Intense doses of sensation in the form of “feelies” (a sensually enhanced form of cinematic entertainment) and popular sports all encourage people to be the puerile playthings of their impulses and desires, incapable of delaying gratification, developing conviction, feeling deeply, or devoting wholly to any one cause. A homogeneous mass entertainment culture promotes social cohesion and quiescence. The aging of the body and the maturing of the character and mind are arrested and prevented, maintaining the capacities and tastes of the World State’s citizens in a permanent adolescent state. Infantilization of the population is government policy. As Huxley remarks in his introduction, “As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” Individuality and privacy are treated with suspicion. Citizens are encouraged to engage in sterile promiscuous sex, to make them complacent to their servitude and as a means of preventing particular attachments from arising. Individuality and the particularism of familial or monogamous love are resisted as obstructions to social homogeneity and conformity-“everyone belongs to everyone else.”Īs children are molded through uniform production line processes, sexual reproduction, monogamy, and the notion of mothers and fathers have all come to be regarded with disgust. There are five different castes or models of humanity, each carefully designed and conditioned to serve a given social purpose. Within a vast eugenics project, people are mass produced through advanced reproductive technologies and conditioning to be docile and serviceable participants in society, fully invested in the production and consumption that constitute its heart. Human beings themselves have become the objects of the World State’s hyper-Fordism.

Mass production and mass consumption of disposable products (“ending is better than mending”), as well as the values of predictability and uniformity, are fundamental principles of the world order.

He’s the basis of its dating system (the book’s events occur in the year 632 A.F.-After Ford), and his name-that of the founder of the new world-is now employed where God’s name was formerly used.

Within Huxley’s World State, Henry Ford is revered as a semi-mythical messianic figure. Brave New World finds its narrative premise and its object of criticism in the ascendant Fordist ideology of Huxley’s day, projected into an unsettling dystopian future.

Preventing a brave new world