Brave New World: Sacrifising Free Will

Aldous Huxley created a literary masterpiece which shows a possible, dismal future produced by the misuse of science and technology. In his book, Brave New World, the World Controllers use various scientific methods to dehumanize the population in order to control them. The advanced use of biotechnology has allowed the government to completely eliminate family and have the population physically engineered to fit specific specifications according to the needs of society. They also use different methods of brainwashing in order to ensure the population properly conforms to their outline of civilization. Through the use of primitive conditioning techniques combined with current ones, everything the people think, like, and dislike is predetermined by the government. Of course, no system is completely flawless. By producing the wonder drug soma and circulating it in massive quantities throughout the world state, the holes in the system are easily patched and the dehumanizing dystopia becomes all the more acceptable. This is especially necessary in regards to the manufacturing of human beings.

In Brave New World humans are created on assembly lines instead of being born naturally. In fact, the very idea of family and love is widely considered pornographic. Hatcheries throughout the World State use donated ovaries and sperm to create test tube babies which follow an assembly line similar to the one utilized by Henry Ford. From the assembly line, the embryos are physically conditioned into one of the world’s five classes; Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Alphas, the mentally and physically strongest citizens, are the highest class, while Epsilons, the mentally and physically weakest citizens, are the lowest class. Alpha and Beta...

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...ls. They are created in factories and customized to one of the five product specifications. They are trained to agree with the implications of society and their masters who control it. When they are not in self induced comas, they happily follow directions like the robots they are. Though the technology in this world is what made all this possible, it is not what caused it to happen. The World Controllers who abused this technology are the ones at fault. Technology is only at evil as the people who use it.

Works Cited

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998.

Huxley, Aldous. "Hypnopaedia." Brave New World Revisited. New York: Harper, 1958. 85-95.

Morgan, S. Philip, Suzanne Shanahan, and Whitney Welsh. "Brave New Worlds: Philosophy, Politics, and Science in Human Biotechnology." Population and Development Review 31.1 (2005): 127-44.