![]() As the science writer Matt Ridley put it, Brave New World describes an "environmental, not a genetic, hell".Ĭitizens have no awareness of history except for a vague idea of how terrible things were before the inception of the present society. ![]() Huxley wrote the book in 1932, twenty years before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. The Brave New World can thus be considered either a dystopia or an "ironic utopia".Ĭontrary to what modern readers would expect, the biological techniques used to control the populace in Brave New World do not include genetic engineering. ![]() The irony is, however, that all of these things have been achieved by eliminating the things - family, cultural diversity, art, literature, religion and philosophy - that are generally considered to be of integral importance to being human. In many ways, the society of Brave New World can be considered to be a utopia - humanity is carefree, healthy, and technologically advanced, warfare and poverty have been eliminated, and everyone is permanently happy. Any residual unhappiness is resolved by an anti-depressant and somewhat hallucinogenic drug called soma. Alphas wear grey, Betas mulberry (purple), Gammas green, Deltas khaki, and Epsilons black.įrom birth, members of every class are indoctrinated, by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep, to believe that their own is the best class to be in. Members of each caste also wear uniforms, the colour of which identified which caste they belonged to. Within these classes are sub-groups, plus or minus, which further determines their roles in society (every possible combination appears at least once in the text, with the exception of Delta-Plus). People are thus manufactured to fill their jobs, rather than jobs being created for people. These two groups together form the upper castes, with Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons comprising the lower castes, each with a descending degree of intelligence, Epsilons being so stupid as to be described as "semi-morons", and trained to perform the most menial tasks without complaint. The Alpha caste consists of those destined for leadership positions, with Betas filling professional and administrative posts requiring higher education, but without the leadership responsibilities of the Alphas. The three lower castes are manufactured in groups of up to 96 clones, and they are chemically stunted and/or deprived of oxygen during their maturation process to control their intelligence level and physical development. Children are engineered in fertility clinics and artificially gestated. In this society, people are "decanted" into a chemically-enforced and totally conformist caste society. Instead, humans are grown in factories according to industrial quotas. There are no families, and no-one is born in a natural way. His famous phrase "History is bunk" has become the fundamental approach to studying the past - as a result, no-one knows of past societies. The assembly line process is present in many aspects of life, and the symbol "T" has replaced the Christian cross, a reflection of the Model T car developed by Henry Ford. ![]() The word lord has been replaced with ford. The new society is built around the principles of Henry Ford, and many aspects of life reflect this. History is forbidden, and only the World Controllers know how the present society was created and what life was like before it. Following the devastating Nine Years' War (said to have begun in the 1940s), the entire planet has been united into the One World State, governed by ten "World Controllers". the 27th century), the story describes a society whose motto is "Community, Identity, Stability". Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow. ![]()
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