When I started reading Brave New World, I became interested very soon after. The story started out with descriptive imagery about the facility that the embryos of humans were being fertilized in. The fact that over 70 different people could come from one embryo was amazing to me. The caste system is already determined from this stage and depending on what class you’re in, your place in society is also predetermined. You could be at the bottom, or you could be at the top.

Everyone is taught at a young age to dislike any other caste than their own, through methods that include one called Elementary Class Consciousness, where a voice repeats statements while the person is sleeping. “They’ll have that repeated forty or fifty times before they wake” (21). This shows how hatred for the other classes is essential for this form of society. It is mentioned more than once how this allows for the stability of society, as everyone has to be content with their own caste to allow for them to be happy, no matter how low they are in the system. I see this as a way of controlling everybody, as no one will feel the need to search for something more than they were given because of the training they were given from the moment they were just an embryo.

Consumption seems to be very important for everyone living here as well. As long as a human is consuming a resource given, it is seen as good, while anything that doesn’t include consumption is seen as pointless and wrong. “…to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport…find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes”(17). The love of nature and affection for flowers isn’t encouraged. It is seen as gratuitous and as something that does nothing for society as a whole. Therefore, it was gotten rid of, but not the consumption of transport.

What interested me the most was how different the words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ were seen in their society compared to ours. The word ‘parents’ is met with distaste. Since children aren’t born the same way, the concept of having a mother and a father is foreign and alien to everyone. To be born in their way is called ‘decanted’, so the method of which we are born is something they can never understand.

In chapter 4, the children going through the facility are amazed when they are taught the history of their world. Their history sounds to be what our society is now, and I found it interesting, how the concepts of parents and sexual maturity were seen in a completely different way than how we view them. To them, children participating in sexual acts is nothing, it is even encouraged. When they began to learn the history of how it was discouraged, all of them laughed loudly, as if it was the most ridiculous thing they ever heard. I feel that Brave New World is an interesting book, and I wonder how the characters will be developed further.

As I’m reading “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley I get a lot of imagery with the first few pages that describes a very futuristic world. It was narrated by third person so there wasn’t really a protagonist at this point. The science fiction story takes place in Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre of the future. People are no longer produced naturally by sexual reproduction but instead asexually produced almost as phrase test tube babies. They are produced in a way which they are almost all the same which goes with the theme of dystopian. The whole society within is controlled heavily by government by an caste system in which they are classified by their qualities.Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon are the five categories in which they are in. They are made in a why they each would perform the task the same way. My reactions toward is that as simple they make it seem to have everybody perform the same things it is highly unstable to really put them in a caste system to really make them equals so in a sense I think it is ironic to level them as equals but not really equals. They are useless unless they are performing the task given and mobility to a higher class is utterly impossible. It makes me feel like this society is balanced by fake happiness. Where people are almost probed to feel happy when they don’t really even know how they are really feeling because they are programmed to feel a certain way. They removed basic emotions such as love by taking away even the simplest relationship man can have which is family. They are programmed to think embarrassment. when the idea of parents comes up and everybody is “born” the same ways as twins so they are all already family in a sense but without the feelings of attachment. They use this as a way to form uniformity within the society. They are programmed to not feel emotions in a way because as they think for themselves they feel embarrassed because of societal views and restrictions which is shown within chapter 2 they demonstrate a big societal control on even babies from the moment they are born by electroshock them so they will think a certain way into hating things that would give them feelings and emotions to create though other own as said by the  director “They’ll grow up with what the psychologist used to call an instinctive hatred of books and flowers. reflexes unalterably conditioned. they’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives”(30).  It was the directors way to enforce control from early so when they see books it creates a repellent to get near them so that they would never really create ideas of their own from the future with education they get from reading.

This story is very complex on the relationships people have between each other because they are told from the begin of birth how to feel and think to the point the idea of even thinking for them selves is frowned upon such as education they feel ridiculous.

Brave new world I find somewhat interesting. The concept as a whole I’m not to found of. A society that is decanted and raised and conditioned  by the “state” separated by a caste system. I think the conditioning part, which I think is based on Pavlov’s classical conditioning I find t be the most disturbing. To think the world is controlled by just a few individuals and what every hey think or believe is to be right is that is law, that’s the way it should be!  “Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind……. But al these suggestions are our suggestions!….. The suggestions from the state!” ( Huxley page 36). This I find to be troubling. What I find troubling and also in a way disturbing is the processes of decanting humans and treating humans as machines! The whole process to me, seems so sterile “Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six year old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work” ( Huxley page 25). They are talking about humans as if they were machines, robots, just a piece of flesh to do work. Besides  My social and moral outrage and disgust about the concept of this story what I find really interesting in the later chapters, is the introduction of the characters, two in particular Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx. I find them intriguing because they appear to have some difficulty accepting the status quo, Bernard more so than Lenina. Bernard is a character I would love to find out more about. He should be one of the happiest people in the world. He’s an Alpha Plus male, which is the highest ranking caste and he is a psychologist. Through some defect ( I don’t know if that is the right word) he is “created” shorter than what an Alpha Plus male should be. Eight centimeters shorter! Which makes him feel like an outcast among is alpha cast, which I believe makes him question the whole process! ” One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx who was a specialist on hypnopaedia. Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make on truth. Idiots!” ( Huxley page 52). That paragraphs intrigued me about his character. He is by profession a psychologist and I believe a expert on hypnopaedia, and for him to have a thought like this! It appears to me the author is setting us up for some big event involving him. I’m not quite sure what it is. The obvious thought would be a rebellion against the state, but as I read on and discover more about his character I doubt that would be the case. Another line that struck out to me “What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals” ( Huxley page 71).  For a society as this one, to me, I would think this would be an horrible thought! To be an individual? It’s like having leprosy! This has to be the worst imaginable thing that can happen to a person! I’m curious to know what is going to happen with these characters!

