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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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Brave New World summary
Aldous Huxley
A Dystopian Novel on the Perils of State Control & New Technology
29 mins
Table of Contents
Brave New World
summarized in 6 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 6
Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center
Community, Identity, Stability. That’s the motto of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center.
Inside, laboratory workers in white overalls handle microscopes and test tubes with white-gloved fingers. The tubes make long lines along the work tables, and the light entering the room appears lifeless and frozen. We’re in the Fertilizing Room, where new people are created. In the World State, children have no parents – the very word “mother” is considered obscene – and everyone is created in a lab.
Eggs aren’t just extracted and fertilized at the Center; they’re also conditioned. Categorization happens as soon as a group of ova is fertilized. The Alphas and Betas – the eggs destined to become important members of society – are placed into incubators. The others – Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons – undergo Bokanovsky’s Process, a cloning procedure that results in up to ninety-six identical human beings. This process is key to social stability: it produces standardized human beings in uniform batches.
Regardless of their social status, all fetuses are predestined and conditioned. Seventy percent are made sterile, so there’s no chance of uncontrolled reproduction. From infancy, they’re conditioned to have an instinctive hatred of books and flowers – both things that have the potential to disrupt the social order. They also receive hypnopaedic lessons – canned phrases projected into their minds while they’re asleep, which produce a subconscious, instinctual understanding of society’s moral values.
Other infants receive more specific types of conditioning. For instance, some are taught to detest being cold. This will inspire them to emigrate to the tropics, where they will associate their love of heat with a love of whatever job they’re assigned there.
And that, according to the theory of the World State, is the key to happiness: liking what you need to do. All conditioning is aimed toward the goal of making people not only accept, but enjoy, their fate.
ANALYSIS
The setup at the Central London Hatchery shows, in a microcosm, the values of the dystopian society in Brave New World. Unlike in other dystopias, society isn’t controlled through violence, outright oppression, or totalitarianism. Instead, the mechanism of control is made up of a tightly managed and predetermined social hierarchy, psychological conditioning, and eugenics.
By predestining the members of society to have a certain fate – and, crucially, to be happy about that fate, social stability is maintained. There is no risk of people rebelling, protesting, or rioting, because they are perfectly happy as they already are.
The conditions at the hatchery also present a clear difference between Brave New World and its philosophical counterpart, 1984. Though there is a certain amount of social conditioning in both novels, Brave New World takes it to an extreme. As you saw in this section, infants are taught to instinctively hate books and flowers. A love of flowers is risky because it inspires people to go out into the countryside and wander – and such activities don’t keep the factories running. Reading, meanwhile, is dangerous because words have the power to break someone’s social conditioning.
The safest solution? Make sure no one is interested in books or flowers in the first place.
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What is Brave New World about?
Brave New World (1932) is a dystopian novel set in a world where citizens are socially engineered to be complacent and pleasure-seeking. It’s a world that worships Henry Ford – a scaled-up version of an assembly line that’s mass produced, homogenous, and ultimately consumable.
Best quote from Brave New World
And that … that is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what youve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.
—Aldous Huxley
Who should read Brave New World?
- Anyone fascinated by dystopias, utopias, and everything in between
- People concerned about the state of modern society
- Fans of George Orwell who want a very different take on dystopia
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