Brave New World
...by World Controllers, whose primary goal is to ensure the stability and happiness of society. Thus the underlying principle of the regime is utilitarianism, or maximizing the overall happiness of the society. The novel begins at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, a production factory for human beings. A group of students is being given a tour of the facilities by the Director.
The students are introduced to various machines and techniques used to promote the production and conditioning of embryos. The scientists take an ovary, remove and fertilize the eggs, force the eggs to bud up to ninety-six times, and subsequently grow the embryos in bottles. Predestinators then decide the future fuction of each embryo within the society, essentially assigning a future job to each human.
The society contains a five-tiered caste system which ranks Alphas and Betas on top. Only the Alphas and Betas come from single eggs which are not budded and hence have no twins. The Centre conditions all the non-Alpha and Beta embryos for their future status in society by dividing them into Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. Thus the Alphas represent the intellectually superior group, followed by the Betas, and continuing down to the Epsilons. The Epsilons are described as having little to no intelligence.
Analysis: The idea of totalitarian social stability is introduced in this chapter. While few critics have called the governmental regime "totalitarian" in nature, it is explicitly described as such by Huxley. Huxley stated in Brave New World Revisited that the only way to create a permanently stable society is for a totalitarian regime (essentially a dictatorship) to have absolute power. The regime must then ensure that people are happy all the time, be able to control the behavior of each individual, and ensure that independent thinkers are forbidden from disturbing...
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