Brave New World

Summary:

The novel is set in A.F. 632, approximately seven centuries after the twentieth century.
A.F. stands for the year of Ford, named for the great industrialist Henry Ford who refined
mass production techniques for automobiles. World Controllers rule the world and ensure the
stability of society through the creation of a five-tiered caste system. Alphas and Betas are at
the top of the system and act as the scientists, politicians, and other top minds, while
Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are at the bottom and represent the world's industrial working
class. A drug called soma ensures that no one ever feels pain or remains unhappy, and
members of every caste receive rations of the drug. Pre- and post-natal conditioning further
ensures social stability.

Brave New World opens with the Director of the Central London Hatchery and
Conditioning Centre giving a group of young students a tour of the facilities. An assembly
line creates embryos using the latest advancements in science. The students view the various
techniques for producing more babies and watch as the process segregates babies into various
castes. After the babies are decanted from their bottles, they are conditioned through Neo-
Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia. In Neo-Pavlovian conditioning, babies enter a room
filled with books and roses. When the babies approach the books or the roses, alarms and
sirens sound, and the babies receive a small electric shock, which frightens them so that when
they confront the same items for a second time, they recoil in fear. Hypnopaedia teaches
babies and children while they are asleep by playing ethical phrases numerous times so that
the phrases will become a subconscious part of each person.

The World Controller of Western Europe, His Fordship Mustapha Mond appears and
gives the students a lecture about the way things used to be. Before the Utopian world order
was established, he explains that people used to be parents and have children through live
birth. This existence led to dirty homes with families where emotions got in the way of
happiness and stability. The first world reformers tried to change things, but the old
governments ignored them. War finally ensued, culminating in the use of anthrax bombs.
After the so-called Nine Years' War, the world suffered through an economic crisis.
Exhausted by their disastrous living conditions, people finally allowed the world reformers to
seize control. The reformers soon eradicated religion, monogamy, and most other
individualistic traits, and they stabilized society with the introduction of the caste system and
the use of soma.

Bernard Marx is introduced as a short, dark haired Alpha who is believed to have
accidentally received a dose of alcohol as a fetus on the assembly line. His coworkers dislike
him and talk about him in derogatory tones. Bernard has a crush on Lenina Crowne, another
Alpha, and she informs the reader that he asked her to go with him to the Savage Reservations
several weeks earlier. Lenina has been dating Henry Foster for the past several months, but
since long-term relationships are discouraged, she agrees to go with Bernard Marx to the
Reservations.

Bernard goes to Tomakin, the Director, and gets the Director’s signature to enter the
Reservations. The Director tells a story about how he went there twenty-five years earlier with
a woman. During a storm, she became lost, and circumstances forced him to leave her there.
The Director then realizes he should not have told Bernard this story and defensively begins
to yell at him. Bernard leaves unruffled and goes to talk to his good friend Helmholtz
Watson about his meeting with the Director.
Helmholtz Watson is an intellectually superior Alpha who has become disillusioned with the
society. He is tired of his work, which consists of writing slogans and statements to inspire
people. Helmholtz indicates that he is searching for a way of expressing something, but he
still does not know what. He pities Bernard because he realizes that neither of them can
completely fit into the society.

Bernard flies with Lenina to the Savage Reservations. While there he realizes he left a
tap of perfume running in his room, and so he calls Helmholtz Watson to ask him to turn it
off. Helmholtz tells him that the Director is about to transfer Bernard to Iceland because
Bernard has been acting so antisocial lately.

