Suppression of Emotion

In Brave New World, a utopian society is shown to the reader. You learn how it works, and the feelings of the people living in it. The utopia is explicitly described by one of its highest authority figures as being a society where all of its people are happy. Its greatest strength, and the pride of its citizens, is its great stability. As the story progresses however, it becomes more and more unattractive to the reader. While initially it is to be believed that everyone is indeed happy, some characters are discovered to be uncomfortable and go against the norm. These are the individuals who are just that, individual, so they stick out and have difficulty blending in.

A key component of the stability of the society is the intentional suppression of the people's emotions. They are taught from the beginning of their lives that passion is a sin, rather than a virtue. They are instructed against such passionate things as falling in love, being angry with one another, and especially being sad. One of the ways that they go about this is by training them to be uncomfortable when they are alone. They do everything together so they do not have time to think in solitude and work themselves into a passion by thinking deep thoughts. They are also trained to take a hallucinogenic drug whenever they do not feel happy so that they go on a drug induced trip called a "soma holiday" after the name of the drug.

The authorities who set up the system were aware that feeling no emotions would have a negative affect on the mental well being of the common people, so they developed ways of giving them artificially produced substitutes for emotions such as a "V.P.S treatment" which is like an adrenaline shot, and a "pregnancy substitute" which seems self explanatory. These are not enough for some though. One such character, Helmholtz Watson, feels that he is missing out on something like a hidden reserve of power. He later figures out that he is missing meaning in his work. He is employed as a writer, but lacks strong feelings of which to write about. He grew restless because he had no way of expressing his emotions and felt contained or "bottled up." His life long molding into a mindless member of a society of ignorance left him wanting deeper meaning in his life, but was to ignorant even to figure out that that was what he wanted. The problematic outcome of trying to make a utopia stable by keeping people in the dark is that they will eventually feel empty and become dissatisfied.