buy study guide
Chapter 1
Summary:
beautiful new world600 years in the future. The world has submitted to the rule of world controllers whose main objective is to ensure the stability and happiness of society. The underlying principle of the regime is utilitarianism, or maximizing the overall happiness of society. The novel begins in the central London hatchery and conditioning centre, a factory for human production. A group of students take a guided tour of the facilitythe director.
Students will see various machines and techniques used to promote embryo production and conditioning. Scientists take an ovary, extract and fertilize the eggs, force the eggs to bud up to 96 times, and then grow the embryos in bottles. Predestinators then decide each embryo's future role within society, essentially assigning each human being a future role.
Society contains a five-tiered caste system with Alphas and Betas at the top. Only alphas and betas come from single eggs that do not hatch and therefore do not have twins. The center prepares all non-alpha and beta embryos for their future status in society by dividing them into gamma, delta and epsilon. Therefore, alphas represent the intellectually superior group, followed by betas and even epsilons, who have little or no intelligence.
To analyze:
The idea of totalitarian social stability appears for the first time in this chapter. Although few critics have characterized the regime of government as inherently "totalitarian", Huxley explicitly describes it as such. Huxley explained in Brave New World Revisited that the only way to create a permanently stable society is for a totalitarian regime to have absolute power. Therefore, the regime must ensure that people are happy all the time, control each individual's behavior, and ensure that independent thinkers are prohibited from disrupting the social fabric.
Huxley creates a society that frowns on individual creativity and welcomes only those who conform. The social motto "community, identity, stability" frames this social structure. Huxley creates a "community" by dividing the population into segments with alphas serving as intellectual superiors and epsilons as mere manual laborers. Huxley shows how "identity" comes from the conditioning center through the selection of embryos into each of the five groups. The "stability" comes from the limitations placed on each group's intelligence.
The fundamental principle behind society is utilitarianism, which describes a society that strives to create maximum happiness. Limiting each person's intelligence to their future employment is one way this society makes them happy. So alphas get challenging jobs and epsilons get difficult jobs that would be boring for members of the upper castes. Social conditioning and stunted development maximize everyone's happiness. The goal of utilitarianism is to make society "happier" and therefore more efficient. The society described by Huxley is therefore a "utilitarian totalitarianism".
episode 2
Summary:
Students continue their visit to the hatchery and packing center in central London. You're looking at neopavlovian conditioning, a technique that trains babies. Here, the use of electric shocks and sirens in response to touching roses or books modifies delta behavior. This discourages behavior that could destabilize society, such as allowing deltas to read books and acquire knowledge. Students also see a group of sleeping babies receiving moral instruction through hypnotic learning while they sleep. Sleeping babies hear repeated phrases, and in this chapter, beta babies listen to a tape played hundreds of times, leading them to believe that they are superior to gammas, deltas, and epsilons, but not as smart as alphas.
To analyze:
Huxley reveals some of the main sources of social stability. Science creates and conditions human beings to become happy members of society. The director's commentary, "What man has joined together, nature cannot put asunder" shows how conditioning can alter behavior.
Pavlovian conditioning stems from Pavlov's research, which showed that animals can learn to perform an action through punishment and reward. Huxley extends this concept to humans, who use it to condition lower-class babies. In his example, deltas learn to avoid roses and books, giving themselves electric shocks when touching these items. Psychologically, this conditioning also demotes these classes to the status of animals.
The use of hypnopedia reinforces the conditioning and signals the subversive nature of the state. Huxley shows readers that advertising begins at birth and can happen even when we don't realize it, like when we sleep. He reinforces the point that people don't know how influential advertising is by having his characters constantly quote "hypnopaedic catchphrases".
The purpose of the state is to ensure social stability, and conditioning creates "community" by dividing each child into separate classes. This promotes stability by creating a pool of workers with government-controlled preferences. Therefore, economic stability comes from creating preferences that encourage spending. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.
Chapter 3
Summary:
The student leaders come out and see some kids playing Centrifugal Bumble-cub. The game is elaborate and requires complex machines. They learn that a heavy reliance on machines increases the consumption of material goods and thus boosts the economy. Young children are also encouraged to participate in erotic and sexual games. A boy who refuses to play with a girl needs to see a psychologist.
