Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" book

When I was 14, my teacher gave me this book, that would become my favorite one. She said it was a complex book for people around my age, but she knew that I would digest it well since I enjoy such topics. I want to make a small analysis of why I consider that this book matches many social phenomenas. 

As a small introduction, Aldous Huxley was an English writer, poet and philosopher in an important intellectual family. From an early age, he began to suffer serious problems affecting his vision. Huxley graduated in English literature at Oxford. After completing his studies, he made various trips around Europe as an art critic and literary critic. 

"This is one of the most famous dystopia of the 20th century. In it, Huxley presents a dehumanized future world in which society is divided into a caste system in which individuals are created and genetically altered."

This novel describes a futuristic, utopian, highly regulated and technological world. It starts with a group of students visiting the London Incubation and Conditioning Centre. There, the factory manager explains to young people how the population has been divided, since incubation. Thus, according to their previously altered genetic condition, society is divided from the Alpha to the Epsilon, from greater to lesser intelligence. 

The protagonists Bernard Marx and Lenina (allusion to Karl Marx and Lenin) visit the 'wild reserve', whose inhabitants are considered backward. They know John, who, despite growing up among the Indians, was conceived by citizens of the 'World State' or 'World State', so he can read and write. The protagonists decide to take John, the savage, to the 'global state' where comparisons begin to emerge and expose the negative points of a seemingly perfect and happy society. 

The 'World State' of the happy world has as its motto: 'community, identity, stability'. 

Scientific caste system

A highly advanced human difference science is being developed that allows government leaders to assign each individual the right place in a social and economic hierarchy divided into five classes.

Here is where the social stratification and social classes come through... by dividing it into:

• The Alphas: they're the smartest people in this group that belong to the elite. They have responsibilities and they have the ability to make decisions.

• The Betas: executives belong to this caste, are less intelligent than the previous castes, and their main role is reduced to administrative tasks.

• The Gammas: they are junior employees whose tasks require skill.

• The Delta: this group belongs to the employees of the previous group.

• The Epsilon: it's the lower caste, it belongs to the employees for hard work.

Behind this is the criticism that Huxley made in 1932 of the consumer society, which over time makes even more sense. It is a mechanized, dehumanized society in which individuals believe to be free but are nevertheless controlled and determined since their "creation". It's a system that wants to "guarantee" happiness, with expendable beings. A regime in which emotions are not allowed, which are palatable with artificial substances. A dictatorship dressed in democracy. In this utopia, machines take precedence over human beings, especially determining their development. It is precisely the machines that have caused the individual to lose the characteristics that make him human.

Now let's analyze the characters by "judging" their "status" according to the novel:

• Bernard Marx: Born alpha-more with intact intellectual abilities, he's got a lower height than usual. This means that he is physically marginalized by his class and despised by the other castes. This rejection and social discrimination makes him an unsuitable person who refuses to consume money and challenges the system. Here, his behavior is influenced by other members of society and economical factors. 

• Lenina Crowne: She is born as a beta, and works in a genetic lab. Fits the system by taking refuge in pleasure. 

• Henry Ford: The god in his futuristic world to criticize this trend in today's world: "in the age of advanced technology, inefficiency is a sin against the Holy Spirit."

There's no such thing as emotions. They are annulled by conditioning centres that model the human being as a product. The search for freedom, the ventilation of feelings, turns the savage, educated with William Shakespeare's texts, into a tragic alien destination; at the heart of a mass spectacle in which the free man is persecuted, aged, by a seemingly "happy world". 

The book has completely destroyed the relationships and bonds that characterize the human being. Individualism has also become more dynamic. In other words, individuals in the proposed caste society cannot act on their own volition. In this society, thought is determined by the system, the individual has lost his ability and freedom of reason. 

What in the Sun City of Campanella is religion, and in the anarchist utopias of a Kropotkin or Proud-hon is the secular morality of solidarity, in the 'happy world' of Huxley is science; the regulatory instrument of life, the tool that adapts and accommodates everything to achieve this 'social stability' which on the planet Ford is synonymous with civilization. In this, this utopia coincides with that of Saint Simon, where science also appeared by dispensing, with its infinite resources, the saying to all human beings. On the planet Ford, everyone is said to be a chemical problem, a state that is acquired by ingesting 'soma' tablets. these ingenious reconstructions of the world: a fear of the disorder of life unleashed upon its own discourse. Therefore, they always suppress spontaneity, unpredictability, accident, and involve existence within a strict system of hierarchies, controls, prohibitions and functions. The mathematical obsession of all utopias delineates what they want to suppress: irrationality, instinct. 

I have read this book around 20-30 times and it is a really good book to understand society from another perspective and see how society is divided. The concepts used are very clear and it is a really creative way to explain some sociological theories.