Essay About Social Class And Brave New World

The Price of Perfection
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Aldous Huxleys Brave New World presents a portrait of a society which
is superficially a perfect world. At first inspection, it seems perfect in many
ways: it is carefree, problem free and depression free. All aspects of the
population are controlled: number, social class, and intellectual ability are
all carefully regulated. Even history is controlled and rewritten to meet the
needs of the party. Stability must be maintained at all costs.
In the new world which Huxley creates, if there is even a hint of anger,
the wonder drug Soma is prescribed to remedy the problem. A colleague, noticing
your depression, would chime in with the chant, “one cubic centimetre of soma
cures ten gloomy.” This slogan is taught to everyone, from the youngest to the
oldest. Unhappiness, intellectual curiosity, disagreement, suffering – none of
these feelings is allowed in the world which Huxley creates. At the first sign
of unhappiness, Soma is prescribed. Emotions of all types are strictly
controlled to provide stability and predictability within the population.
Another of the panaceas for social ills is the belief that everyone
would enjoy his or her work because he or she was “made” or trained for it when
young. Consequently, from birth, everyone in Brave New World is slotted to
belong to a specific social and intellectual strata. In conjunction with this
idea, all births are completely planned and monitored. There are different
classes of people with different intelligence and different “career plans.” The
social order was divided into the most highly educated, the Alpha+, and then in
descending intelligence, the following divisions: Alpha, Beta, Beta -, Gamma,
Delta, and Epsilon, which is the last group comprised of those citizens of the
lowest intelligence who are necessary to perform societys most menial jobs.
Another of the problems with the society which Huxley depicts is that
the people do not have individuality. They are all conditioned by subliminal
messages and artificial stimuli to respond the same way. Although all people are
meant to respond identically without thinking, a few are made imperfectly and,
as a result, do have personalities. These people violate the principles of
technology and artificial personalities and consequently have to be sent away so
as not to “contaminate”