The Power of The System in Aldous Huxley’s

            As Charles M. Holmes clarifies in “The Self cannot survive in Huxley’s Utopia”:  “Disgusted by almost everything he has seen in Fordian culture and overwrought by his mother’s death from soma, the Savage has caused a riot by heaving out the window boxes of pills. Then calmed by soma vapor and a ‘Synthetic Anti-Riot Speech’, hustled… into the office of Mustapha Mond” (27). John, furious of his mother’s death, takes the soma of some kids and throws it out the window. These young adults start arguing with John and eventually start a fight. This shows how much the World State society needs soma and what can happen if you take away the soma from them. John thought he would make these kids rebel against the system if their soma would be taken away from them, but he just angers them since now they had no soma to take and stabilize their mind and body. For this society, soma was the solution for everything and even the police use soma vapor in order to stabilize the riot. This riot was started by John, a person who had never uses soma, and because he was clean and purified, he was able to analyze the situation and throw away the soma of the young adults. He understood that soma made you unable to analyze what was going on and just be in a careless state. Soma impairs your mind and made you more susceptible to the system of the World State.

            The system of the World State was too powerful for anyone to overthrow. Thanks to the drug soma, the World State had such a powerful system that would control anyone who would interact with it.  The system was always two steps ahead of its citizens so even if its citizens would “advance” one step, they would still be one step behind of the system. The system already foretells any situations its citizens would have and prevent them from ever happening. The World State system Bernard doubts the system but is quickly controlled by it when he gathers the fame of showing John the Savage to all the intellectuals of the World State. No citizen of the World State knew how to surpass the system and all succumbed to it, all except John. John eventually beat the system but the price was his own life.

Works Cited

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (P.S.). New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. 

Holmes, Charles. “The Self cannot Survive in Huxley’s Utopia”. Readings on Brave New World. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 1999. p.26-32.

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