Government Power In Brave New World

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is about a government that completely controls the lives of the residents. The government regulates the production of humans and splits them into separate scientific castes. The government also supervises what they learn and feel. The government teaches the people to believe that having a family is wrong and that they should never have children. Yet, they are supposed to have as many sexual partners as they possibly can. Their learning is controlled through sleep-teaching and they are taught to cover up all of their feelings and emotions with soma. The people of this brave new world have no individual freedoms left. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the culture and society is much different from the one that

Each caste is taught to think that they are better than all of the other castes. For example, they teach the young Beta children to believe that they “are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid . . . Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour [sic]. I’m so glad I’m a Beta” (Huxley 35). Every person is created for a specific reason. The lower castes, which include the Epsilons, Deltas, and Gammas, are not as important as the upper caste, which are the Alphas and Betas. The Alphas and Betas are made with more intelligence than the lower castes. They are needed to be doctors, lawyers, and other jobs of importance. The lower castes do not require as much intelligence; since they are only created to be factory workers and fill in other jobs that require them to complete very few tasks. Therefore, they are stuck with one option for their lives: “ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines” (Huxley 18). They do not have the freedom to choose what they do with their

. . a miracle of science” was born (Ramsey 7). She was the first person to be “fertilized in a laboratory” (Ramsey 7). As Christopher Lasch said in Birth, Death and Technology: The Limits of Cultural Laissez-Faire, “it was perhaps inevitable that the achievements of modern science should be seen, not as a new stage in man’s collective self-awareness, but principally as another means to individual fulfillment and the satisfaction of personal wants” (1). In Brave New World, all of the people are created in test tubes at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. They have developed the science and technology to produce every human being inside a test tube and therefore, not burden the adults with having children. At the hatchery, they use the Bokanovsky’s Process to develop Epsilons, Deltas, and Gammas. They are mass produced from one single cell; “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 human adult. Making ninety-six human beings to grow where only one grew before. Progress” (Huxley 17). In the London hatchery, a single ovary has been known to produce “sixteen thousand and twelve; in one hundred and eighty- nine batches of identicals. But of course they’ve done much better . . . in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five