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Quentin Minard

Mrs. Cramer

Comp I Pd: 6 b

15 Nov, 2019

The Horror of Possible Futures

Imagine a futuristic technologically advanced, dystopian world that is governed by a

supreme state where human reproduction is controlled and monitored in a lab and no one is

themselves. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World takes place in this world. Aldous Huxley said he

was inspired to write this book by reading utopian novels written by H. G. Wells. A utopia is an

imagined society or community that has near or perfect qualities for its citizens. Huxley thought

to himself what the opposite of these perfect worlds would be he constantly read about. His book

Brave New World was the product of that thought. Huxley also took inspiration from another of

H. G. Wells’ works called the Sleeper Awakens that features corporate tyranny and behavioral

conditioning. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World shows the dangers of an all-powerful

government through the government’s use of advanced technology to control society and the

way it uses its control to push society deeper into the consumer mindset.

The far future that the book takes place in features huge technological advancements such

as reproductive technology, psychological manipulation, and sleep learning. This dystopian

society has developed itself an intelligence-based caste system. How is it possible to make an

intelligence-based caste system? Intelligence can't be monitored, and it changes. The

government, or world state as it is called in the book, has outlawed natural human reproduction

and instead grows embryos in monitored laboratories. The technology available to the
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government allows them to interact with human embryos. They can sterilize it and deprive

certain developing structures of essential nutrients which allows the world state to determine

how smart the embryo can possibly get when fully grown. Therefore, the world state chooses

which caste each human will be born into (Huxley, pg16). Also, they have developed a

technology they call Sleep Learning. Kids are kept in controlled environments till a certain age.

When kids are sleeping the minds are at their most malleable. Sleep Learning allows the world

state to access the developing child’s brain and imprint certain ideologies.

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so

frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we

are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green,

and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And

Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able...” (Huxley, pg27-28)

This quote from the book is what sleep learning looks like. The world state enters the child’s

mind and imprints ideas and beliefs such as the one above. They use sleep learning to create and

reinforce the divides between the castes in young child so when they grow up, they believe it all

to be true and there is nothing wrong with what the world state was doing to them. The control

sleep learning and reproductive technology gives the government allows the it to push society

any way it wants to.

The government controls everything that happens and everything that is created therefore

giving it control over the economy as well. The government has created a consumer society,

where the people are not creating new products or producing new ideas. They only consume

what the government feeds them and the governments conditioning keeps the people from

realizing this fact. The government has used sleep learning to imprint ideals of emotionlessness
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and that when something is broken just get rid of it because trying to fix it will cost too much and

slow down the society (Huxley, pg49). The government has made a society where everything is

worthless, and everything is replaceable, including the people who live in it. This world that the

government has created is emotionless because it couldn’t control emotion. The world state has

accounted for this through another sleep learning imprint, “When the individual feels, the

community reels,” (Huxley, pg94). Therefore, the government has made the people believe that

emotion is the enemy of society. It has conditioned the people to fear their own emotions and

made them believe that feeling emotion means they are broken, and they then must be ended.

The world state has made its people believe emotion equals death and new and original ideas are

impossible.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World creates a world ruled over by the government. It is

exactly what he wanted it to be, a negative utopia. Instead of a government ruled by the people

the people are ruled. Instead of the advanced technologies of the future being used to help and

further society towards a perfect world were anything is possible, and creativity is allowed to

flow and flourish out of any individual. The government uses the technology of its day to

suppress the people and force society to move in the direction it wants inhibiting society to

evolve. This is the world Huxley viewed as one of the worst possible futures. The theme of this

book was to show us what it would be like if we as the people relinquished our freedoms to a

larger power and government. All in the hope that we would to take measures to avoid becoming

the opposite of the utopias Huxley always read about..0

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Works Cited

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1998