BRAVE NEW WORLD 2010
human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley wrote the dystopian novel Brave New World in 1931 at the inauguration of the last Crisis period in America. Dystopia is the often futuristic vision of a society in which conditions of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence, disease, pollution, nuclear fallout and/or the abridgement of human rights, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain. Wells Men Like Gods and George Bernard Shaw which glorified socialism and a one World State. Orwell 1984, written in 1948, is the other famous dystopian novel of the era. Huxley had visited America during the Roaring 20 and his experience provided the character for the novel. He was outraged by America out of control materialistic egocentric society. He witnessed youthful superficiality, commercialization, sexual promiscuity, and a self centered culture. Chesterton explained his view of Huxley novel:
the Age of Utopias came what we may call the American Age, lasting as long as the Boom. Men like Ford or Mond seemed to many to have solved the social riddle and made capitalism the common good. But it was not native to us; it went with a buoyant, not to say blatant optimism, which is not our negligent or negative optimism. Much more than Victorian righteousness, or even Victorian self righteousness, that optimism has driven people into pessimism. For the Slump brought even more disillusionment than the War. A new bitterness, and a new bewilderment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature and art. It was contemptuous, not only of the old Capitalism, but of the old Socialism. Brave New World is more of a revolt against Utopia than against Victoria. Technology to Control Society
progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. Aldous Huxley
Science and technology are not inherently good or bad. They can be used or misused. They offer promise or peril. Ultimately, humanity can benefit from science and technology or it can be detrimental to our planet. Huxley envisioned a horrifying future where mankind used science and technology in a self destructive manner. He was disillusioned with the decadence of society and disgusted by the behavior of his class. Huxley outlook is a world where the vast majority of the populace is united under one World State. The world is restricted to two billion inhabitants. The inhabitants are strictly divided into five castes. The world is controlled by Alphas and their subordinates, Betas. Below them, in descending order of brainpower and physique, are Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Each caste is further subdivided into Plus and Minus save for Epsilons, which are regular or semi moron. Reproductive technology, referred to as the Bokanovsky Process, is used by the government Alphas Betas to manage the number of human beings and their functions. The process is applied to fertilized human eggs in vitro, causing them to split into identical genetic copies of the original. The State has eliminated procreation by loving couples. Ovaries are surgically removed from women. The lower caste children are created in hatcheries.
At the very pinnacle of society sit Alpha Double Pluses, who serve as the future scientists and top administrators of the world. People in different castes are conditioned to be happy in their own way they do not feel resentment towards other castes, but rather feel a slight contempt for people not members of their own caste. The upper castes are intelligent, and have managerial jobs, where as the lower castes do the manual labor. The Alpha have what we would consider the best jobs, and it continues down until the Epsilons, who have the least skilled jobs. The Alphas are tall and fair, while the Epsilons are dark skinned.
The novel takes place in the year 2540 in London. The disturbing aspect is that we are now in the year 2009 and much of Huxley vision has come to fruition. At the heart of the World State control of its population is its rigid control over sexual mores and reproductive rights. The act of sex is controlled by a system of social rewards for promiscuity and lack of commitment. The United States has restricted population growth through a number of methods. Abortion on demand was made the law of the land in 1973. I ask myself how many Martin Luther Kings, Stephen Hawkings, and Ernest Hemingways have been among those aborted before having the chance to positively impact our world. use the pill available since 1960 on a daily basis in order to avoid pregnancy. The morning after pill was introduced in 1999. Planned Parenthood, created in 1916, has 850 locations in the United States offering easy access to abortions and other forms of contraception. have persuaded the lower classes to restrict their reproduction. They promote non consequential promiscuity among the other classes while reproducing and raising the new ruling class. American society is also segmented into castes as portrayed by Huxley. The Alpha Double Pluses are the Harvard MBAs running Goldman Sachs and the other mega banks. Others in the Alpha caste are the Bushes, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Clintons, Gores, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Paul Krugman. The Betas include Congressmen, bank executives, government bureaucrats, military leaders, and corporate executives. The Gammas and Deltas are the working classes that do the hard work without ever advancing. The Epsilons are the morons produced by the inner city public school system. They fill the non thinking manual labor jobs of society.
The Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are brought up in conditioning centers. The Alphas and the Betas use technology to mould them into their predetermined roles in society. They use operant conditioning and sleep teaching to modify the behavior of the lower castes. Hatcheries rely on machines to condition bottled embryos to heat, sudden motion, and disease, allowing the embryos to fulfill their predestined jobs in specific climates. The science exists today to produce whatever traits are desired in our children.
Those in control of America also use conditioning and teaching to keep the lower classes in their place. The ruling elite send their children to exclusive private schools, grooming them for Harvard, Yale and Stanford. This guarantees they will be given the high level positions in business and government. Blacks and Hispanics represent 50% of all the high school dropouts even though they only make up 25% of the population. This guarantees a life of blue collar low paying jobs for these people. Whites obtain 78% of the advanced degrees, guaranteeing them the positions of leadership in society. The social welfare state implemented by the ruling elite provides enough sustenance to the lower classes to keep them anesthetized, ignorant and easily manipulated. Whites also obtain 77% of the bachelor degrees, assuring that they will fill the Beta administrator positions in society.
Another technological method of keeping the masses tranquilized and distracted in the Brave New World is through high tech sports and entertainment. Sport is a pillar of the World State consisting of various games and activities which use high tech equipment. Another key aspect of entertainment is the Users rest their hands on metal knobs protruding from the arms of their chair, allowing them to feel the physical sensations of the actors on screen usually in sexually themed films. The mass production of HDTVs, CD players, Laptop computers, Blackberries, iPhones, iPods, luxury automobiles and other electronic toys distributed to the masses through easy credit policies has successfully distracted the populace from the pillaging of the country by the Alphas at Goldman Sachs. The feelies of today are 24 hour cable TV with 600 stations, downloadable movies, an unlimited amount of free porn on the internet, strip joints, and prostitution. Sports addicts can attend baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, wrestling, boxing, auto racing, and Michael Vick sponsored dog fighting events year round, or watch it on TV 24 hours per day. With mindless jobs and unlimited distractions, the preponderance of citizens are as docile as sheep.
Soma is a biological method used by the Alphas to keep the lower castes sedated. It is a drug that provides an easy escape from the hassles of daily life and is employed by the government as a method of control through pleasure. It is ubiquitous and ordinary among the culture of the novel and everyone is shown to use it at some point, in various situations: sex, relaxation, concentration, confidence. It is seemingly a single chemical combination of many of today drugs effects, giving its users the full hedonistic spectrum depending on dosage. As a kind of it also represents the use of religion to control society. Huxley description of soma reveals its power:
if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears what soma is. leaders bluster about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, but their actions speak otherwise. Americans can sedate themselves legally with alcohol, over the counter prescriptions, and tobacco. population, or 27 million people, are taking anti depressant pills. Over 4 million children are being drugged with Ritalin every day to make them malleable. The government looks the other way as the middle class uses marijuana, heroine, and cocaine. preaching the good word and sedating the masses. People intoxicate themselves with work so they won see how they really are. Aldous Huxley
Huxley formulated his dystopian world after observing the excessiveness of Americans during the Roaring 20 If he thought things were decadent and Americans were self consumed in the 1920 Huxley head would explode at the debauchery, ignorance materialism, and shallowness of Americans today. Our landfills contain more wealth than entire Third World countries. We throw away over 100 billion pounds of edible food per year. In his Brave New World Revisited, written in 1958, Huxley clearly laid out the dangers of consumerism:
re the services of expert salesmen versed in all the arts including the more insidious arts of persuasion. Under a free enterprise system commercial propa by any and every means is absolutely indis But the indispensable is not necessarily the desirable. What is demonstrably good in the sphere of economics may be far from good for men and women as voters or even as human beings. a simple example. Most cos are made of lanolin, which is a mixture of purified wool fat and water beaten up into an emulsion. This emulsion has many valuable properties: it penetrates the skin, it does not become rancid, it is mildly antiseptic and so forth. But the commercial prop do not speak about the genuine virtues of the emulsion. They give it some picturesquely volup name, talk ecstatically and misleadingly about feminine beauty and show pictures of gorgeous blondes nourishing their tissues with skin food. cosmetic manufacturers, one of their number has written, not selling lanolin, they are selling hope. For this hope, this fraudulent implication of a promise that they will be transfigured, women will pay ten or twenty times the value of the emulsion which the propagandists have so skilfully related, by means of