The quotes in “Brave New World” are satirical and full of irony, subtly shedding light on how what, at first glance, seems to be a perfect world is a horrible one. With sharp wit, Aldous Huxley demonstrates a dystopian government executed not with violence and fear but by giving its citizens too much pleasure and making them passive.
Social Control
The theme of social control is prominent in “Brave New World,” as the story describes the great lengths World State goes to actualize this. The following quotes show how and why this is necessary for the World State.
“Science?” The Savage frowned….
“Yes,” Mustapha Mond was saying, “that’s another item in the cost of stability. It isn’t only art that’s incompatible with happiness; it’s also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”
Mustapha Mond in dialogue with John, Chapter 16
After John’s nervous breakdown at the death of his mother, he is detained. Mustapha Mond engages him in a debate about the pros and cons of his newly adopted society, the World State. Art is often presented as a tool of subversion, and usually, it is through art that rebellion is expressed. But here, Mond also implicates science as a source of dissent. Uncontrolled, the curiosity that drives science can produce unexpected and unpredictable results that may counter the government’s interest. Science is the driving force behind technological development, which the government relies on to manage society. However, because they want to maintain stability, they limit the sanctioned area of scientific study.
“Government’s an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists.”
Mustapha Mond during the tour of the hatchery, Chapter 3
During the hatchery tour at the novel’s beginning, Mustapha Mond joins the party and supplements the scientific orientation with a commentary on the social underpinnings of their state’s policies. Altering a fetus to a desired end, creating and conditioning citizens to castes, and providing them a worry-free society are soft (and, according to the views of Mond, ideal) ways of achieving social control. A totalitarian state that uses force threatens and exposes itself to the risk of its use of power because humans will naturally want to avoid or oppose anything that brings them pain and suffering. In a World State, this is avoided, and more subtle, pleasant, and effective ways, like drugs and hypnopaedic conditioning, are used to exert control on people.
Community, identity, stability
The motto of the World State, printed above the Directorate of Hatcheries and Conditioning, Chapter 1
Aldous Huxley’s brilliant satirical wit is showcased in this quote, which is the motto of the World State. These words, which should evoke a sense of social harmony, take a negative note when interpreted in the context of “Brave New World“. Community means the state carves out groups and conditions citizens into these groups instead of creating a society that accommodates an individual’s healthy development. Identity means the state forces its citizens into roles and statuses that they cannot change rather than allowing them to find for themselves who they are. Stability means the citizens are discouraged from acting in any self-directed manner but must participate in the approved and predictable activities the state designed.
Happiness as the Highest Societal Goal
Immediate gratification and pleasure-seeking are cardinal pursuits in “Brave New World” and serve the state to undermine the personal development of individuals by keeping them emotionally stunted and using the sources of pleasure as things to model behavior and compel action in them.
Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Lyrics of a song sung during the Solidarity Service, Chapter 5
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at one with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release.
Bernard attends a Solidarity Service, a pseudo-religious activity organized by the World State, one of the many ways to keep the society docile. These are lyrics to the song recited during the service, which is a routinely organized, socially-sanctioned sexual orgy. The genius idea of “Brave New World” is that a state could induce greater compliance in its citizens by enticing people with pleasure and indulgence. With the use of the soma drug and the provision of many social activities and avenues of distraction, the citizens are conditioned into complacency and avoid acting in ways that deviate from the norm or order. The service emphasized facelessness, superficiality, and uniformity in social activity, just one more way of effacing the individual.
“One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments.“
Lenina to Bernard Marx, Chapter 6
Lenina mentions this to Bernard Marx to persuade him to take soma, a mood-altering drug used recreationally in the novel, while they are on a date. He is gloomy because the activity she chooses for their date (watching a live women’s wrestling match) does not appeal to him, and she offers this to cure his bad mood. Instead, He chooses to remain with his feelings and not take a pharmacological escape, which puzzles Lenina. This statement is one of the many catchphrases, called hypnopaedic statements, spread across the book that capture the essence of World State society. They are made simple so that with constant repetition, people are easily conditioned to believe them as truth and fail to consider any other alternative possible or even better.
People take soma to stave off bad feelings. However, this would not address the root of the negative emotions, which is a necessary step for personal development. A drug-induced escape from the discomfort is preferred, from which one comes back miraculously fixed. As with clothes, so with feelings in World State. Ending, they say, is better than mending.
When the individual feels, the community reels.
Lenina Crowe to Bernard, Chapter 6
Bernard extols the merits of an individual being with their feelings to Lenina, and Lenina responds with the hypnopaedic remark above. Bernard defiantly answers that perhaps the community should reel, a remark that puts Lenina ill at ease.
The World State has exerted much effort to keep people from feeling strong emotions because these feelings could become contagious. Too many people in passion can lead to social instability, as seen when John’s frenzied self-flagellation at the lighthouse starts a riot in the crowd watching him.
