Benjamin Franklin once said that nothing is certain but death and taxes. However, this humorous statement is incorrect. In addition to the aforementioned ideas of death and taxes, there is also another absolute: crisis. No human can live, or even has to option to live, a life void of problems and difficulties. Misfortune is inevitable at one point or another. Even in the realm of fiction, a seemingly perfect world is often anything but. Every utopia has its flaws and cracks, and few novels make this point more clearly than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The futuristic setting of the story exposes the reader to a world dominated by technology and complacency. People are no longer born; they are made in laboratories all around the world, and have their destinies chosen for them before they even leave their test tube. Sexuality is treated in a very flippant manner, and self-gratification is the primary driving force for the actions of nearly every single person. History is no longer relevant, and people never question what they are told. The key question regarding the nature of this kind of world is a question to which the answer is yet unknown. The question is something any reader of this novel should ask himself or herself, and that is simply this: Is it worth it? There is no crime rate, and peoples’ desires are rarely left unfulfilled, but is it worth the giving up of free will and of choice? There is no clear answer to this question, and there will likely never be one.
Although this question has no obvious answer, the logic behind this world is fairly easy to understand. Perhaps Aldous Huxley himself summarizes it best in Brave New World Revisited when he states, “Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government. And permanent crisis is what we have to expect in a world in which over-population is producing a state of things, in which dictatorship under Communist auspices becomes almost inevitable.” In other words, the threat of ongoing crisis, such as over-population, condones extreme government control to the point of Communism. With this in mind, one can understand the thought process that leads to Brave New World’s version of the future. Current human population is growing almost exponentially, and since this novel takes place in the future, one would think that over-population has clearly become an issue that is being dealt with in an extremely productive, albeit, immoral way. Nevertheless, upon finishing the story, one can see that this new process of “birth” is not being carried out with the set goal of lowering the population, but aims to both raise and maintain it. The book references an event known as the Nine Years War, an incident that nearly leads to the annihilation of the human population. After this calamity, it only makes sense to do whatever it takes to prevent a repeat of this event. In this case, the supposedly best option was to give complete and total control to the government, thus leading to the new way of life portrayed in the book. The process of artificially creating human life is used large-scale to get the human population thriving again, while making it easy to monitor the overall number of human lives.
In reality, our current society is not too distant from this level of government control in terms of the regulation and control of childbirth. We already have Brave New World’s version of birth to a lesser extent. We use In Vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and a variety of other unnatural methods to develop new babies. Scientists are even going as far as to use genetic engineering to modify babies before they are born. It is used to increase the odds of giving a baby a certain hair color, or a certain eye color. How long will it be before this science is perfected so that people can custom make a child? Although it is not as extensive or lavish as the conditioning unborn babies go through in the novel, we are still using types of conditioning to try to control birth and the traits of the children while they are still in the womb.
In addition to the similarities arising in methods of population control between our society and the society of the story, there is also another resemblance the two worlds share that might strike one as rather surprising: the notion of brainwashing. Of course, it is never directly called “brainwashing” by any of the characters in Brave New World, but nevertheless, the term is accurate. After the babies in the story are decanted (born), they are immediately moved into a facility where they are brainwashed, or “conditioned” as the people in charge of said facilities call it, into the type of person they will be. When offered books and flowers, lower class children are electrocuted and have sirens blared at them in order to instill a fear of learning for themselves and going out into the countryside. In addition to treatments such as these, the children also go through hypnopaedia, or “sleep teaching”. As the children sleep, a voice whispers things into their ears, such as how they should be thankful and happy to be who they are and what social class they are. Hypnopaedia used in conjunction with the types of conditioning that take place during the day successfully mold the kids into the specific types of people that are needed to make society continue to smoothly run. These types of conditioning are much more extreme than the conditioning we experience today, but the connections can easily be made.
Although we are brainwashed to a lesser degree than the people in Brave New World, it is extremely hard to deny that we are conditioned from a young age into what type of person we will be. Mass media such as television, magazines, the Internet, newspapers, and more all work together to shape an individual’s view of the world. Seeing Hollywood’s version of what constitutes as a “beautiful person” may make regular people feel inadequate and give them the desire to change themselves. People may change how they act, how they dress, and even how they speak in their pursuit of what they think is how they should be. Those living in our society are taught what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, weird and normal. Everybody in the story already knows that they are conditioned to be a certain way, and this knowledge provides readers one of the strongest links between our world and the world of the story. Everybody in both worlds is conditioned, yet between both worlds, nobody seems to care enough to stop it. People in both worlds seem to be complacent with how life is, and they are kept complacent with instant gratification.
Although Brave New World may seem like nothing more than a far off, impossible idea, it relates to the world we find ourselves in today on an uncomfortably close level. One could even logically assume that the government’s idea of a permanent crisis in the story is human nature itself, and that the Nine Years War was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. With all the similarities of the two societies and our ever-increasing scientific knowledge and technical capabilities, it is not a preposterous statement to say that some day our society could very nearly emulate, or even mirror, Huxley’s immoral, safe, communistic, stable Brave New World.