British novel response 1

I decided to read a brave new world by Aldous Huxley. the book is a very interesting take on a future governed by the laws and values of the industrial revolution taken to an extreme. people are manufactured and manipulated from birth to fit logically and efficiently into society, but ridding people of choice in the meantime. people are conditioned from birth to believe everything the rulers say and to embody the ideal sheep. the governmental structure itself is very odd, at this point in the book it is not well established how everything is actually run. there is a large focus in consumerism in society but there isn't much mention of who produces the consumables and how that system works. the government seems to have a totalitarian rule but it does not take as active a role as most government systems today. Instead this government conditions it's citizens from birth to love the government, behave parfectly according to their caste, and often the extremely judgmental society takes care of any stepping out of line that may occur, instead of governing directly the ruling class trains it's citizens to behave in such a manner to keep them from gaining ideas of their own or making opinions about things. it almost reminds me of the early American puritans who believed in the concept of original sin, that man was naturally sinful because eve ate the fruit of knowledge thus defying god. this concept instills the idea that knowledge is a bad thing, that god doesn't want us to be smart or think for ourselves, ensuring that not only are people uneducated, they are glad about it. This makes the citizenry unable to act against the ruling class, essentially keeping those powerful educated people a step above everyone else, and everyone else is happy about it; ignorance truly is bliss.

society plays a very huge part in this story, everyone is conditioned to be a part of this segmented society, based on a caste system. alphas and betas are the elite whereas deltas are the effective middle class and gammas and epsilons are the lower class. your caste is determined in the test-tube, the lower class people are given chemicals that stunt their growth, effectively making them mentally disabled and only fit for manual labor and dirty work. instead of governing directly people are conditioned from birth to act exactly as the government wants them to. this creates an almost self governing society. everyone is constantly trying to "fit in" everyone as conditioned to want to seem an normal as possible all of the time, reducing civil disobedience or general oddness to a near zero. this homogeneity is indicative of the mass production industrial revolution motif that permeates this story. all the people are mass produced, there are some models that are better than others, but there is absolutely no individuality, people are encouraged to be extremely promiscuous, everyone has sex with everyone else, there is no love or actual personal connection between people, there are no parents, no siblings, no family, no husbands or wives, no real personal connection at all. no one has meaningful connections with anyone thus removing most power people have, the power to form groups of like minded people who are dedicated to a common ideal or action.

the idea of manufactured consent is extremely prevalent in this story, people are conditioned from birth to want things they don't need, people are conditioned to all believe the same things, no one forms their own ideas, no one makes their own decisions, all of the "ideas" and "decisions" that are made are merely forms of the ideas that the government has implanted in them from the earliest age. one could make the argument that the same thing is happening today with advertisements permeating every facet of life these days, and with how well we know the human psyche we know extremely well how to manipulate the ideas and opinions of consumers. the difference is that parents have the ability to teach their children whatever they see fit, with good parents all of that effort of manipulation can be identified and effectively disarmed, imaging how bush's approval rates would be if his cabinet was the one to raise all the citizens, it would probably be amazing.

this story is an extremely interesting one to be sure but it is by no means a possible outcome of society in my opinion. we are approaching this sort of system now and seeing how it is impossible to sustain, the industrial revolution created such a rapid change in environmental content the life has no ability to keep up, and in order to continue to survive and thrive on this planet we need other life and it would not simply be possible to sustain the ecosystem with as large scale industrial application that is proposed by this novel, it would simply be unable to keep itself from collapsing in on itself due to lack of resources or general imperfection in plans. for such a society to exist it would need to be absolutely perfectly balanced or it would fail.

I greatly enjoy this book as it is a very good example of what might happen if humans continue down the course of industry, capitalism, and consumerism. it is interesting how this novel takes many of the concepts usually applied to a competition driven market systems and usues them to form a government that almost embodies a massive corporation.