Caste Divisions: Are We Socially Parallel to the World State?

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World depicts a society wherein human beings are mass produced through an assembly line and later on divided into different castes, which would determine how they spend the rest of their lives. Disregarding the fact that the people in Brave New World are created in a robot-like procedure, is there really anything different between the caste divisions in that society to ours?

We may not be mass-produced, and we may have individuality in forms of self expression unlike the citizens of Brave New World, but are the boundaries in Brave New World any different from how our society functions? Although we are not directly injected with chemicals that determine our fate, there is still a division between different social standings in our world. We aren’t directly addressed as alphas, betas, deltas, or epsilons, but we are divided by money. Being decanted and placed into a high caste in the Huxleyan world is basically the equivalent of being born into a family with ridiculous amounts of wealth. For example, in Brave New World, citizens who belong in the alpha-double plus caste are the world controllers, and the epsilons simply obey orders from those who are in the higher castes. In our society, it is more frequently seen that a person of a wealthy origin is granted high positions in the government, and lower positions are typically offered to those who are financially struggling.

Is there really any difference between the social barriers in the Huxleyan society and our world? And if our society is not the same in social aspects with the World State’s, are we well on our way to being their parallel?