The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma.
Mustapha Mond to John, Chapter 16
In this quote delivered in his debate with John after Linda’s death, Mustapha Mond lists the measures employed to strip the citizens of the World State of their humanity. By creating artificial conditions that are carefully maintained, the world controllers are assured of a docile and servile citizenry. However, these citizens are hardly distinguishable from livestock or robots regarding how well-regulated their lives are.
Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
Mustapha Mond to John, Chapter 16
The thesis of “Brave New World“, presented by Mustapha Mond in response to John’s idealistic clamor for individual freedom and self-expression, warts and all, is that bland social stability is more desirable than any freedom one may imagine because the freedoms, though dazzling and alluring, often lead to misery. Better the pale pleasantness of government control, providing bread and circuses on demand, than the wild and unpredictable clash of passions when a society is allowed to run its natural course.
Dehumanizing Individuals for State Interests
Aldous Huxley has always been interested in and explored how the state subordinates individuals in governance. In “Brave New World“, he critiques how humans are degraded when treated as nothing but state-building and maintenance instruments.
“Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended, There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment.“
Mustapha Mond during the excursion of the young students at the hatchery, Chapter 3
At the hatchery, after the students are given a run-down of the scientific wonders that made the hatchery and conditioning facility possible, Mond explains the socio-economic imperatives that make the system necessary.
The World State’s priorities are reversed. Rather than building a world where individuals are developed to their best potential and then building a stable society made up of these optimized healthy people, the World State makes a stable world the goal and underdevelops individuals so that they are fit only as tools of state stability.
Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies.
Mr. Foster to the students at the hatchery, Chapter 1
Mr Foster, one of the hatchery’s scientists, explains the children’s antenatal conditioning process. He is proud of the procedure and his role in it, oblivious to the inherent inhumanity of treating human conception and birth as coldly as a factory process.
This describes one method used to control the development of human embryos in hatcheries, effectively binding them to a defined role in society as if they were machines.
The Problem of Individuals
For the World State, a persistent problem is the problem of individuals, both as a social challenge and as an ailment of the component organisms that make up the state. As such, the idea of an autonomous person is treated as a disease state requiring medication and therapy.
“If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”
Bernard Marx to John at the reservation, Chapter 8
When Bernard is playing at being an anthropologist at the reservation, he listens to John narrate his autobiography, a singular white man at an Indian reservation. Bernard realizes that they both share a similar experience, both being outcasts in their respective places. While John’s difference is more obvious, Bernard’s is more subtle. John even remarks that his mother informed him no one was ever alone in the World State. Bernard’s loneliness was more spiritual, stemming from his outlook being at odds with the ethos of his immediate society. Even in a crowd, he would still lack the company of people with whom he can share himself.
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
Mustapha Mond to John, in their final conversation, Chapter 17
After John’s rebellion, Mond detains John, Bernard, and Helmholtz and engages John in a debate about the different values of the different societies they originate from. Mond challenges John on his belief that one set of ideas is inherently better. He asserts that all ideas are strong because the believers have been brainwashed into them. Only the ideas that society needs and conditions its citizens to believe for it to work are valid.
“I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
Bernard when Lenina asks him to take soma, Chapter 6
Lenina asks Bernard to take soma to enjoy himself. Bernard is opposed to taking the drug and treasures his experiences and the feelings they generate in him without the mediation of any mood or mind-altering substance. This is strange in their society as people want to and are encouraged to be “pneumatic”—always bubbly, light, and superficial. Bernard generally arouses the suspicion and distrust of others because of his noticeable difference, which is oddly what being an individual is— noticeably different from others.
“Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning during the orientation of the Hatchery, Chapter 2
“Brave New World” opens with a group of young people taking on a tour of the hatchery where children are produced in-vitro and their primary conditioning is carried out. The Director explains why young children are conditioned to hate flowers and nature, revealing that earlier experiments found that love of nature reduced the work output of the citizens at maturity. Every effort of the World State was to churn out human robots who worked to produce what they would consume, only to work again all for the economy’s health and at the expense of a person’s essential individual autonomy and self-expression.
“Bernard considered that Electro-magnetic Golf was a waste of time.
‘Then what’s time for?’ asked Lenina in some astonishment.”
Bernard talking with Lenina on deciding the activity for a date, Chapter 6
In love with Lenina, Bernard attempts to share his ideas and worldviews with her. However, she responds with puzzlement, confusion, and mild alarm at the strange things he says, which are almost always at odds with her conditioning. Because Bernard is an outcast, he has had the opportunity to spend time alone and experience the pleasures solitude can give. He can develop a healthy sense of self separate from what their social conditioning dictates for them. Lenina, an excellent product of World State conditioning, cannot even comprehend some of his ideas, let alone understand the value he attaches to them. It is not so much that the World State ruins individuals; the greater tragedy is that they prevent the development of the individual.
