Brave New World: Book Analysis

Final Socratic Seminar

Brave New World.

1. Utopia vs. Dystopia:
UTOPIA:
Limits the citizen's lifestyle. The residents are born into a permanent caste system, all the citizens are at the absolute mercy of 10 World Controllers, and they are conditioned and brainwashed into emotionless cyborgs.
The castes are divided into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Each individual caste is then broken down into sub levels, for instance (from lowest to highest): Alphas can have Alpha minus, Alpha, Alpha Plus, and Alpha Double Plus. The lower castes, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilons, are to undergo the Bokanovsky Process. The process is applied during the late stages of embryological development as the egg is being split into two identical twins. The purpose of the cloning is to create a huge work force of low level citizens. Their high level counterparts will undergo normal fertilization and development, resulting in tall, handsome, intelligent, and strong breeds of Alphas or Betas.
The World State is in an absolute dictatorship society, where everything is being manipulated according to the wishes of each respective Controller. This alone outlines the general characteristic of a dystopian society, where a small handful of men govern the entire world according to their beliefs and values. The Controllers will decided on the rules and laws, they also have the ability of creating propaganda and censorship. The purpose is to make sure everyone is happy, and prevent the ebb and flow of the economy.
"Community, Identity, Stability".
The citizens are brainwashed into an invaluable part of a stable economy.
DYSTOPIA:
A dystopia is the opposite of a utopia. It’s the vision of a society that has bad living conditions, e.g. poverty, oppression, violence or disease.

2. The use of technology to control society:
Brave New World warns of the dangers of giving the state control over new and powerful technologies. One illustration of this theme is the rigid control of reproduction through technological and medical intervention, including the surgical removal of ovaries, the Bokanovsky Process, and hypnopaedic conditioning. Another is the creation of complicated entertainment machines that generate both harmless leisure and the high levels of consumption and production that are the basis of the World State’s stability. Soma is a third example of the kind of medical, biological, and psychological technologies that Brave New World criticizes most sharply.
It is important to recognize the distinction between science and technology. Whereas the State talks about progress and science, what it really means is the bettering of technology, not increased scientific exploration and experimentation. The state uses science as a means to build technology that can create a seamless, happy, superficial world through things such as the “feelies.” The state censors and limits science, however, since it sees the fundamental basis behind science, the search for truth, as threatening to the State’s control. The State’s focus on happiness and stability means that it uses the results of scientific research, inasmuch as they contribute to technologies of control, but does not support science itself.
Science and technology are two different things. Science is the pursuit of truth and fact in the various sciences, from biology to physics. Technology refers to the tools and applications developed from science. Science is knowledge. Technology is what you can do with that knowledge.
Brave New World raises the terrifying prospect that advances in the sciences of biology and psychology could be transformed by a totalitarian government into technologies that will change the way that human beings think and act. Once this happens, the novel suggests, the totalitarian government will cease to allow the pursuit of any actual science and the truth that science reveals will be restricted and controlled, even as the technologies that allow for control will be constantly improved and perfected.

3. The consumer society:

It is important to understand that Brave New World is not simply a warning about what could happen to society if things go wrong, it is also a satire of the society in which Huxley existed, and which still exists today. While the attitudes and behaviors of World State citizens at first appear bizarre, cruel, or scandalous, many clues point to the conclusion that the World State is simply an extreme—but logically developed—version of our society’s economic values, in which individual happiness is defined as the ability to satisfy needs, and success as a society is equated with economic growth and prosperity.