So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport.’” Elaborate steps are taken to circumvent what’s “natural,” to such a degree that those who prefer simpler pastimes are looked upon with suspicion. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. ‘But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. ‘We condition the masses to hate the country,’ concluded the Director. “The problem was to find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes.
#BRAVE NEW WORLD ONLINE STORE HOW TO#
Once lots of human beings have been produced, the problem becomes how to make them serve the economy in their everyday lives. The novel opens with an elaborate narrative of how human beings are mass-produced: By the time Bokanovsky’s Process is applied, a single fertilized egg “was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos-a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature.” The Director goes on to exult, “‘Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!’ The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.” Quite literally, citizens are produced in order to keep the machinery of the World State economy humming. Industrialism and consumption are built into the very structure of the World State-in fact, it is literally how people are made. By portraying the World State economy in this way, Huxley argues that, according to the logic of industrialism, people end up serving their economy, rather than the other way around. Hypnopaedic teachings condition them to throw out worn clothes instead of mending them, to prefer complicated sports with lots of mechanical parts to simple games, and to refrain from any activity, like reading, that doesn't involve the payment of money for goods. All World State citizens are conditioned to consume. Consequently, the World State in Brave New World has made consumption one of its centerpieces. It became an economic imperative, then, that people always want new things, because if people were satisfied with what they had, they wouldn't consume enough to keep the wheels of industrial society turning.
But there's no value in producing new goods that no one wants, so the willingness of the masses to consume these new goods was crucial to economic growth and prosperity. The industrial revolution that began in the second half of the 19th century and sped up through the 20th allowed for the production of massive quantities of new goods. Brave New World criticizes the industrial economic systems of the era in which it was written by imagining those systems pushed to their logical extremes.
0 kommentar(er)
