Individualism In Brave New World

Words: 1779
Pages: 8

We are the Auxari. We are a race united as one. We have assimilated many into our hive mind, moulding a society envied across the universe. We come in peace, but in dismay. We have without interference observed the rise of human civilization for millennia. We have observed your exhilarating ingenuity, but also fail to understand your need for individual freedom, which will ultimately lead to your demise. We now realize that human society must be saved from itself. We are revealing ourselves to rescue you from your own detrimental tendencies, and offering you an avenue to escape your miseries. Many of your great novels have attempted to dictate the best path for humanity. We agree with a select few, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and …show more content…
Society suffers so greatly under individualist thought that R-13, a renowned poet and close friend of D-503, uses an allusion to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve to illustrate the stark difference between happiness and freedom. He recalls that “there were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness” (Zamiatin 59). According to the human Biblical narrative, Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, a utopia. They could do anything in absolute bliss, but they could not eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Nevertheless, they rebelled out of curiosity and ate the fruit, leading to their exile from utopia. This act of rebellion brought them into your world of pain and injustice. R-13 uses this allusion to explain how the world can be perfect only through strictly set rules, and that conventional freedom leads to mistrust and pain. In fact, conventional freedom is not as glorious as it sounds. R-13 shows this by comparing freedom to the acts of Adam and Eve, suggesting that freedom is merely the act of rebelling against benevolent rulers for the sake of rebellion. The scale of this allusion becomes clearer as the novel progresses. Similarly to how the descendants of Adam and Eve are punished eternally by their want for independence, so are the characters in the novel who break away from the Benefactor’s guidance. …show more content…
Most importantly, here is where we find that the One State of We lacks compared to the World State of Brave New World. The One State is run on the laws of mathematics, and all aspects of that society revolve around these natural laws. Until the onset of the novel, these laws, accepted as the undeniable basis of reality, keep the vast majority of society under control. However, these laws prove to be ineffective, as unintended suggestions in mathematical language undermines the contentedness and compliance of the populace. For example, when D-503 doubts the faultlessness of the One State’s decrees, he realizes that he is doubting the foundations of his world, realizing that he is “in a world of the square root of minus one” (Zamiatin 74). The Auxari understand from your mathematical records that the square root of minus one is referred to as the imaginary unit, the foundation of imaginary numbers. By referring to imaginary numbers, D-503 reveals how his imagination is escaping the control of the One State, even while using language intended to control him. He dreams of a world far from unity and perfection, implied to be the world to which we address this warning. The paramount importance placed on mathematical law by the One State enables D-503 to desire alternatives to perfect unity due to unintended