I've been reading brave new world and noticed many things that makes their society a little awkward to my taste. This subject has probably been discussed before but I am just now getting to it.
In reading chapter one, I noticed that no one believes in families anymore. Babies are decanted and are not born anymore. Families are nowhere in sight and genetic engineering is everywhere. The people in the facility even shock infants while they are looking at books and flowers just so they can destroy their interest in them. What human would charge volts of electricity through infants? How can that be part of a perfect society? Sounds like a demented one to me. They even let little children play erotic games in the gardens. Children that young are just not supposed to do that.
I can point out things in the society that already degrade it. The adults take soma, are separated into groups like Epsilons or Betas or Alphas, and spend nights with different people, not just one for their lifetime like the people of our time. Then there is the savage reservation. This is where they keep what they call "savages" which are people that live like us nowadays. Whats wrong with the way they live? Its stable and its normal.
This may seem like a perfect society to those living in it, but I don't quite understand how this is perfect. Maybe its because I've lived the way I do now for so long that I've grown too used to it. Though I don't get how a perfect society has people in it that are like so.
In their eyes the controllers of this society may see it as a stable and perfect society but it definitely is no utopia.
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I agree that it is not a perfect society. To their eyes, however, it would be considered a perfect society because they were trained to like their position in their society since birth. Also, maybe it is also because they too have grown used to living a predetermined life given to them since birth. They might be blinded by the planned life for them that they don't realize that they are living in a "demented" society.
They should have the freedom to choose their own path and things they want to do or achieve. It is also harsh to be placed in the lower castes such as the delta and epsilon. It is definitely a bad environment to live in in my point of view.
I don't think that Huxley meant to show this as a perfect society. Instead, it's more of a warning and an example of a dystopia that could happen if we keep abusing technology. Also, pointed to the part about the savage reservation, the people who live there don't see the savages' lives as being "stable" and "normal". Actually, they see them as abnormal, which is what the government is trying to erase-everyone who'
is different in the slightest way.
I'm not completely done with the book, but I feel that it is a perfect society, even though the treatment of infants to suit their future roles seems a bit cruel. They make the workers enjoy their jobs, even if their jobs are inhuman, their jobs are none-the-less necessary to keep humanity going.
I don't think the author necessarily agrees with his picture of this so-called perfect society. Its almost like The Giver. Giving everyone a specific job, not letting them give birth to their own children, having a soma-like medicine for pain. Its very similar, but like in Brave New World, it dosen't really work because you can't make everyone happy and there will always be someone who tries to change things. I definitely think that the society in Brave New World works a lot better than the one in The Giver because the people only know what they are taught. They only know their jobs and don't wish that they had another because that is all they know. From a far point of view, it looks like it could work, but if you really look into it, it just won't for very long.
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