The director begins to talk about the past, when parents, not the state, raised children.mustafa world, the Western European Controller, interrupts and tells the students that the "house" was made up of mother, father and children and, in addition to being cloying and smelly, it contained overwhelming intimacies and emotions.
Freud is credited with showing that the "terrible dangers of family life" lead to individual instability. The manager points out that this, in turn, leads to social instability. For this reason, society coined the phrase "all belong to all" to eradicate individualism.
The controller also gives a history lesson and describes how past governments banned early reformers. After the Nine Years' War destroyed most of the ancient world and brought the world controllers to power, they fought to defeat corporate culture by launching a campaign against the past, destroying monuments and books, and outlawing sexual reproduction. Religion, especially Christianity, was reduced to a form of Ford worship. To emphasize Ford's greatest contribution, mass production, they cut out all the crosses to make a T in honor of the Model T car. Also, a new drug called soma was invented, which worked like cocaine or heroin, but had no Side effects. secondary. The drug made people spend time hallucinating instead of thinking. The government continues to distribute Soma to its citizens every week.
Nonetheless,leninina corona, a Beta Plus, talks about her four-month relationship with Alphahenry forestwith her friend Fanny Crowne, a beta. Fanny is upset that Lenina has been in a relationship with only one man for so long. He quotes the phrase "all belong to all" and urges Lenina to have sex with other men. Lenina agrees with Fanny and says that she likesbernard marx, an Alpha Plus, and decided to accompany him on a trip to the Wild Reserve. Fanny is skeptical, saying that she thinks Marx is a loner and an introvert.
Bernard Mar is a specialist in hypnopedia. The reader first meets him while overhearing a conversation between Henry Foster and another worker. Foster and the other man talk about Lenina, and Foster tells the man to "have her", implying intercourse. Marx is furious upon hearing this, suggesting that he is in love with Lenina.
To analyze:
Chapter 3 introduces many of the main philosophical themes of the novel. Huxley presents social needs for perfect stability within his society. This includes the role of consumption, the interplay between sexuality and emotions, the role of history and the redefinition of religion.
Society sees consumption as beneficial. Society believes that more consumption means more production of goods, which increases the number of jobs and keeps society at full employment. Examples of increased consumption include hypnotic phrases telling people to get rid of old clothes and buy new clothes, indoctrinating deltas to enjoy country sports to use the government transit system to get out of town, and complex machines needed for any kind of of sport. or game
The interaction between sexuality and emotions is complex. Huxley recognized that monogamy, sex, and family ties evoke most human emotions. So society is based on promiscuity and baby factories. The aim is to eradicate emotions, replacing them with pure sexual desire and nothing else. This, combined with baby factories, destroys family life and monogamous relationships. The state directs most emotions, which is necessary for social control and stability. Interestingly, George Orwell used the opposite technique in1984. Orwell forbade sexual intercourse to eliminate dangerous emotions that could go against the state. However, as both authors recognized that sexual emotion destabilizes society, each technique achieves the same goal of eliminating sexual emotion.
Society sees history and religion as dangerous and potentially corrupting. Having a story gives people a sense of time outside of their own lives. This, in turn, makes people think about progression over time, which society cannot allow without causing social upheaval. So Huxley uses Ford's quote, "History is nonsense," to suggest that history is worthless and should not be studied. The Controller describes the story in a way that further emphasizes its negative aspects. He also blames Christianity for the inability of past societies to achieve ectogenesis (in this context, Huxley means that babies grow outside the human body).
The new "religion" of society is closely linked to consumption. It's not really a religion to speak of, but rather a system of ideologies that Ford recognizes as his guide. So society replaces the Christian "sir" with "Ford" and uses the T instead of the cross. Consumption is also extremely positive due to the introduction of mass production. Huxley plays on the fact that Henry Ford started mass production with the Model T automobile. Huxley then bases society's "religion" on this fact. However, strong elements of Christianity remain. Chapter 3 ends with a scene from the New Testament in which Jesus tells his disciples to leave the children with them. Two noisy children disturb his Fordship Mustapha Mond. The director of the center orders them to leave, but Mustafa responds like Jesus, saying: "I have suffered, my children".