people, your very existence is based on uniformity - community is meant to be a collection of unique people’s separate world views which mesh together or conflict, the relationships which occur to agreeable or opposing ideas - not a uniformity in which everyone simply locks together. So where is your beloved “Community?” Certainly your cries of “Identity” are invalid, with your sickening clones and lack of individuality. No, you have lost the ideology, the world view, which separates us from one another, all for the sake of your beloved “Stability.”

O, brave new world, your people are but slaves to your ideas; you have destroyed the ideas which make us human. Our world views define ourselves; not a ridiculous hypnopædic lesson you impart to us. My dear friend Helmholtz, he understood the beauty of searching for meaning, writing of what we feel, what we are; so too Bernard, even if he is admittedly selfish and angry - must his elevated, soma-less world view be condemned? Must the beautiful writing of Helmholtz, which are amongst the beauty of William Shakespeare, be destroyed? These ideas, ideals of society which you have disregarded, or morality, of God, of identity, destroyed - and for what? Your precious happiness? You leave behind that which separates us from one another, what makes us who we are, instead molding your people into what you wish them to be. Is it really so valuable that you have destroyed humanity over it?

O, brave new world, how have you fallen so low? Did your Ford truly believe that a world like this is the solution to everything? An enslavement of all of humanity, lack of morality, no philosophy, no true community, no true identity, nothing of what you so greatly proclaim? You, brave new world, with your world controllers who foolishly believe that happiness is worth the destruction of all meaning in life - and whom I’m sure will stop the publication of this note - are forcing identity upon a people who know nothing better. You do not show them God, but you too, Mustapha Mond, believe that he exists - you condemn these men with your modern “morality”, you destroy their right to make choices, you ruin all that is human, replacing it with what is more “comfortable.” But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. And if that rejects your false happiness, then I claim the right to be unhappy. Because I can’t be human without it.
O, farewell, brave new world.
John

The author's comments:
My addendum to Alex Huxley's 'Brave New World,' from the point of John in his suicide note.

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