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BRAVE NEW WORLD BRAVE New World was published in 1932. It is a remarkable piece of science fiction for both its time and our own. It seems to withstand the intervening 65 years, primarily because of its depiction of a tightly controlled, rigidly stratified homogenous society. Issues of social control are as relevant today as in 1932, perhaps more so.
Reproductive technology plays a key role in the social control of Brave New World. Reproduction takes place in a Hatchery. Excised ova are inspected for abnormalities, fertilized, put into incubators and then undergo the Bokanovsky Process. Each embryo is irradiated for 8 minutes with X-rays until rather than the cells dividing normally, they bud. Each bud has the potential of becoming a separate but identical embryo. These buds are then subjected to various chemicals such as alcohol, until they also bud.
This process is repeated many times until an average harvest of 11, 000 identical embryos can be created from one egg. These 11, 000 identical brothers and sisters become a Bokanovsky group. Each embryo is then bottled, labelled and sent down the conveyor belt to the Social Predestination Room. It is here that they are given a caste designation (Alpha, Beta, Delta, Epsilon), carded into the main card index and stored.
It is here that they are sexed. Thirty percent of the female embryos are allowed to develop normally (to maintain the supply of initial ova). The rest of the female embryos are given a large dose of male hormone that renders them structurally female in all ways, but sterile. It is also here that their caste designation determines how much oxygen they will receive in their bottle.
The lower the caste, the shorter the oxygen. The lower caste Epsilons are oxygen deprived because for the labours they are destined to perform, they will not need human intelligence. The Bokanovskified, pre-sexed, caste designated embryos are then taken out of storage when needed and decanted where as children, they are subjected immediately to sleep learning tapes on the conditioning wards. Hour after hour as they sleep, the children receive sleep reinforcement of their social caste designation. As they mature, they naturally assume the responsibilities and the rules of their castes. Very few question, as their caste is assigned from birth.
If they do, they are exiled to an island (usually Iceland) where their questioning cant contaminate others. Thus, the society is stable and unquestioning. Identical genetic material, rigidly enforced social caste using oxygen deprivation and sleep tapes for brainwashing. Everyone easily fulfils society's obligations and there are few surprises. If things should get stressful for any reason, theres always the wonder drug soma. If anything goes wrong, theres always the soma holiday from life.
Most of the Epsilon workers are paid in soma tablets to keep them happy. It wouldnt do to have an unhappy workforce. Leisure time is often spent at the feeling, a movie theatre where the emotions and responses of the actors can actually be experienced. But not everyone belongs to this society. Some places there are reservations, where an Indian tribe lives. They have their own culture, with worshipping of a mix between Jesus and some old Indian gods.
And in this story we meet 4 persons. Bernhard Marx, Lenina Crowne, Helmholtz Watson and the savage John. Bernhard and Helmholtz are thinkers. They havent conformed properly. They actually do some thinking of their own. Bernhard is also peculiar in the respect that he is not of the average height as his class.
There are rumours that there was put some alcohol in his bottle when he was on the embryo stadium. On the other hand we have Lenina, a girl just doing her job, taking her soma, and having her sex. She and Bernhard goes to the reservation in New Mexico for their holidays, and meet the savage John. He is the son of the director of the London hatchery. His mother was also there on her holidays, but she got lost, and stayed there. So the young John learned to read, and he has read a lot of Shakespeare's plays.
They bring John and his mother back to England. After meeting a lot of problems in his new society, and when both Bernhard and Helmholtz are sent away, he finally tries to escape, and he runs off, and goes to a lighthouse. After some months he is seen whipping himself. This causes a lot of people to come there and see, and John looses his mind, and attacks Lenina, whom he had fallen in love with. That night he and the many other people there had a long orgie, and he even took some soma. When even more people came back the next evening, he had committed suicide, and he hung inside his lighthouse.
John, the savage, has been a loner all his life. He was not accepted in the Indian society, and the only comfort he had was his mother (an alcoholic) and Shakespeare. And through his childhood his mother told him lots of stories of the Utopian society she thought the outer world was. When he came there, he found that this Utopia was nothing like what he had expected. People thought they had the best society ever (people always think that, dont they? ), but John saw through all this and saw the realities. People werent free, they were trapped by their own minds and their sleep-conditioning.
John felt very disappointed. He also was truly disappointed over his mothers decay when she came back to civilisation. She started using Soma, and took very large doses. And after a very short while she died.
John truly started to dislike the civilised society after this. And when Helmholtz and Bernhard, his only true friends, were exiled, he turned his back on society, and decided to leave society. But our new reproductive technologies have, luckily, yielded us nothing like the society of Brave New World, but the stage has been set for a future which could be every bit as chilling and oppressive. We have the technology to sex select or predetermine. The poor of all countries slip closer to Epsilon status, deprived not of oxygen, but of financial, educational, nutritional and political resources. Where we go from here depends on how much we educate ourselves as a society, and which of these technologies we allow to bear their bitter fruit.
At least we dont have soma as a method of social control but then again, we do have Prozac! 32 a
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Research essay sample on Brave New World Social Control
