Animalistic Society In Brave New World

Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World presents an entirely unrecognizable world almost six-hundred years in the future. In this futuristic society or “World State”, conventional ideals such as marriage and family are now viewed as archaic and grossly pornographic. This negative perception of current societal standards stems largely from the World State’s guiding phrase “community, identity, and stability”. To achieve these new ideals, people are no longer born but decanted from bottles, wherein they not only develop as a fetus but also begin to undergo conditioning. The goal of this conditioning is to make people perfectly content in their predetermined caste. Despite disparities in freedoms and intensity of work between the castes,

One particularly striking instance was in reference to the Hatchery, wherein Huxley equates the process of breeding humans to that of cows (Huxley 13). With this comparison, he implies that lab-bred humans also serve a commercially valuable purpose: to consume goods and optimally perform their jobs to maintain societal function. Another prime example arises later in the novel at the hospital. When John is visiting Linda before her death, a group of Delta children are being conditioned to tolerate and accept the inevitability of death, a fact of which he resents. Disgusted with their lack of concern for Linda's imminent passing, John describes their staring as “the frightened and stupid curiosity of animals” (Huxley 223). The scene further describes the children animalistically when John views the abundance of identical Delta twins swarming around Linda’s body as “maggots” (Huxley 232). The overarching purpose of this repeated animalistic imagery is to draw attention to the hypocrisies of the World State. Though it prides itself in its supposed “civilization”, its use of technology has created some ironic effects. In theory, civilization seeks to bring people closer to man and away from animalistic tendencies. However, the supposedly “civilized” World State has instead dehumanized people with its use of technology, as individuals have no more value than what they can offer

As I read the novel, the futuristic World State wholly dominated by technology eerily reminded me more and more of modern society. While contemporary technologies vary immensely from those in the novel, both worlds are united by one factor: technological dependence. One particularly striking modern example is AI chatbots. Though AI itself is not a very new technology, the recent advancement of AI-powered chatbots has taken it from a useful tool to a remarkably effective cheating method. Indeed, with the simple insertion of a prompt, the technology can generate an eloquent response in mere seconds, a fact of which many people capitalized on. Soon, AI chatbots such as ChatGPT quickly became a popular shortcut for school assignments, paid work, and other seemingly “tedious” obligations. Those that take these cheats may become dependent on this technology to get by, limiting their own ingenuity and individuality since they are seldom producing unique work through their own skills, similar to but not as extreme as the World State’s technological engineering of people’s identities. Now more than ever do people in modern society need to remain conscious of how they allow various technologies to interfere with their lives. From AI to CRISPR Cas-9 genome editing technology, people must remain wary of