Not sure if this should have gone into the Cafe Society forum or not but as its more about the issues raised than the novel itself I put it here. If its the wrong place please don’t break my legs.
This is inspired by a thread on a different website (which took a very unexpected turn)
This is the question:
After reading the book Brave New World, one is presented with an interesting moral question. For those who have not read the book, I will outline the basics of the world presented in the work. In the year of our Ford six-hundred something, humans are no longer born, they are grown. All people are divided into five social classes, from Alpha to Epsilon. The Alphas are the brains, and the Epsilons are the hard labor workers. The lower classes receive toxic substances when they are embryoes so that they are no more intelligent than a child. Once the embryoes have become children, they are seperated by class. Each group grows up together. These groups of children are exposed to speech in their sleep that isolates them from the other classes. For example, the speech tells the children that they should be glad to be an alpha, but those betas are ugly, the gammas are dumb, etc. This brainwashing makes them love what they will do in life. The Epsilons, who do the jobs that today no one else wants to do (garbage man, janitor, etc.), love their work, because of this brainwashing.
Basically, everyone in the world is happy, but really have no freedom. Now, I did a really bad job of outlining this story, so you’ll probably have to read the book, unless someone else can do a good job of outlining it.
So my question to you is this: Is this society desirable? Is it ethical? Is is right to take away everyone’s freedom, but give them happiness? Do the ends justify the means?
I’m asking this here because I was amazed at the majority of the responses on the other site. The general concensus was that the society depicted in BNW was extremely desirable with many people considering it a genuine utopia, personally I found it a more chilling dystopia than 1984 partially because in BNW most citizens are happy and content. Those people who are all for it probably imagine themselves as Alpha’s or Beta’s at the least…
On a side-note I saw a generally decent 1998 movie based on the book which had some interesting, and plausible, twists. It had a happy ending (unlike the book) but one I found satisfying as well.