Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is oddly entertaining. This book is interesting because it gives us an insight to a world that we do not live in. This “utopia” to some may be a “distopia” to others. To me, this world is a distopia. The world that these characters live in is messed up. We no longer create beings through intercourse, but now we create beings in labs. I call these things beings because they cannot be considered human in my eyes. This new way of development called Bokanovskifying creates beings by the multiple. Not just one or two beings, but thousands of identical beings categorized by classes (using Greek terminology, which to me is weird because the narrator points out the fact that many languages such as French, German, and Polish are instinct.) When reading about this Bokanovski group of beings, I asked myself, what is wrong with diversity? Is there any diversity in this world that these characters live in? The narrator points out the fact that there are multiple races (African American for example.) So what is this issue of diversity if technically diversity exists in this world?
While reading Brave New World, I can make a text to text comparison. This book reminds me of The Hunger Games in multiple ways. These books are similar in the fact that in both stories, people are divided by class. In Brave New World, the people are divided using Greek terminology such as Alpha, Betas, and Gammas, while in The Hunger Games, the people are divided into districts. Another comparison can be the fact that there is one group of individuals ruling the people of the world. In Brave New World, this individual is the DHC, while in The Hunger Games, this leading individual is President Snow. These leaders are even similar in the fact that they dress in their white suits.
While reading Brave New World, I also made the connection of these generated beings to the Aryan race. To me, it seems like the DHC is creating a group of alike individuals who have “no flaws.” The beings that are being created are conditioned to the liking of the DHC. In chapter 2, the Delta babies (all dressed in Khaki) were conditioned to form a fear of books and flowers. The narrator states “you can’t have lower-caste people wasting the Community’s time over books.” Also, the narrator states ” a love of nature keeps no factories busy.” Today, people are conditioned to read books and educate themselves and to go outdoors and not stay in front of the television.
In some ways, the characters in Brave New World are similar to the people in our world. For example, in Brave New World, the scientists in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre inject the embryos with typhoids and sleeping sickness to “immunize the fish against the future man’s disease.” Today, we do the dame thing. At a young age, we immunize humans so they will not be effected by the diseases of the world.
Brave New World is a story originally published in the early 1900s, and in some ways predicted the future (the time period we are in now) and will probably predict events that will occur hundreds of years from now.
