Economically, the society has subscribed so thoroughly to mass consumerism that the consumers themselves have been commodified. Erotic experimentation begins at six or eight years old. Sexually, people are uniformly promiscuous - “everyone belongs to everyone else” - avoiding those neuroses rooted in repression or exclusive attachments. Welcome to the World State, where “all men are physico-chemically equal” and “everybody’s happy now.” People are conditioned by genetic engineering, electric shocks, and hypnopaedic repetition to accept these and other mantras as the sum of their identities, to promote complacency and simple desires. Dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century - what would be the use of that?” But our business is to stabilize the population at this moment, here and now. “For in nature it takes thirty years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity. “Viviparous” reproduction, that shameful secret of the past, has been replaced with manufacture here the eggs are selected from disembodied ovaries, mixed in culture with the sperm, and incubated in a clean, sterile, efficient environment overseen by technicians - “the bizarre case,” as one critic has noted, “of a product supervising a production line.” The embryos are designated into five castes, and while the elite Alphas and Betas each come from one unique embryo per egg, the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are cloned (“bokanovskified”) into as many as ninety-six embryos per egg. Huxley’s vision of the future begins with a tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, in the year of stability a.f.
But could it be that our insistence on seeing Huxley’s book as an exceedingly successful prophecy actually prevents us from recognizing its real insight? Is there a way for us to understand the book free of the great distorting influence of our own times? It is easy to imagine that we see the shadows of our society in Huxley’s vision of the future. We live in a time of biotechnological leaps forward that have made the term “Brave New World” almost a reflex for commentators worried we are rushing headlong toward a sterilized post-human society, engineered to joyless joy. Huxley’s most famous novel, Brave New World, was published in 1932, and the occasion of this seventy-fifth anniversary should lead us to wonder about his peculiar description of how we understand the future. For if prophecy is an expression of our contemporary fears and wishes, so too, to a very great extent, is history.” And not our notions of the future only: our notions of the past as well. “Our notions of the future have something of that significance which Freud attributes to our dreams. The future is the present projected,” said Aldous Huxley.
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