"All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny"
"The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better than one should suffer than that many should be corrupted"
"And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand".
Brave New World is a Dystopian book set in the year A.F 632, the year of stability, where the World Controllers have perfected society. A.F 632 is 632 years after the time of Henry Ford, whose T model car was the first mass produced automobile. This book warns the dangers of progress. Progress specifically as it affects human biology and the thought process.
A.F 632, the year of stability is a time where everything is industrialized. Babies are mass produced with their purpose for existing ingrained into them through hypnopedia. They are conditioned to be happy doing their job. We have different caste systems such as Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, Epsilons . The Alphas and Betas are considered more important as they do the more meaningful jobs. But each group is conditioned accordingly for their specific job so that they will all like what they do. No one can have a long lasting relationship with anyone else. Everyone belongs to everyone else. It is frowned upon to spend time alone. Everything is colorful, you travel on helicopters, perfumes flow from taps and you have the drug Soma that is approved by the government to make yourself happy. The ones who act out are sent to Iceland so that they don't disturb the perfect society.
Bernard is someone who feels unfulfilled. Presumably something went wrong when he was decanted. He feels the need to find another purpose. He wants to feel a different type of happiness other than the one that is mandated. He decides to visit the savage reservation with a girl called Lenina where the old way of living still continues. There, he meets John the savage who does not approve of civilization. He quotes shakespeare and wants the right to feel pain. He wants his life to have meaning and that can only be achieved through feeling the good with the bad. John the savage is brought into the world of civilization as an experiment.
The same way that Lenina is disgusted by the way the "savages" live so is John by the civilized. Lenina is disgusted by the smells, old age, disease etc. John is disgusted by the sameness of the people in the civilized world. John cannot fathom life in the civilized world, a life without passion, heroism or meaning.
I loved this book. Although probably not as shocking now as it was when it was first released, it still does make an impact. In every civilization, meaning is something humankind has searched for. Is it something that we can sacrifice for a life of stability? Is the absence of "bad things" enough to sacrifice meaning?
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