Dear Reader,
Imagine the terror of living in a world that functions as a factory, where you exist as just another manufactured doll. The first three chapters of Brave New World introduce us to this scary utopian/dystopian society. Rather than beginning with characters who will carry the plot, the novel opens with clinical descriptions of a laboratory.
In this factory, life is arranged on trays, multiplied, sterilized, labeled, and moved along a conveyor belt. Babies aren't born, but they're decanted. When these babies become adults, their desires don't emerge through natural discovery but are prescribed to them.
From these opening chapters, I am forced to imagine a world where humans are treated not as persons but as products. This choice to present process before people creates an uncanny effect, suggesting that in this horrifying world, the system itself possesses more reality than the individuals living within it.
Nearly a century later, we must ask ourselves:
How close have we come to this factory world?
While we may not yet decant babies in laboratories, we do market, brand, and optimize ourselves. Huxley's world is not manufacturing dolls, but creating actual humans who are engineered, conditioned, and optimized. These manufactured people are shaped to fit perfectly into their assigned social roles rather than to question or yearn. In short, they are defined by society, not by themselves.
Meaning in a World of Abundance
What can we expect of meaning in a world where everything is available in abundance?
In the Hatchery (which is the laboratory), new lives are produced with commendable precision, as if to guarantee supply will always meet demand. Because when there is scarcity, there comes a desire naturally to fill that scarcity. But in this new world, desires are not born naturally but are conditioned.
Everyone has their portion, their pleasures and already predetermined satisfactions. If all of it is already given, what is left to be earned or sought? If we are to long for something, it needs a lack. When we erase the lack through conditioning and overproduction, we are erasing significance itself. And the desire to strive then becomes unnecessary.
Instead, in the novel, they chant: "Everyone belongs to everyone else."
Process Before People
Let's talk about the beginning of the novel a bit more. Why does Huxley let us see the machinery before the human? I think it is because in this society, the machinery is what defines the human. I know, strange!
In chapters 1-3, the Bokanovsky Process is described in quite some detail: a single embryo divided into dozens of identical copies, a "major instrument of social stability." Caste or class destiny of the baby is already written on the petri dish; determined not by luck or chance, but by the society or the hatchery.
It makes me wonder, if the process is that important, it tells us that individuality is not just suppressed, but it is totally irrelevant.
What matters are categories: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon.
What matters is output: workers perfectly designed for their social slot.
It is as if human beings have become an experiment in optimization, like we train our machines! It also makes me question whether, in this society, the system is not built for people, but these people are built for the system.
Class / Caste Engineering and the Erasure of History
In the hatchery, from the very embryo stage, the future of the baby is decided. They manufacture a huge number of babies for different categories, so they serve their purpose in this society. And they condition the growth of the embryo so they are forcibly fit into this role; I mean they are altering the growth and mutations.
For example, Epsilons are considered the lowest in the class order, so they are deprived of oxygen and infused with alcohol in their blood, which will make them dull intellectually.
What horrified me while reading this bit was, social mobility does not exist in this world. Once the choice has been made for you, there is no way for you to escape or alter your life. There is no way for you to make your choice; the option is taken away from you. That is scary!
And the World State in this society is doing this purposefully, with history not being rewritten but totally abolished and declaring the past as irrelevant. I think that is what enables the system to endure, because there is no past reference of how life could be, other than what you are experiencing! And that creates havoc for the so-called stability this world offers.
"History is bunk"
When you erase memory, the present seems natural and eternal. Then this cruel class engineering doesn't seem odd, because it looks like an inevitable order of things.
Loving Our Chains
One of the guiding questions (Preface) of this essay series I choose to anchor my current read is:
What is more terrifying: a world that controls us through violence, or one that controls us by making us love our chains?
This is in comparison with Orwell's 1984, where terror and pain enforce obedience. But Brave New World showed me a gentler and deadlier mechanism. Huxley's answer to this is ruthless: "conditioning."
