We live in a society where standing out is not only accepted, it is encouraged. Every individual is encouraged to have their own sense of style and personality which results in them finding a sense of belonging. In "A Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, however, individuality is completely foreign; it is a thing of the past. You are raised as an embryo to fit perfectly into your profession, and to hate anything that may result in you becoming "deprogrammed". You are raised with dozens of twin copies of yourself, and you are basically forced into submitting. You will never have a change in personality, you will never wear anything outside of your caste color, and you are never allowed to stray from what is considered right and just.
It makes readers consider, with the ability to make a "designer baby" in today society, are we heading down the same path? You may argue that choosing a baby's eye color is not the same as cloning dozens of twins as we program them to have no personality, to believe what the government believes, but can you argue that it is not at least a step in that direction? If we are choosing eye and hair color for our babies now, whats next? One day, we might not even know what the word "parent" means, we may just be used for our reproductive cells and then sent into our castes. Then again, in our individualized society we may never have to worry about government control-it all depends which side of the argument you look at.
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ReplyDeleteI understand your take on the foreign-ness of individuality in Brave New World. I realize since many spurt from just one embryo, that they are expected to be more than very similar.
ReplyDeleteHowever, when you look at twins, similarities are, with no doubt evident, but different personalities still do develop. I also noticed, in chapter 3, when Lenina and Fanny were conversating they didn't sound like robots or answering machines. I sensed different personalities in each person.
So these mass productions of people, will they work like how they were meant to or will these personalities grow into something that could eventually destroy the system?
I also noticed that there does seem to be individual personalitlies-more often when you were able to read from leninas view. However, whenever something particularly challenging to the government came up, or something challenged the sleep teaching to much Fanny simply responded with her sleep teaching responses. If there were more people like Bernard or Helmholtz in the society I could definitely see an uprising and an overthrow of the government.
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