Wednesday, November 23, 2011

First Brave New World entry

In Brave New World, the hatchery and the nrusery are the first examples of equality you come across. The hatchery basically produces humans in groups, raising them together and molding them to fit their futures. Whether you are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon, you have been raised to fit that specific life. They do things when the children are infants, like condition the Deltas to hate books and flowers. That is how they reduce conflict in the world; they create human beings like baby dolls.
"That is the secret of happiness and virtue- liking what you've got to do. all conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny" (Huxley 16). The director is saying that by shaping these humans to be just how they are meant to be seen, happiness will be obtained. This is a startling contrast from our society where we are raised by our parents and shaped by our experiences. When compared to the book, our experiences can cause us to go anywhere. We will not always do what we are 'assigned' to do in our society, but in Brave New World these people have no freedom. They must wear clothes to specify their caste, having no forbidden books, no reproduction, no religion, no Shakespeare, no families. Essentially everything that could influence a person to diverge from their destined future has been outlawed.
Based on the reading so far, this is definitely a dystopia to me. No one is happy like I have experienced happiness, no one is given individual rights. "They don't know what it's like being anything else. We'd mine, of course. but then we've been differently conditioned" (Huxley 74). Lenina was pondering about the different social classes but soon realized everyone was different. She was raised to be what she was, and other Betas or Alphas were raised to be what they were. People were not given the opportunity to choose. Freedom is the big thing a dystopia lacks, and in Brave New World you see minimal freedom granted to the citizens.

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