Line #56 Headscratchers/BraveNewWorld


1	* If the people in Brave New World don't have age-related frailty and disease, why do they still die when they're old?
2	** [[ShapedLikeItself To make way for the next generation]]. They almost certainly have the technology to avert it if the controllers thought that was a good idea, but if they do it goes the same way as labor-saving technology.
3	** Mond points out that people in his society enjoy perfect health until death (which he cites as a reason for [[OutgrownSuchSillySuperstitions disinterest in the idea of God]]). This reasoning suggests that social stability is best served by having people live to 60 in perfect health and then quickly die than by having them live to 120 with the afflictions of old age toward the end, even if those afflictions are mild by modern real-world standards.
4	** Presumably, if they did develop the means to extend life, they tested it on some island and didn't like the results.
5	** The impression I got was that their method for halting the degenerative effects of aging could only be kept up for so long, and that it caused massive systemic failure when it finally ran out. So basically, they can give you sixty years of youth, but no more.
6	** They aren't using magic; tampering with fetuses, using a drug that stimulate pleasure and all the weird conditioning is gonna kill someone in the late years. Epsilon making it to sixty in perfect health is a miracle giving they engineered birth defects.
7	* What about homosexuals? A society of frequent, non-reproductive sex and no one even MENTIONS homosexuality? The Brave New World is trying to prevent unwanted pregnancy by sterilizing most women, yet [[NoHeterosexualSexAllowed promoting homosexuality]] or [[EveryoneIsBi Bisexual "conditioning"]] aren't considered? Why not actively promote homosexuality in order to reduce unwanted pregnancies? Huxley seems to be going for a society where sex is quick and commonplace, and EveryoneIsBi would fit nicely with this.
8	** At the time when the book was written, homosexuality was a criminal offense in Britain. Huxley was very well aware of and supportive of bisexuality - he was polyamorous and shared a lover with his bisexual wife, and even playfully coined the term 'omnifutuent' (Neo-Latin for 'all-fucking') to describe her. But it was still a huge risk to write about it.
9	** Encouraging homosexuality might be the most efficient way to prevent pregnancy, but the World State often does things in deliberately inefficient ways to stimulate demand (e.g. "ending is better than mending"). There's a mention that the percentage of fertile women is kept fairly high to insure a wide range of egg-harvesting choices, perhaps another reason is to keep the contraceptive factories busy (a goal that could be undercut if the fertile women were having casual sex with other women instead of with men).
10	** There ''is'' a passing reference to homosexuality at the beginning, when the DHC lectures the students about how childhood sexuality was once considered shocking and immoral; he describes it as one of the few available outlets children had for sexual experimentation. It never comes up again, but everyone clearly understands the concept, at least.
11	** They are doing orgies where everyone probably fucks everyone, they don't care because sexuality is just blowing off some steam to them, that's why they put you on a list of mates with the person you want and might get a reprieve if you keep going with the same one. And they already took care of childbirth control, only one who got pregnant was lost in the woods everyone else is monitored to make sure that doesn't happen.
12	* They may disagree about whether it's worth it, but all of the characters seem to accept that maintaining a society where people are happy and comfortable requires sacrificing everything else that people might value. Is it so hard to imagine that people could be happy ''and'' pursue science, philosophy, and art?
13	** Given individuality is key in pursuing science, philosophy and art... not really. In this utopia, the only kind of science, philosophy and art that can be pursued is the "mass-produced" kind. But it's obvious this sort of philosophy is useless, this kind of art is barely art (more like a craft) and this sort of science (government-funded and focused on goals instead of discovery) would make Carl Sagan cry.
14	** No, people probably ''could'' be happy while still pursuing science, philosophy, and art... it's just too risky. Pursuit of science, philosophy, and art ups their chances of not being happy, so they have to go. Mustapha Mond's judgement when he refuses approval for that article's publication seems to be, "Better safe than sorry."
15	** As the DHC said to Marx, be a kid or leave. They only give short term happiness, sex, drugs and leisure, everything else is prohibited. It's to keep people happy, not persons.
16	** One of the problems here is this was written by a non-hedonist. So some of this logic doesn't hold up from the perspective of people who would want to build a Brave New World, which considering the book is anti-hedonist is kind of the point. An engineered world state with reservations and islands without rules is very accurate to what a hedonist utopia would look like. The World State of Brave New World however clearly isn't peak happiness to most hedonists back then or today.
