Monday, October 18, 2010

"Brave New World"

Mustapha Mond is comparing humanity to a machine. They worship Mr. Ford because he created the assembly line which acts as a machine pumping out more supply than ever before. Mustapha Mond and other world controllers want their people to always be focused on their specific job and not have emotions affect their work. For example, the narrator states, "Cryimg: My baby, my mother, my only love; groaning: My sin, my terrible God...how can they tend the wheels?" (Huxley 42). If people have emotional ties with other people than their duty to the society could be influenced by emotions. Someone could have a death very close to them and their output into the economy might not be up to standard. When people aren't putting their greatest effort into their job then the community as a whole becomes unstable. The governments whole foundation is based off stability. They condition all the people in the population to act a certain way and have certain instincts. The world controllers use a method called "hypnopaedia" to condition children when they are very young. They can insert whatever information they wish into the childrens' minds. They control what people they will interact with, favorite colors, food, hobbies, etc. With this sleep teaching technique they can account for all the people because they exactly what they will consume. The biologically engineer each human to be happy with their job in life. If everybody is happy with what they are doing then it creates stability, which is the goal for every economic system. They create different social classes so every individual has their place in the community. It is basically an extreme and successful version of communism.Communism was unsuccessful because some people were not happy with their place in society, but Musapha Mond and other world controllers have discovered a way to engineer humans the same way a person would hard-wire robots.

1 comment:

  1. I really enjoyed reading this blog post. It seems like you actually read the text and interpreted it unlike some other people whose blogs I read. I agree with the fact that Mond is comparing their society to a machine, with gears that need to be turned. Emotionality also plays a large role in how people act, and therefore in this new society, it is cut off to prevent instability. The goal of this entire society is to be extremely efficient, at the cost of individuality. I like how you ended your blog post with a connection to Communism. I agree that both of these social orders are very similar, and the author intends to portray this, however this perspective of a perfect utopian society actually succeeds. Huxley tries to show how cruel a society must really be to be perfect. The absurdity of the conditions in this New World go to show how undesirable a perfect economy and society are, as individuality is sacrificed in order to reach stability.

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