The novels Brave New World and Across the Universe explore the significance of social class and how a society can be engineered to ensure control. The social structure is created to maintain governmental control over the society. Genetic engineering is utilized so that people fit their predetermined social role. Finally, psychological conditioning is employed to discourage rebellion and resistance among the people. The use of social engineering in these two novels is the foundation laid to ensure control. Brave New World portrays a futuristic social structure. The population is split into five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons; the higher castes have managerial jobs and lower castes have labour jobs. Social interaction between
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The children created in the factories are conditioned through torture to have phobias of flowers and books, “Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks– already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly” (Huxley, 49). This “programming” was engrained in the children’s minds to prevent obstruction of their future jobs, for this had happened before (Huxley 50-51). The babes are also taught to accept death from the age of eighteen months “‘…Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course’” (Huxley 359). As the children grow older they are taught to be free with sexual impulses, it is considered moral and encouraged; the society uses sex as a tool to keep people busy and pacified by entertainment such as orgies. The drug “soma” renders those of a clear head and brings the user to a place of pleasure and bliss. This drug is part of the psychological conditioning, enslaving the people, creating mindless citizens ready to obey the law. Through these methods the society conditions all human behaviour to pacify and discourage
The children created in the factories are conditioned through torture to have phobias of flowers and books, “Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks– already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly” (Huxley, 49). This “programming” was engrained in the children’s minds to prevent obstruction of their future jobs, for this had happened before (Huxley 50-51). The babes are also taught to accept death from the age of eighteen months “‘…Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course’” (Huxley 359). As the children grow older they are taught to be free with sexual impulses, it is considered moral and encouraged; the society uses sex as a tool to keep people busy and pacified by entertainment such as orgies. The drug “soma” renders those of a clear head and brings the user to a place of pleasure and bliss. This drug is part of the psychological conditioning, enslaving the people, creating mindless citizens ready to obey the law. Through these methods the society conditions all human behaviour to pacify and discourage