The beginning of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" sets up a rather strange new world for the reader. It's a place in which society is bred in a lab by an elite, or alpha class. The embryos are created from one ova and duplicated through a process that allows for many twins to be created from one embryo. It is then decided which caste of the social system they will be placed in, and from there they are conditioned to perform certain functions in society. The lowest caste was trained to dislike books and nature, while the second to highest caste was trained to admire the alpha class and to think poorly of classes below them. One of the more shocking and memorable excerpts from these two chapters, involved giving babies of a low class caste an electric shock when they began to enjoy images of books and flowers. What made this scene even more disturbing, was the pride the Director of the facility took in showing off this experiment.
posted by Rich @ 7:40 PM
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