17	** Besides all of the above, there's also the fact that the pursuit and even the existence of things like science, philosophy and art actively require those pursuing such interests to engage with, think about and question the nature of the world one lives in. And that act of questioning everything around you immediately opens up the overwhelming likelihood of not particularly liking whatever answers or conclusions you might come to very much. The ''act'' of pursuing such interests might make a certain percentage of the population happy but the ''results'' of it, especially as these things tend to then be passed on and consumed by others, risk causing widespread unhappiness. So...ultimately it's better for the World State (which seems to thrive on selling relentless short-term pleasure and complacency above the actual human emotion of genuine happiness) if these things just aren't there beyond what they have immediate control over.
18	** The World State isn't trying to produce happiness, it's trying to prevent unhappiness. Those who pursue real science, art, and experience can definitely still be happy (and in fact will almost certainly be happier than those still feeding off the infantile World State versions of these things), but they also have the potential to be ''un''happy, and that's what the World State won't accept.
19	* In the Island experiment, everyone was an Alpha citizen and all the islanders considered themselves above tasks for the lower classes, and things went downhill … and fast. However, wasn't that experiment ''already'' doomed to fail even before it began? I kept thinking: all Alpha citizens are conditioned since birth to behave like '''exactly like that''', relishing their intelligence while priding themselves as above those of the lower classes, ''even if those jobs needed to be done''.
20	** Pretty much. Mond had mentioned that there was a huge archive of labor-saving devices not in use because it would render a good bulk of the population effectively unemployed, right? They should have started with their standard ratio of classes on Cyprus and then experimented with adding those inventions to the society and determining what the new optimum ratio would be, with the eventual goal of applying it to the world at large.
21	** Bear in mind that some (not all) of those setting up the "experiment" would have been ...keen to see it fail.
22	*** It's a shame that Bernard, John and Helmholtz completely fail to call Mustapha out on this. You'd think that Helmholtz at least, who is meant to be a very bright man, would notice how the whole exercise sounds like it was designed to reinforce the worldview of the Controllers.
23	** But this king of experiment isn't necessarily meaningless. They needed to prove themselves right and that the conditioning works. It's more like "submiting it to tests" than an experiment.
24	** They were Alphas like Bernard and Helmhotz, filling they could do better than this society and starts living for themselves, they just realized it's harder than they thought and gave up. Sure it was expected to fail but that means Helmholtz and Bernard are also doomed to fail since they won't live like that either even if they think they can.
25	* Why do World State inhabitants have last names? Those seem to be a relic from the past that there's no reason for the World State to preserve, considering its offensive connotation of the family institution.
26	** Ah, that's a very good question, but my belief is that it's to differentiate people who have the same first name. That was actually the original purpose of surnames.
27	** The surnames in the book are mostly from 18th-20th century history. Possibly the World State was attempting to commemorate certain approved historical figures (and perhaps also converting them to icons having little connection to historical reality, much as they did with "Our Ford").
28	** I took it to imply that because all history before the Nine Years War had become expunged (Other than the existence of Our Ford of course), the use of nomenclature belonging to old world cultural figures as normal surnames might be an intentional effort to invoke mimetic dilution. At the beginning of the book it's described that there are only a few hundred surnames used to define hundreds of thousands of citizens, so the names are so ubiquitous as to be meaningless. It's a far more insidious way of robbing the lives and philosophies those names invoke than simply censoring them. "Hey Tolstoy, I found a strange book with your name on it!" "Who cares Guevara, I know fifty men with my name. Here, have a dose! A Gramme Is Better Than A Damn!".
29	** In his first appeareance, Mond talks about Freud, but the students imply he is just mispelling "Ford". It's implied that some people, like Freud (who studied not just family relations, but majorly individuality) are hidden and forbidden. All the names that are accepted are about people whose ideas revolve around collectivity.
30	** It's not necessary to remove it and they keep some stuff from the old world if they feel like it.
31	* The Epsilons, who are at the bottom of the gene pool, are called 'semi-morons'. What are full morons then?
32	** Full morons are literally too retarded to be of any value- even Epsilons need to be able to understand orders. Moron in this case referred to a real kind of mental disability, rather than just the insult now, which is from that anyway (imbecile and idiot were also medical terms once before they became used simply as insults).
33	* So, the Epsilons are supposedly needed because someone has to do the dirty work and labor-saving gadgets are supposedly not implemented because then the Epsilons get bored. Why wouldn't they just implement the labor-saving gadgets and make fewer Epsilons?
34	** More gadgets and devices and dropping out Epsilons might also affect other people in various ways in a socioeconomic chain-reaction. This culture wants consumerism. More mouths wanting more food needing more employed food makers needing more employed advertisers triggering desire for more food, etc. They don't feel the need to stop people from being engaged in labor, so they don't need many labor-saving devices.