Bernard and Lenina enter the compound and watch the Indians perform a ritualistic
dance to ensure a good harvest. A young man named John approaches them and tells them
about himself. He was born to a woman named Linda who had been left on the Reservation
nearly twenty-five years earlier. John is anxious to learn all about the Utopian world. Linda
turns out to be the woman that the Director took to the Reservation and left there. She was
unable to leave because she became pregnant with John, and since the Utopian society finds
the notion of live birth disgusting, mothers and children are taboo topics.
Bernard realizes that John and Linda could save him from a transfer to Iceland. He
calls Mustapha Mond and receives approval to bring them back to London. When Bernard
finally returns, he has to meet with the Director in public. The Director publicly shames him
and informs Bernard that he must go to Iceland. Bernard laughs at this and introduces Linda
and John. At the disclosure of his past, the Director is so humiliated that he resigns. Bernard
becomes an overnight celebrity due to his affiliation with John Savage, whose good looks and
mysterious past make him famous. Reveling in his sudden popularity, Bernard starts to date
numerous women and becomes extremely arrogant.

Bernard eventually hosts a party with several prominent guests attending. John refuses
to come and meet them, which embarrasses Bernard in front of his guests. The guests leave in
a rage while Bernard struggles to make amends. John is happier afterwards because Bernard
must be his friend again.

Helmholtz and John become very good friends. Helmholtz has gotten into trouble for
writing a piece of poetry about being alone and then reading it to his students. John pulls out
his ancient copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare and starts to read. The fiery passion
of the language overwhelms Helmholtz, who realizes that this is what he has been trying to
write.

Lenina has developed a crush on John the Savage, and she finally decides to go see
him. After a few minutes, he tells her that he loves her. Lenina is very happy to hear this and
strips naked in front of him in order to sleep with him. Immediately taken aback, John
becomes extremely angry with her. Crying, "Strumpet!" he hits her and chasse her into the
bathroom. Fortunately for Lenina, a phone call interrupts John and he rushes off.

John goes to the hospital where Linda has finally succumbed to taking too much soma.
While he tries to visit her, a large group of identical twins arrives for their death conditioning.
They notice Linda and comment on how ugly she is. John furiously throws them away from
her. He then talks to Linda, who starts asking for Pope, an Indian she lived with back on the
Reservation. John wants her to recognize him and so he starts to shake her. She opens her
eyes and sees him but at that moment, she chokes and passes away. John blames himself for
her death. The young twins again interrupt him, and he silently leaves the room.

When he arrives downstairs, John sees several hundred identical twins waiting in line
for their daily ration of soma. He passionately thinks that he can change the society and tells
them to give up on the soma that is poisoning their minds. He grabs the soma rations and
starts to throw the soma away. The Deltas get furious at this and start to attack him. Bernard
and Helmholtz receive a phone call telling them to go to the hospital. When they arrive and
find John in the middle of a mob, Helmholtz laughs and goes to join him. Bernard stays
behind because he fears the consequences.

All three men are taken to meet Mustapha Mond who turns out to be an intellectual.
He tells Bernard and Helmholtz that they must go to an island where other social outcasts are
sent. The island is for people who have become more individualistic in their views and can no
longer fit in with the larger society.

John and Mustapha engage in a long debate over why the society must have its current
structure. John is upset by the regulation and banning of history, religion, and science.
Mustapha tells him that the society’s design maximizes each person's happiness. History,
religion, and science only serve to create emotions that destabilize society and thus lead to
unhappiness. In order to ensure perfect stability, each person receives conditioning and learns
to ignore things that would lead to instability. John continues protesting. The climax of the
book comes when Mustapha tells John, "You are claiming the right to be unhappy." Mustapha
then mentions a long list of mankind's ills and evils. John replies, "I claim them all."

Mustapha sends Bernard and Helmholtz away to an island, but refuses to allow John to
leave. He tells John that he wants to continue the experiment a little longer. John runs away
from London to an abandoned lighthouse on the outskirts of the city, where he sets up a small
garden and builds bows and arrows. To alleviate his guilty conscience over Linda’s death,
John makes a whip and hits himself with it. Some Deltas witness him in self-flagellation, and
within three days, reporters show up to interview him. He manages to scare most of them
away. However, one man catches John beating himself and films the entire event. Within a
day hundreds of helicopters arrive, carrying people who want to see him beat himself. John
cannot escape them all. Lenina and Henry Foster also arrive and when John sees Lenina, he
starts to beat her with the whip. The crowd soon begins to chant “Orgy-porgy,” a sensual
hymn used to generate a feeling of oneness. John loses himself within the crowd and wakes
up the next day after taking soma and engaging in the sensual dance of the hymn. He is
overwhelmed with guilt and self-hatred. That evening he is found dead in the lighthouse as he
hangs from an archway.