misleading symbols, to a deep seated and almost universal feminine wish the wish to be more attrac to members of the opposite sex. The principles underlying this kind of propaganda are extremely sim Find some common desire, some widespread uncon fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensa dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. economic advancement has been marketed to Americans as happiness from consumption Every need can be realized through material gain. Success as a society is measured by GDP growth and the facade of prosperity. In Brave New World children are conditioned from birth to value consumption with such platitudes as is better than mending, which means buy a new one instead of fixing the old one. America has become the definitive throwaway society. Product waste has grown from 92 pounds per person per year in 1905 to 1,242 pounds per person per year in 2005. American human beings are lumped into the category of consumers by the mainstream media. Consumerism and consumer debt have been the contaminated lifeblood of the United States for the last three decades. Government actively promotes gambling by the poor, offering them false hope for riches. Americans squander $160 billion per year on lotteries and in casinos. Our society has become even more extreme than the Brave New World as we have outsourced our production to foreign countries, thereby gutting our economy. Even at the dawn of television Huxley realized the immense power for propagandists:
to compulsory education and the rotary press, the propagandist has been able, for many years past, to convey his messages to virtually every adult in every civilized country. Today, thanks to radio and television, he is in the happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults and not yet literate children. States advertising expenditures, 1920 in constant 2007 dollars billions
The mass media is owned and controlled by mega corporations run by the Alphas of our society. Colleges graduate thousands of people with the skills to manipulate the uninformed masses through advertising and propaganda. What passes for news organizations are just propaganda machines for a particular point of view. The public is distracted by the seemingly major differences between the two main political parties. The reality is that both parties are controlled by banking and corporate interests who pay for the laws that benefit their interests. Huxley description of political candidates in 1958 is even truer today:
methods now being used to merchan the political candidate as though he were a deo positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything. people must be beautiful and entertainment is indispensable. They provide the people what they want 24 hour coverage of Tiger Woods sex life, weeks of reporting about Michael Jackson death, and 10 seconds about the $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities we are leaving future generations. Truth is an inconvenience in the consumer society.
Incompatibility of Happiness Truth
is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations. Aldous Huxley
Mustapha Mond, World State Controller, believes that the population is better off with happiness than truth. In the Brave New World happiness is represented by immediate gratification of every citizen desire for food, sex, drugs, nice clothes, and other consumer trinkets. If the proletariats think they are happy, they won need to think or question reality. The World State cannot allow individuality to blossom. Free thinking individuals seek the truth. Spending time alone is considered an outrageous waste of time and money. Confession to a craving for individuality is shocking, horrifying, and embarrassing. John, the savage, grew up outside the World State and has studied Shakespeare. Everything that Shakespeare stood for: passion, love, intensity, seeking truth, relationships, and tragic endings, are at odds with the World State foundation. They cannot allow truth and true human happiness to exist in society or the Alphas will lose control.
The United States is the richest most powerful country in the history of the world. Our poorest live better than the aristocracy lived 100 years ago. We have indoor plumbing, air conditioning, heaters, clean water, automobiles, trains, jet airplanes, televisions, CD players, portable gadgets galore, free public education, fast food, gyms to work off the fast food, movies, the internet, restaurants, bars, concerts, sporting events, casinos, home improvement stores, grocery stores, discount stores, Wal Mart, clothes stores, jewelry stores, dollar stores, churches, Disney World, Las Vegas, and Graceland. These are the that are supposed to make Americans happy. Going into the woods alone, like Thoreau, to think is frowned upon. The propagandists sell the American public happiness in the form of material goods and services. If you don feel happy, take a pill. If you aren happy with your appearance have plastic surgery. If your spouse isn making you happy, cheat or get a divorce and try again. If your neighbor outdoes you by getting a $20,000 kitchen remodel, get yourself a $40,000 kitchen remodel. Happiness is a 6,000 sq ft McMansion with 5 bathrooms, a pool, game room, and Jacuzzi for your family of three. Having your neighbors see you driving a BMW 750Li will surely make you happy. Wearing a Rolex will definitely make you happy. If you die with the most toys, you still dead. Until reading a book to your three year old at bedtime is valued more than staying at the office until 10:00 pm to complete an investment offering, our society is destined for decline. Ours is not to reason why, but simply to do and die with a bare minimum of fuss.