35	** Epsilons also create a bigger population that Alphas and Betas can feel superior to, which means more effective marketing (helping drive the above point) and helping them fit into their own niches better.
36	** The gadgets user are Delta, more Deltas instead of Epsilon is dumb since they might be smart enough to get pissed if you make too much of them.
37	** Basically, anyone above Epsilons can feel better knowing that at least s/he isn't Epsilon and there for has better job and life. Epsilons, on the other hand, are "semi-morons" and do not realize that they are basically genetically engineered ButtMonkeys for everyone else. This helps to keep everyone else happy. Epsilons can be made to do everything nasty nobody else wants and they feel better since ''they'' don't have to do it, there is someone lower that has to do it and since they are too stupid to realize they ''can'' say no (whatever reaction this could cause is a different matter) they ''will'' do it. In the book, there's a mention of an experiment on Cyprus about a fully-automated society composed of all-Alphas. It collapsed.
38	*** The Alpha society wasn't fully automated, though.
39	*** In fact, it was a pretty big point of the story that the experiment failed because the Alphas didn't want to do Epsilon or other lower-caste jobs.
40	** And Epsilons are engineered to take pride in the fact that without them, the society would collapse in very short order.
41	* The people in this world are conditioned before birth to be content with pointless happiness and sex. So what would happen if the society that maintained all this suddenly collapse?
42	** Bad things probably. But then collapsing societies are no picnic for anyone.
43	** While the society ''portrayed'' is pretty recognisable, it's hinted several times that their actual level of background technology is way more advanced than what you can see on the surface. It's almost certainly been designed with hundreds of tiers of automated safeties, redundant backups, global monitoring systems, etc. For all we know the planet has automatic asteroid defences and Mond can control tectonic drift from his office.
44	** The society maintains itself, with intervention from the ingenious Alpha-Pluses who 'graduate' to the point that they have to choose, essentially, to disappear or become Controllers. Alphas are the world leaders, Epsilons are the manual laborers, and the others fill the gaps. Every single job can be met, because they're predestined to have their job. They like the job because they were conditioned to like it. The happiness with those things are to distract them between workdays. People are constantly being grown. These people are conditioned to love their jobs, love who they are, and love everyone else. They're all conditioned to consume a large, consistent amount, so no industries are growing or shrinking. Community, Identity, Stability.
45	*** The very interesting implication of this is that the World State ''needs'' those "deviant" Alphas like Helmholtz and Bernard, whose sense of individuality has developed to the point that they're capable of creation and invention, in order to research and develop the science and technology needed to keep civilization going. If that's so, the most advanced laboratories and research facilities in the world in this era are very likely located on those islands, staffed by the exiles - who also have living conditions (residences, food, recreation, etc.) fully as comfortable as anything they had had to leave behind. This is also useful for the World State in that it gives the exiles interesting and fulfilling work instead of having them sit around on the beaches all day bemoaning their lot. This would also help explain why Mond is so sympathetic, gentlemanly and downright kind to Helmholtz and Bernard when he sentences them to exile; quite apart from his own personal inclinations - he may be a dictator, but he's not the genocidal type - he recognizes the two as having developed into the most valuable resources available to the World State. And it also helps explain why Helmholtz seems positively welcoming of the prospect of exile, if he's going to be installed in a luxurious flat on an island with all the modern conveniences and everything he needs to pursue his poetry (including a heaping helping of bad weather!!)
46	*** Moreover, one function of the islands may be to act as seeds for the rebuilding of civilization if necessary. Should the main society totally collapse, you have the islands full of men and women who are intelligent, at least partially capable of functioning without the World State, biologically capable of reproduction (and with the free will to overcome those taboos, if necessary), and possess the technological resources to sustain themselves at a fairly high tech level.
47	* Okay I get how they condition and engineer the lower castes, and I guess betas are just people of regular intelligence by today's standards, but how are alphas created?
48	** Its possible most of them are not actually super-intelligent, they just believe they are.
49	*** That's an interesting interpretation, but the DHC does say to his students "I'd like to show you some very interesting conditioning for Alpha Plus Intellectuals. We have a big batch of them on Rack 5. First Gallery level." at the end of the first chapter. It seems that there ARE methods of conditioning people to be geniuses, we just never have them described.
50	** Because intelligence has a genetic component, alphas could be created out of the sex cells of intelligent people and raised in optimal fetal conditions.
51	** Not necessarily smart, they might give them plenty of protein and stuff to make sure they are strong and tall.