Throughout “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, the concepts of consumption and
utopia are constantly juxtaposed and compared to determine whether or not they are genuinely
compatible. Although one could state that the citizens of this world in “Brave New
World” are genuinely happy, this is more a result of ignorance and blindness rather than a
truly fulfilling sense of bliss. Because the state in “Brave New World“ has meticulously given
consumption an almost holy significance, the culture that exists around it must accordingly be
conducive to it.
As a result as the constant emphasis on consumption in “Brave New World" the signifiers of
identity such as a concept of nature, religion, and self, have been obliterated to foster a
powerful and complete reliance on the state. Because of the almost infantile degree of
dependence the state has created in “Brave New World“ the culture of consumption is able to
thrive. It is only through the character of John, who is most allied with our perception of
reality, that the reader is able to discern how the ideas of consumption and utopia cannot be
compatible. Through his eyes, it is possible to see how instead of creating happiness in “Brave
New World“ by Huxley the combination of these two opposing forces breeds dependence and
destroys the individual.

The culture of consumption in “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley is the engine
driving the success and “happiness" of the state. Although to the masses it may seem as
though identity is something secure and comfortable, it is rather based upon identity-
obliterating principles of mass-production and consumerism. All traces of human elements of
individuality and identity have been replaced by the concept of the common good and even
ideas about love, family, and sex have been reduced to the maxim, which is one of
theimportant quotes from “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, “everybody belongs to
everyone else" (26). Furthermore, the basis of life in “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
an idea that is sacred and personal in our society, is firmly rooted in Ford’s famous model of
production—the assembly line. With the help of science, human beings are created according
to a narrow set of specifications (which class they will eventually belong to) and their lives,
once no longer useful are considered meaningless, especially since they can be easily
replaced.

As Mr. Foster, who presides over the conditioning and “hatching" of the new human
lives says in one of many important quotes in “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
“Murder kills only the individual and, after all what is an individual? …We can make a new
one with the greatest ease—as many as we like" (133). Even from the beginning of the text
we are forced to question the concept of mass-production and consumption in terms of
humanity. We are introduced to the process of (re)production, which describes how, “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 adult"
(4). With the aid of technology, identity and the function of nature have been both combined
and destroyed simultaneously. After the process of conditioning, the concept of the self will
be even further limited to an individual’s participation in the economy and his or her value or
obedience as member of a caste. In other words, by obliterating the concept of the individual,
all that is left is the state and its capacity to meet the relatively simple supply and demand-
based needs of the citizen. This fact in turn makes the individual completely reliant on the
state to provide for them and allows this state to completely control all aspects of society,
including the individual’s understanding of the natural world, their sense of place within the
grand scheme of things, and thus by proxy, the concept of God. At the pinnacle of all
concerns—both by the citizens and their state—is an almost holy reverence for consumption.

As this thesis statement for Brave New World by Aldous Huxley states, just as the
state has destroyed the meaning and value of the individual in Brave New World so too has it
altered the individual’s understanding of the natural world. This seems only just considering
that this is a culture driven by the forces of science and technology, but the conditioning
against the love of nature has deeper significance for the state. Throughout the text, the state
seems keenly aware of the fact that nature and consumption are essentially at odds because, in
other words, “A love of nature keeps no factories busy" (19). Here it is directly expressed that
the enjoyment of the masses is directed toward what is economically desirable instead of what
is personally enjoyable and thus, because of the mass acceptance of such a paradigm,
individual fulfillment is inexorably linked to economic stability and consumerism. As the
reader is told, conditioning has caused the “masses to hate the country…to love all country
sports…and have all country sports entail the use of elaborate apparatus" (23).

