Brave New World and Censorship Law in the United States

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Brave New World and Censorship Law in the United States
Introduction
The United States is thought to be a free country and there is a common belief that people have freedom of speech as provided by the First Amendment in the US Constitution. While it is true that people are free to say what they feel, the United States does not always allow such free speech without a check and there are limitations to free speech. The First Amendment guarantees individuals the right to free speech, but there is no right devoid of limits. Sometimes, a right begins to infringe on the interests of other persons or groups, and the courts will interpret such a clause to ensure that fairness and reasonable solution is afforded. For instance, while Americans can enjoy the right to free speech, they should not apply that right to deliberately mislead others to take an action or inaction that may result in harm to the listener. While the speaker may have the right to free speech as provided by the Constitution, they should not induce others to act in a manner that harms them. In the dystopian novel “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley anticipates huge advancements in science such as sleep-learning, reproductive technology, classical conditioning, and psychological manipulation. The novel is set in a futuristic World State of intelligent-based society and genetically engineered humans. Huxley imagined of a perfect world devoid of diseases, poverty, and sadness, but the themes of self-harm, promiscuity, and negativity in the novel led to its censorship in many libraries globally.
The novel “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932, depicts a dystopian and futuristic society and is set in the state of New Mexico and London. In the novel, Huxley portrays how a totalitarian administration controls society through science and technology to brainwash or condition its citizens. The government “grows humans inside bottles and prescribes drugs known as “soma” (Oliver and Rich np), which Huxley postulates to be a versatile drug that would make people happy in small doses (Huxley 38). However, according to Green and Karolides (69), the novel “disavows personal relationships, including intimate love and family, rejects concepts and practices of democracy, and abjures religion” to a level where people find it inappropriate to public consumption, especially incorporating it in school systems. Huxley’s novel has been seen to challenge the traditional social order by integrating a “predetermined caste system designed to fulfill the economic and occupational functions and the population’s requirements of the society” (Green and Karolides 69). Through the creation of this system, characters in the novel are unable to assume their traditional roles in society where individuals support and love one another. The society in the novel is made up of people created in test tubes and nurtured to perform a specific function. In the novel, “biological or physiological conditioning consists of adding chemicals or spinning the bottles to prepare the embryos for the levels of strength, intelligence, and aptitude required for given jobs. After they are "decanted" from the bottles, people are psychologically conditioned, mainly by hypnopaedia or sleep-teaching (Astrachan np).” The conditioning that society in the novel receives from the totalitarian government makes them live in utopian state that is far from reality.
The “pleasure principle” coined by Sigmund Freud is distorted in the novel where it introduces sexual acts, which counter with widely accepted views as healthy. Huxley portrays the pursuit of happiness to an extreme level and shows that “a society can achieve stability only when everyone is happy, and the brave new world tries hard to ensure that every person is happy. It does its best to eliminate any painful emotion, which means every deep feeling, every passion. It uses genetic engineering and conditioning to ensure that everyone is happy with his or her work (Astrachan np).” Huxley’s “Brave New World” outlaws procreation and citizens created abide by a social order of all beings belong to all (Oliver and Rich np). On this note, Huxle...