From being a baby, people are taught to desire precisely what the system intends for them. They have machines that whisper hypnopaedic slogans into the child's sleeping mind, forming what Huxley describes as,
"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions or conditioning parameters, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too. All his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides — made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are the process suggesting. Our suggestions, who run this society."
To me, this is more terrifying than violence because it is removing the inner essence of resistance altogether. The dangerous revolution is the transformation of the human soul, silently corrupting inside each manufactured mind.
Because there is no need to break people if they have been built broken.
Where Are We?
When I picked up this book, I thought of how far are we, really, from this vision? The closest we've got is, we are all products now. Social media demands a polished, curated self, where our "self" can be packaged and sold.
There are huge corporations experimenting on our consumer psychology with the same clinical precision as Huxley's laboratory scientists. And in turn, our attention is conditioned, with nudges, notifications, targeted ads, recommendations; these are our modern hypnopaedia. Even our habits are being engineered and similar to Huxley's world, our desires are targeted. Aren't they?
But if we think of it this way, we already experiment freely on animals, shaping their bodies and environments, so we understand them and also to maximize our outputs. This comes in many ways: selective breeding, genetic editing, bio-tech manipulation, if I can think of a few. All these are real, but just not yet on humans.
We do focus on optimization and comfort everywhere. And in turn, have we traded messiness for order? Which in turn traded spirit for stability/comfort?
What made me more terrified while reading these chapters was, I don't think of the possibility of us waking up one day in Huxley's laboratory, but that we will slide gradually into it, and terrifyingly not ever noticing that we have stopped being born and begun to be manufactured. And I think we already are slipping into this, don't you think?
The Perfect Future
I think the root of all these is in our minds for the perfect future. Among the animals, we alone have this suffering. We imagine what will have been, what could have been, and what might yet be. This power of foresight and imagination has given us both freedom and terror, both equally. And Huxley's world is pressing on this very thing.
Then it makes me question, if we don't have the quality that makes us different from animals, then how different will we become? We will just perform some tricks of the system, like animals in a circus.
** I just chuckled, thinking about this **
Even at this thought of becoming puppets, animals after all do resist, they bite, they might even escape. But in the Brave New World, there is no such concept of resistance existing. There is no escape from the chains. Oh Lord, that is so terrifying.
The Disastrous Revolution
"The release of atomic energy marks a great revolution in human history, but the final and most searching revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings."
Like Huxley said, the biggest revolution is in hollowing out the souls (transformation of human beings themselves), rather than any weapon. Because it will erase what makes us human while leaving the body intact. It is not like becoming extinct; there is no death, but just vacancy. The human being we know today, becoming extinct, to become a new being. But again, can we call that new being a "being"? I wonder.
As far as I know, we have always preferred order over freedom. When that order controls the mind, that is horrifying. No one will ever resist, because no one knows how, and no one wants to.
We will just become one of the millions of manufactured dolls, ready to be played with.
I would love to discuss with you! How do you see Huxley's factory world in our own lives?
In the next post of this series, I will share my reflections on Chapters 4-6 of Brave New World, where pleasure itself becomes a tool for control.
Will soon knock at your mind's door with my thoughts! 💌
Until then,
Yours in thought,
Yana ♥️
Manufactured Minds: Read-list series on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Ch. 1-3: We, the Manufactured Dolls of the World Factory (Current)
Ch. 4-6: Coming soon…
You have spoken like a true Scientist words with meaning and research. It's impeccable.
I believe with the way the world is right now, I can confidently say that we are designed for the system not the other way around. Because deliberately look up and worship the machines programmed by us to give us direction.
And yeah, we may not be decanting babies in a test tube yet, but we are on our way down there, and when we are finally there, I can significantly say that we have become inorganic and somehow not real anymore.
This is the most thoughtful and classic work I've read all month. You're amazing.
I sent a DM.