In other words, even though the citizens are outdoors and in the country, it is for the
purposes of self-gratification (sports) and for the good of the economy (buying vast amounts
of equipment to play these sports.) While these are more obvious examples of the state’s
thinly disguised emphasis on consumption, the explicit statement is that nature itself is useless
since it is all free and could be enjoyed by all without benefit to the state. Nature, like
Shakespeare, art, and poetry, is an item of beauty—something that exists within itself as
something desirable without any intrinsic commercial value. In response to this idea, Mond
later explained in one of the important quotes from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley,
“Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t" (228). By
stating this, Mond is suggesting that only the instant gratification of sports and play is
meaningful to all parties (both consumer and provider) and that appreciating nature is
something that requires more thought—something that state discourages from the time of
birth. In this world, nature and beauty are all parts of the comedic world of the Reservation.
They have been rendered ridiculous as a result of the new God, consumerism just as equally
high notions of religion have. In essence then, both the act and prospect of consumption have
become the new nature, the new God.

Religion and the idea of a supreme creator is something that is almost laughable in the
world Huxley presents in Brave New World. After all, with all of the most immediate needs
satisfied instantly, why should there be a use for God or the strengthening benefits of
religion? Upon taking over its role as the supreme provider of all goods, both consumer and
otherwise, the state has set itself up as God. The mentality behind their status is that by
keeping their citizens as docile and well-equipped with all things pleasurable as possible, the
pattern of consumption will invariably continue and the economy (the key to stability) will
thrive. Citizens are always informed of their status as dependent and the state makes it clear
that, “No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy—to preserve you, as far
as that is possible, from having emotions at all" (44). Through the repeated use of soma and
other mind-altering forms of existence and entertainment, the sense of the individual is even
further lost to consumption. Religion becomes antiquated because it is no longer necessary as
the “souls" of these people are constantly being filled, even if it is with a false sense of
fulfillment. Instead of having religion and an understanding of morality or even pain,
“Anyone can be virtuous now. You carry at least half your mortality about in a mottle.
Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is" (238).
With the state taking over all aspects that contributed to an understanding of the self—
nature, religion, and family—all that is left is the state. They are the ultimate provider because
they posses both the means of production and the distribution of consumer commodities such
as soma. In many ways, the citizens of this world are very much like young children who are
incapable of functioning without their gods of consumption and provision. This is evidenced
by Linda who, after being left with Indians was completely useless because she was as
helpless as a baby and could not think or act for herself. Although this is a rather sad of
imagining a society, it shows how powerful the state can become when it both acts almost
solely on principles of consumerism. By becoming the both the god and the religion for its
people, it has created a race of beings who will always be slaves to consumption and as a
result will lose their identity completely.
 In the midst of these statements about the dangers of falling into a society based on
consumption, John stands as the voice of the modern reader. He (like the writer of this essay)
sees the hollowness of existence that results from consumerism and instead of viewing its
ease as a utopia, he begs for the right to suffer his unhappiness. He pleads in one of the
important quotes from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, “I don’t want comfort, I want
God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin" (240). To
John, all of the “happiness" that he sees before him in the “brave new world" is vacuous and
artificial. No one experiences anything that makes us all essentially human because the state
regulates experience through products such as soma. He, like the reader, sees this lack of
humanity as a disturbing warning about the dangers of modern consumerism and understands
that the pain and emotion of Shakespeare, nature, art, and god are more real and useful than
tactics to produce mindless obedience. He is, in essence, the foil to every character in the
book and is the true outsider—the only one who seems to see that utopia and consumption
cannot exist simultaneously and can only breed infantile dependence and thus a lack of
individuality and truth. Because the reader is also an outsider, having never been exposed to
the bizarre culture presented in the novel, we find John’s statements even more compelling
and it becomes clear that even though fiction has exaggerated the potential reality—there are
definite dangers imminent when the consumption becomes the means to create a utopia.