The Price of Perfection

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World presents a portrait of a society which

is superficially a perfect world. At first inspection, it seems perfect in many

ways: it is carefree, problem free and depression free. All aspects of the

population are controlled: number, social class, and intellectual ability are

all carefully regulated. Even history is controlled and rewritten to meet the

needs of the party. Stability must be maintained at all costs.

In the new world which Huxley creates, if there is even a hint of anger,

the wonder drug Soma is prescribed to remedy the problem. A colleague, noticing

your depression, would chime in with the chant, "one cubic centimetre of soma

cures ten gloomy." This slogan is taught to everyone, from the youngest to the

oldest. Unhappiness, intellectual curiosity, disagreement, suffering - none of

these feelings is allowed in the world which Huxley creates. At the first sign

of unhappiness, Soma is prescribed. Emotions of all types are strictly

controlled to provide stability and predictability within the population.

Another of the panaceas for social ills is the belief that everyone

would enjoy his or her work because he or she was "made" or trained for it when

young. Consequently, from birth, everyone in Brave New World is slotted to

belong to a specific social and intellectual strata. In conjunction with this

idea, all births are completely planned and monitored. There are different

classes of people with different intelligence and different "career plans." The

social order was divided into the most highly educated, the Alpha+, and then in

descending intelligence, the following divisions: Alpha, Beta, Beta -, Gamma,

Delta, and Epsilon, which is the last group comprised of those citizens of the

lowest intelligence who are necessary to perform society's most menial jobs.

Another of the problems with the society which Huxley depicts is that

the people do not have individuality. They are all conditioned by subliminal

messages and artificial stimuli to respond the same way. Although all people are

meant to respond identically without thinking, a few are made 'imperfectly' and,

as a result, do have personalities. These people violate the principles of

technology and artificial personalities and consequently have to be sent away so

as not to "contaminate"