Ever since Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, the world has been waiting- waiting to see how accurate Huxley's futuristic ideas of a world gone mad could really be. Seventy-eight years later, amazingly, we see that there is much that Huxley has shown great foresight in.
The setting for the book is a future society in which most of what we think normal is turned upside-down. The book opens in a government-run lab where people are being "made" by the hundreds. Due to advances in science, humans are no longer born into a family and raised by parents. In fact, the words mother and father have become an insult. Instead of being raised by the family, individuals are raised by the state. This includes sleep conditioning, appearance-altering, and many other specific processes.
You see, the "new world" runs strictly by the caste system. The castes are Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Alphas and Betas all come from a unique egg, but the lower castes are a sort of clone produced by what is called the "Bokanovsky Process".
What I find most interesting is how the government chooses to program each individual. Instead of encouraging low good consumption, they teach every member of society to consume as much as possible. Rather than encouraging abstinence and monogamy, they encourage free sex from the age of toddlers. In fact, staying together with one person for too long could get you in trouble. "Everyone is everyone else's". Finally, the wonder-drug, soma, is distributed throughout society for whenever one doesn't feel 100% happy.
Instead of going into the plot I'd rather comment on the parallels to today's world. Where the government has begun to program the mind in Brave New World, it seems that the private sector of entertainment and advertising has taken care of in American society. Addiction to consumption, addiction to sex, fun as the be-all, end-all, and wonder drugs to escape reality and go on a vacation. The result: people wandering through life entertaining themselves. People wandering through life without wondering why they're here... just like in Brave New World, conditioned to death, never entertaining ideas of God or purpose or thoughts of any depth. Sex reduced to a naturalistic act like eating. Men and women in the pursuit of pleasure and distraction, too absorbed in the everyday thoughts that someone else has given them to consider what matters in this life. And of course, if you're not feeling happy (like everyone else) figure something out immediately to escape your situation (rather than dealing with the full range of emotions that inevitably come with real life).
The culmination of Brave New World occurs in chapters 16 and 17 as the free man, John, talks with "The controller" (the guy in charge of it all). The issues that have been lying under the surface throughout the book rise to the forefront. Is stability worth the loss of freedom? What's more important? Stability and happiness or truth and beauty (with pain along with it)? Is a guaranteed programmed happiness really happiness? Is the absolute freedom and wealth of a few worth the multitudes that are subjected to long hours of work needed to sustain them? Is the immediate gratification of pleasure the way to go, or is there something to longing and waiting? Does immediate gratification rule out the possibility of love? At what level of conditioning does a human cease to be... human? Is the obsession with comfort, immediately satisfied longings, and entertainment really freedom? Or is it slavery?
Brave New World is loaded with big questions. Ethical questions. Philosophical questions. The best news is that the unique plot and setting provide an entertaining enough read to stay with the book to the end and really mull them over. This is a read that will force you to think about what life is really about and what the alternatives might be.
