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 require...