Social Division In Brave New World

Issues of Social Division

Social division has created a world in which each individual is heavily inclined to stagnate in a particular social class that they were born or nurtured into. In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, he made an accurate representation of what he predicted the world would be. Furthermore, the introduction of a complete socially divided society must work together with absolutely no chance of going up or down a social class. They are simply conditioned from birth to blindly accept their fate as an Alpha, Beta, Gamma, or Epsilon. These labels are correlative with reality since since every individual in our society is labeled as high, middle, or low class. According to this type of lifestyle, what problems arise with social division?

“The class position affects the politics of individuals in the sense that the way women, racial or ethnic etc behave is determined not by their gender, racial, cultural Identity alone but by their overall position within the ensemble of social groups.”(Fotopoulos 1) Labeling someone as a certain class of individual creates a

problematic and an ultimately unfair experience for every type of social class and subclass that is under a high class status. This inadvertently creates an expected environment or behavior from society. “The huge Lower Caste barracks and, on the other side of a dividing wall, the smaller houses reserved for Alpha and Beta members.” (Huxley 73) This description of their setting explains how each person was treated based off of their class.
Being born into a certain social class will frequently influence what decisions you can and cannot make in a lifetime. However, it is not that one is not capable of these decisions that may better their own life, but what society thinks of these choices. This fact alone explains why the majority of people are likely to stay in their given class and are not expected to move up or down from where they are. A quote from the novel explains in more detail of this concept. “Not quite, I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got the power to say it-only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power.” (Huxley 72) This quote clearly displays a self conflict in which the character has the ability to think for himself, however he is unable to do this because it would upset the stability in his environment and it is globally expected for everyone to follow orders and conforms to society.
Social division has revealed a multitude of problems that are relevant both in reality and in the novel.

It ultimately creates a society that is doomed to stay the same due to the fact that the social expectations which are pushed on to the public are undeniably negatively impacting our society as a whole. Additionally, Huxley was correct in his view of the world as it stands today in the sense that a society which is extremely socially divided causes many issues including socio-economics, exclusion, prejudice, and a widespread discriminatory behavior. Thoughts of global stability were also accurate as it was represented in the novel to show just how much people were willing to sacrifice in order to keep stability and avoid change of any sort which is relevant because in reality our society is similar to these concepts. These are the problems which arise with social

division.