Brave New World II & III

II

Creepy book, isn't it?

Everything's so cold, so clinical.

Every aspect of the human experience reduced to a science. And the vision of the typical family life? Forget about it, "Mother" and "Father" are reduced to smutty words that make the kids blush. And "good Christian morals" are undesirably portrayed and looked down upon. Psychology itself is deemed obsolete, because of the new philosophies taken its place in the hypnopeadia.

But you know that the part that stood out the most was the conditioning of the 8 month old babies, and why wouldn't it? We nurture babies, we cradle them, we protect them from harm. It's ghastly to imagine purposefully hurting babies.

I don't know about other people in my age group, but kids are conditioned like this all the time. How many children's parents do they witness reading? How many times do the smart kids get picked on in school? We're always subconsciously learning where we fall socially. In this Brave New World it's just more formulaic.

III

There's a part at the beginning of the chapter where the Director is talking about how strange it is that games used to be played with simple equipment and now they're all complicated...video games anyone? This was a prediction that came true.

What shocked me the most about this book when I first read it was how flippantly they spoke of little kids engaging in sexual activity. I mean sure, little kids always have and always will experiment but it for it to be encouraged and passed off as normal is so alien even in our culture today. I imagine in Huxley's time this was not well recieved at all.

"Our Ford" also spoke on the evils of family life which is particularly interesting to me. They live by the rules that everybody belongs to everybody else, so exclusiveness is unheardd of. This becomes important once the Savage is introduced.

Lenina is also looked down upon for only having one lover. Completely backwards.

They produce the question of before Ford, "how could anyone be stable?" Instability is the spice of life, we need it. It's what makes us, us.