Brave New World Chapters 1-5

            Brave New World exposes the mindset of 20^th century thinking and accurately predicts what could be expected in the future. Huxley does this by making the reader think about the illusions that society believes and the “happiness” that we think we have. He also criticizes the assumption that consumption is good for society. Although the book uses historical references that are not necessarily relevant today, readers of any time period can relate to the feeling that society is a caste system and that the government is trying to have complete control over everyone through indoctrination and manipulative ideas that reinforce conformity.

“Happiness” in this novel is defined as everyone neatly fitting a pre-determined mold that society has chosen for them. Critical thinking, creativity and individuality will lead to social isolation and therefore a lack of happiness.  It was true then and is true now that there are so many advertisements and trends in thinking that are just trying to tell us to be happy. The self-help book genre, which has been very popular over the last decade, is founded on this idea. When people are angry or frustrated with the monotony and lack of freedom in their lives, many times we are simply told to be happy and to think positively. If not, we are scorned and told that we are negative, pessimistic and people will often choose to not associate with that person. Even in the 1930s, Huxley understood this as one of the means of social control.

Huxley was writing this novel at an interesting time in history and he is exposing the corruption and social control of both the East and West. In some parts of these chapters, he is writing a critique of Communist Russia. This is clear when he describes a society that has destroyed the family unit, outlawed religion, assigned all of its citizens to very specific tasks, and punishes those who dissent. He even names his characters Russian names such Marx and Lenina. However, I think he is trying to show that American and English society are doing the same, just with a different economic system. This is evident in society’s worship of Ford. Ford’s factories at this time were creating an assembly line of workers performing monotonous tasks all day long. The efficiency by which the system runs takes the individuality and creativity out of the manufacturing process. This creates a society of drones.

Earlier in America and England, society encouraged frugality and restraint with money and resources. But now that Ford has taken over as the new God, people were being encouraged to buy more and more so that the economy can be supported and everyone can be “happy.” The first five chapters of Brave New World, present an image of the future in which society is tightly controlled and regulated in order to ensure efficiency. Although written for a specific time in history, its messages of social control, erasure of individuality and socially caste systems can be relevant at any time.

Beginning “A Brave New World” the first and second pages immediately caught my attention. The story begins with the a sort of “walk-through” of the facility, including detailed descriptions of the attire and of the people working here – “The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber.” (15). We also get introduced to the first character which happens to be the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning or D.H.C for short. This character walks around a group of students introducing the different areas of the facility and describes what is done in specific each area. I found it very interesting the way Huxley describes these areas in such a futuristic manner and so convincing; It made me believe that this place was actually real. This way of using the characters and create a situation in which it seems that the students are being shown around but in fact it is the reader that is being shown around the facility. I felt as if I was on that same tour, learning and being fascinated by this state-of-the-art “hatchery” as they call it. Learning about how they’ve managed to advance and improve the reproduction cycle using the “Bokanovsky’s Process” was remarkable. “One egg, one embryo, one adult- normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.” (17). I was thinking to myself if only this was something scientifically possible today! Reading along I start to get familiar with the several rooms and the exact purpose they served in the growth of these embryos. For example the “Decanting Room” was a dark room in which the embryos would develop according to their designated caste. Each embryo or caste group were set at a specific revolution and were given certain liquids/chemicals to enhance or discourage certain traits made for that specific caste. Which then brought me into recognizing the classes of caste this society had. Caste were named after the greek alphabet, these caste (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, & Epsilon) were in a hierarchy format. Alphas being the strongest, more attractive, and more intelligent. Down to epsilons which were seen as the lowest yet still usable for the dirty work. When these humans were being created designated a caste, they were already  “predestined” by the facility. Meaning, as young embryos they were being programmed to be exactly what was needed. For example “But why do you want to keep an embryo below par?. . . . Hasn’t it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?. . .The lower the caste the…the shorter the oxygen” (24). This quote was in regards of how the facility creates a sort of retardation in Epsilons by shortening their oxygen supply just enough were they still can function proper; by function they mean work.

Aside from the hierarchy in mental and physical attributes, they were also segregated by clothing color: Alpha-Grey, Beta-Unknown, Gamma-Green, Delta-Khaki, & Epsilon-Black. To further separate the caste from each other they were conditioned through a recording instilling the desired moral values played during the child’s sleep; a technique used by the facility from an old story about a young polish boy that recalled things said from a radio station that was played on accident in his sleep. They realized this wasn’t useful for intellectual training but rather moral training.

