Guest Blogger: Kristimari Kaiya

In the past few days we have been working on finding trends in today’s society and have developed futuristic applications to explain what the world would be like should the given trend advance. Although I know this assignment is not meant focus on patterns Aldous Huxley expressed in his novel, Brave New World, I could not help but think of the current issues that pertained back to his predictions as I worked on the assignment; and so with this interest in place, I continued on to do a little research on what it is we want or believe in that could eventually lead us to in creating such a desolate society, for it is safe to say that few who have read Brave New World would want such an existence. The most frequent answer I encountered pertained to our innate desire for a certain level equality and a world rid of most painful. Even with our varied political social preferences, it is still safe to say that to a certain extent, we all are working for a sense of a peaceful communal harmony with others, which may be established through making everyone equal, or just having everyone be satisfied with their positions in life. Wasn’t this probably the original intention of the forefathers of Huxely’s dystopian society? We may not have any evident movements today that work towards an extreme social reformation, but the idea in all of us is enough to give a case for a possible outcome in the future. As for our desire to wish away pain in our life, this notion is not just limited to wanting immediate relief from physical discomforts, it expands further to our dislike of situational unpleasantness we have to live with, such as say, paying taxes. It may appear to be petty irritations, but they still pertain back to our dislike of pain discomfort; seeing as we have had the ability so far to eliminate certain inconveniences in our lives, who is to say our society will push it further in the future? Perhaps the outcome will not be as extreme as the Brave New World, but it still leaves an unsettling room for an unprecedented form of society.