Throughout the ages, man has wondered what the world would be like in the future. Aldous Huxley gives us a glimpse into one possibility what the world might be like in his novel Brave New World. I have read many fantasy-fiction novels that talks about this subject, such as Fahrenheit 451, but none has caught my and really our society like Brave New World.
The book quickly caught my attention when it described how babies were born, or rather decanted, in the laboratory, by a procedure known as the Bodanovsky process. One egg can be made into 96 children, all of them identical in feature, form, and brainpower. When the babies are born, they automatically get classified into a caste. The caste system consists of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, each caste ranging from minus to plus.
Throughout the novel, Huxley describes everyday circumstances in which these people take part. For example, the cinema has been replaced with the “feelies”, a type of moving picture that will give physical as well as visual and aural delight. Spearmint gum has given way to sex hormone chewing gum. Speaking about sex, causal sex is something that everyone participates in.
In fact, in you don t your peers look down on you and think that something is wrong with you. The population eats grammes of soma, a non-hangover-producing substitute for rum, daily; they take away the blues. God has been dissolved into Ford, and his book “My Life and Work” has become the new Bible. Most shocking, church-like ceremonies are replaced with orgies.
Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s predictions of the result of a completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by systematic conditioning, regular doses of chemically induced happiness, and nightly courses of sleep teaching.
This book made me question reality. The whole time I read the book, I wondered if the world could ever survive like that. In today’s society, we believe that prosperity is more important that happiness. Aldous Huxley’s ideas contradict this opinion in his exciting novel Brave New World.