After Huxley introduces us to the facility and the way things are created and why. He begins introducing us to more characters that carry on the story. We notice some relationships and interactions. My attention was brought to a character named Mustapha Mond. He is the “Resident Controller for Western Europe; One of the Ten World Controllers” (40). This character is shown a tremendous amount of respect from the time he enters the story, he also seems to know a lot of the history of Ford before it became what is shown today. In the first paragraph on page 41, Mustapha gives a major detail about knowledge of our (the reader) worlds history; everything from Bibles to Poetry. He also gives some insight on how parental figures used to be; During this, some students from the group felt sick. As if these ideas were so repulsive it made them sick to their stomachs to even think about it. Although we don’t know much of this character I feel he will definitely be our only connection to the past via the “Controllers”.

Some values of this society are exposed during the introduction of Mustapha Mond. For example “No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy – to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.” (49). From this quote I realized that the people were made in laboratories and raised exactly how they “The Controllers” wanted and providing them with everything they need to survive (stability) to prevent them from ever have emotional ties to anyone. This made it easy for them to concentrate on the work they were given to do. Another value is the “every one belongs to every one else” (48). This society believed in polygamy and were very open about sexual acts with one another, anything else was seen as abnormal. Many examples are shown throughout pages 46-49. Also seen, was that the society knew they they were all different in terms of the caste hierarchy but “All men are physico-chemically equal”(76) and even in death “even Epsilons perform indispensable services”(76)

Another character that caught my attention was Bernard Marx. Bernard is an Alpha, yet barely has the features of one. An example is shown in a conversation between Lenina and Fanny: “He’s so ugly!” said Fanny. “But I rather like his looks” “And then so small.” Fanny made a grimace; smallness was so horribly and typically low-caste.”. Also “Benard’s physique was hardly better then that of the average Gamma. He stood eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha height and was slender in proportion (69). Bernard knows he looks like an outsider “Contact with members of the lower castes always reminded him painfully of his physical inadequacy. . .his self-consciousness was acute and distressing. . .he felt humiliated” (69). This would cause him to isolate himself from every one. I also notice he is very defensive and thinks differently of people but does not show it. Although Bernard does not show rebellion against Ford, he does seem like he will be a troublesome character and may cause internal conflicts. An example of this is in his thoughts, overhearing a conversation about Lenina between Henry Foster and a coworker: “Talking about her as though she were a bit of meat.”. Bernard ground his teeth. “Have her here, have her there. Like mutton. Degrading her to so much mutton. . . “Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford.” He would have liked to go up to them and hit them in the face – hard, again and again. (51). What we do know is that what Bernard does not have in brawn he has in metal excess. As well as Bernard’s good friend Helmholtz Watson, another Alpha. Watson is a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering and is the prime example of an Alpha but yet is having trouble finding pleasure in the usual sports and communal activities.

I’m definitely eager to find out what happens in the upcoming chapters.

As soon as I started reading Brave New World I found it to be interesting the way people were being produced, the carefulness it took, as well as the organization held within the facility. As I got further into the book I don’t like it at all, I think its rather boring, more so because I find the story strange.

What I got out of chapter 4 was that it was ok to be debauched in this world, as Lenina is, “She was a popular girl, at one time or another, had spent a night with almost all of them (pg 62).” In today’s world being promiscuous is somewhat frowned upon depending on how one views women.

What I also found rather strange was that once you were born you ere “trained” for the life you were going to live. As early as eight months, babies start getting trained, from what they should and shouldn’t like, as well as what color they should wear to distinguish them from the others. “They’ll grow up with what the psychologist used to call an “instinctive” hatred of books and flowers. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives (pg 30).”

This book or shall I say world has discrimination and superiority, which I think is bad. People don’t have a choice in who they would want to become because that is chosen for them when making them. Also, there is not much individuality, but rather uniformity in a sense, more so between each kind of person rather then the whole society. The fact that each kind of person has to wear a certain color to be distinguished is unfair, everyone in the society knows what “kind” of person you are. In knowing what “kind” person one is, someone who is a different kind automatically feels superior to you, especially Epsilons.

As far as Soma goes, I think it’s pointless because people in this society seem to not have much to worry about so why take Soma to be “happy”, when they already seem to be happy. The reason as to why I say they seem to already be happy is because they are “trained” to like they way they will be living for the rest of their lives, so one should already know what to expect out of life, and therefore shouldn’t be a “problem” needed to be solved by using Soma.

There seems to be a lot of emphasis on Bernard’s character, although I think he’s portrayed to be a bit of an outcast in this society. Throughout the story people have different speculations as to what exactly is weird about him. Some people think he was made differently, or that he lacked an “ingredient” while they were making him. What I find sad about Bernard is that not only does everyone in the society think he’s weird, he himself finds himself weird, and he himself knows something is wrong with him, he is also very aware that everyone around him thinks he’s weird. I think maybe he seems like the outcast of this world because he’s going to do something very important later on in the story.