52	** (a) I always assumed that Alphas were in fact just run of the mill smartish people by today's standards, not genius level, (b) there is today a growing body of evidence that aside from actual genetic predispositions that bring down performance, all children function at what we regard as "genius" level until the restrictions of wealth, society, education constrict them down to "normal" levels of performance, ie, a person of "normal" intelligence is pretty thick compared to what they could achieve if they had an "optimal" upbringing. Just whether there are books in the house you grew up in will make a HUGE difference.
53	* The existence of freemartins is hardly touched on, based on what you'd expect from an author of the time period. They're implied to be intentionally infertile females who are incidentally androgynous as a result. This is more or less a third "natural" gender, but Huxley hardly makes any attempts to apply Squick to them. Considering that Female is Female and Male is Male has been the hard line on gender for most of modern history, it surprised me (pleasantly) that freemartins are treated as slightly-less-attractive women and not as androgynous, undesirable monsters.
54	** Just remember: A) these aren't women who wanted a different body than the female body they were born in, but whose physical state was deliberately caused by human intervention before birth -- they were stripped of many female traits/characteristics without their consent or choice; B) their acceptance is owed to those who write the hypnopedic suggestion scripts rather than to any genuine open-mindedness; and C) people who physically haven't fit the "Female is Female and Male is Male" hard line throughout history have been ostracized by society because they seemed odd, and this society ''still'' ostracizes people who seem odd by their standards and don't fit the mold just as strongly as any society ever has (look at how his fellow Alphas treat Bernard just for being short) -- in the World State, the molds have changed (androgynous women are normal and accepted), but the attitude towards those who don't fit has not (short Alpha men are undesirable monsters).
55	** The freemartins are also not explicitly androgynous. They are explained as "quite normal" but occasionally develop facial hair (which is almost definitely immediately removed to meet their high standards for beauty). It's also notable that the only really significant women in the plot are both fertile, and the only freemartin who is at all involved with the main characters, Fanny, is portrayed negatively, with her eventually convincing Lenina to rape John. Like much of the society's sexual elements, freemartins aren't explicitly demonized but are probably supposed to naturally offend the reader with their subject matter alone (or at least a reader in 1930's England).
56	* I'm not sure if they go into any detail on this, but how is the World State's economy run? Presumably it isn't a market system, since any economic competition would likely cause unhappiness. So if it's done by central planning, how do they escape the problems this caused to the communist states? Huxley might not have been aware of this (however the economic calculation problem was first put out in 1920, with the debate over it ongoing when he wrote the book).
57	** They're deliberately operating at a fraction of their true technological ability so its probably very easy to avoid any shortfalls. Because of the way things are setup the World State also knows ''exactly'' what everyone wants so there's no issue with responding to changing demands.
58	** There is no real economy, it's all controlled since birth that people want to work and consume government goods. People will buy something because they were told to buy it since they were 4 and people will work since they have nothing to do before their next soma drop.
59	** Communism tends to fail for two reasons as I understand it. 1) Resources are limited. 2) People are greedy. It seems the technology in this society is so great that they're living in post scarcity ie, resources are effectively unlimited (they say they can get by purely by synthesizing food but farm anyway for the heck of it). And then on the human element, everyone is obviously conditioned to be content with their place in the caste and desire no more than they have. They're also universally drugged with ecstasy to keep them from wanting basically anything at all. With those two factors in mind, a completely controlled economy doesn't seem far fetched at all (in fact, this troper assumed there wasn't even money and people got paid in Soma until John mentions having some cash at the end).
60	* By the time this book is set, Shakespere is over a thousand years old. It's already reasonably difficult to casually read by today's standards, it should be outright impossible for a home schooled layman to read it five hundred years from now. And it's not like the evolution of language was outlawed or anything, we clearly see that new words did come to fruition. Of course the language should still be massively different to modern English, but one can rationalize some translation convention, but not when direct quotes are being thrown out so liberally.
61	* Near the end the characters are arrested by the police. Why exactly does this world have a police system? I can't imagine there being nearly enough irregulars causing trouble to justify their existence.
62	** The characters are able to rent planes as easily as we rent cars today, and the planes are apparently about as easy to operate. They could probably have one police unit for the entirety of Britain and just send them over in a fighter jet when needed.
63	** On that note, accidents probably still do happen. Their main use may be 'crowd control'.
64	* Why does John hate Popé? He seems to have been an alright guy, acting similar to a long-term boyfriend. He doesn't seem to mistreat John in the little interactions they have and if he really was a long-term lover of Linda's, isn't it a better alliterative than her just being with random men? At least Popé was consistent.
65	** I think it comes back to that Oedipus complex.

Context Headscratchers / BraveNewWorld