Brave New World: Predetermined Roles

There are two people walking down the street, one a black male and one a white female. Both are in their mid to late twenties and are enrolled at the same college. As they pass each other, the woman pulls out her pepper spray, sprays the man, and then sprints to the emergency box to report the situation. The man quickly runs away as the woman calls the campus police. Even though this man had done nothing to attack the woman, she had expected something terrible to occur. This is a perfect example of how society shapes who we are by giving us assigned predetermined roles that we are expected to live up to. These roles define us in most every situation, as well as everything we do. Whether it be a black man wandering down a dark street or a blonde

As discussed previously, the World State citizens are conditioned even before they are born. Through their fertility system, each batch of children are given a predetermined caste before they are even born. The batches of citizens that are perfect, intelligent, and overall superior are given the highest caste, Alpha Plus. But those that are subpar, unattractive, and considered to be semi-morons are a part of the lowest caste, Epsilon. This entire system is a perfect representation of the assigned predetermined roles in the World State government. By putting everyone in a place with a purpose, maintaining social stability is a simple thing to do. “‘Stability,’ said the Controller, ‘stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability’” (Huxley, 42). But without these assigned embodied distractions, opinions would run their lives and eventually work to overthrow their stable government. This all works together to relate back to Staples' “Black Men and Public Space”. “...young black males are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence” (Staples, 4). But the real perpetrators of giving these influential stereotypes is society as a whole. Throughout an average life today, some common learned stereotypes are that blondes are unintelligent, all Germans are brute, or especially that all black men are in some way dangerous. These assumptions are in themselves dangerous because people then create biases about others before they are ever able to actually know them. But due to the fact that the World State is able to control all of its citizens, not one person is able to truly see the amount of government corruption going into achieving social stability. Another way to understand the World State’s government corruption is through the way they treat