14^th English – homework until 2003-04-07: Society today and in BNW

 

Aldous Huxley wrote his famous book “Brave New World” 70 years ago, but he made lots of predictions that have come true nowadays. For example today’s society can easily be compared with the fictitious one in “Brave New World”.

Most of the people in the western countries think “Why should we bear anything unpleasant?” – and that’s exactly the way the protagonists in A. Huxley’s book think. So they avoid every pain and every kind of suffering and just live to have fun – a perfect hedonistic society, whose one and only goal is happiness. But people sometimes love to see someone else suffer – maybe because there were no wars for a long time, and men have forgotten how it feels to suffer. So they go to the feelies, where they can get rid of their aggressions – like it is in our society. The movies in BNW are mostly very violent – the bloodier, the better.

People in “Brave New World” are also promiscuous – so they have sex as often as possible with as many different partners as possible – of course just for fun. These are things, which are common already in our society, although not to such a high degree. But in 1930 this was totally uncommon.

            An other similarity with today’s society is the use of human resources. In BNW there is an upper-class of rich and (mostly) hyper intelligent individuals, who lead the world into the direction they want to, and large classes of inhabitants, who have nothing to say. In the book there are castes: the Alpha plus, (and some Alpha and Alpha minus), who “rule” the world and have important jobs (like in the conditioning center and the hatchery), and a large group of Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, who have to keep the system running by doing hard, physical work.

            And there is also a last aspect in which these two worlds are similar, because men and women are (nearly) equal – which wasn’t natural at the time A. Huxley lived. There is no real discrimination in jobs, so everyone has the same chances – theoretically. That real life isn’t like that can easily be seen, if you look for example at the number of female top – managers. But that’s also the same in “Brave New World”, because all of the really important jobs are held by men – like the D.H.C. or the world controller, Mustapha Mond.