BRAVE NEW WORLD is a book that gives the details concerning how such a tyrannical brave new world of rulers controlled the population. It reads like a playbook to follow if one wants such a world. It's science fiction, a book that Aldous Huxley penned in 1932, but should librarians today classify it as fiction?
The story of the brave new world begins after the revolution has already occurred. The elite are firmly in control The author informs the reader how it came to be by looking back at each of its increments as the characters of the story remember, relate, and happily live under them them. In the brave new world, there is no such thing as a family, a father and a mother are gone. The divine institutions of marriage and family don't exist. The oft-repeated motto is, "Everyone belongs to everyone else."
The powerful ruling elite show pictures to young children, pictures of families and then comes a sudden electric shock so as to condition children to believe that families produce pain. In that world there are no readers of books; from their earliest years, the powerful elites have instilled a fear in childrem of the written word via those electric shocks.
Among the things that brought about the tyranny to which the people willingly submitted was a war. No, not a conflict of cannon and campaigns, but the War on the Past. To the citizens of the brave new world, history began with Henry Ford as evidenced when the elite changed the dating system of the brave new world from BC/AD to BF/AF with the "Fs" referring to Henry Ford to whom they render all reverence, even in the vocabulary of the brave new world. When exasperated, shocked, or frustrated, the citizens exclaim, "Oh, my Ford!" Then there was the expression: "Cleanliness is next to Fordliness."
The War on the Past involved the removal of statues; those were gone from the brave new world. Since Christianity heavily influenced the past, the elites removed two things especially abhorrent to the control of a population. The first was the symbol of the Cross--they cut off all crosses at the top so that they looked like a "T." Then, as we would expect, in the brave new world, the Bible had to go and when there was only one left, the highest official there was locked it in his safe. Along with the Bible, Shakespeare was o-u-t, out.
The education of the brave new world wasn't an education; it was an indoctrination by sentences, phrases, and mottoes repeated thousands and thousands of times and by that means they educated the masses. The powerful indoctrinated the citizens to behave in one way only according to their caste. They learned what the government wanted them to learn over and over and over again in the hundreds of thousands of times of various repetitions while they slept.
This constant repetition would be similar to those who were alive in 2020-2021 who could not keep from hearing and reading the term "systemic racism" so many times that when they heard the word, "systemic," they automatically coupled it with "racism." Those alive in November 1963 through 1964 were conditioned to the term "Dallas the city of hate." They could fill in the blank of any sentence that said, "Dallas, the city of __________." That's because they heard it over and over again by the ruling class.
The brave new world is also a world of drugged comfort because of soma." Soma is a government-provided drug distributed to the people. It's a way to escape pain, discomfort, embarrassment, sadness or anger and to enhance joy, and an overall sense of well being. It's non-addictive (physically or mentally) and has no negative side effects on the mind or body whatsoever." The government has conditioned the people to repeat a phrase about soma: ''A gramme in time saves nine." (English spelling) Whenever a person in the book feels the slightest mental or physical pain, mild or serious, he takes soma.
What the government doesn't want anyone to do is to think. To prevent the people from thinking, the government creates a multiplicity of distractions which are tools to control the people. Huxley explains the role of these distractions:
“They [the people] did not foresee what in fact has happened ... the development of a
vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with
the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally
irrelevant." Irrelevant is the epitome of distraction.
“In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation.”
One author wrote, "That sounds like our entertainment-saturated realities today. A quick scroll through most social media feeds will reveal just how much of the online experience is built around these jolts of pleasure, from people “liking” our posts to food and travel experiences that give us vicarious enjoyment to feel-good videos that generate positive feelings. . . one is able to consume only the things that give one pleasure or fit in with one’s world view, while avoiding anything that doesn’t."
The brave new world focused people's attention on the banal, the irrelevant, and the trivial. These distractions created a passive people who willingly became that way. In Brave New World, one of the regime’s biggest achievements is creating the illusion of “doing” when all they're doing is observing.(Sharmilla Ganesan)
Brave New World is often compared with Orwell's 1984 but it would be better to contrast them. In 1984, there's Big Brother with his massive surveillance and swift punishment which he used to produce a citizenry like Winston Smith who fears opposing the regime. In the Brave New World there is no need for surveillance or punishment because the citizens have been thoroughly conditioned to be happy with their lives. That's the most scary part.
So, do you think Brave New World is science fiction?
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