H4: Brave New World

Mantra 1––Community. Identity. Stability.

Mantra 2–– Competition. Commerce. Consumption.

Pre-reading

• World Building
• A factory for making people
• Caste System versus Class System
• "The secret to happiness and virtue—liking what you've got to do." 
• The Underclasses
• Plato's––"Happy Slaves"
• Thoreau's––"Noble Poor"
• Marx's––"Satisfied Worker"
• South Africa

What problems of today will create the dystopias of the future?

Chapter 1

• What is the purpose of the mantras taught to people in this society (community, identity, stability)?
• Which group in our society does the most physical work? Which group is paid the most? Are these groups the same? Explain.
• Are students being taught to think or to be satisfied?
• Does America have an underclass? Who are they? How do you know? How are they maintained?
• What can be determined about the future based on chapter 1?

What three to five key qualities make us human?

Chapter 2

• Why is Pavlov not a great source of inspiration for training children?
• What are the other impacts of treating babies in this way? Of abusing them, not comforting them, not touching them?
• "Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks––already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same ora similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder."
• In what ways does our society convince people to travel, to buy expensive things, to have expensive hobbies?
• "Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy."
• What do "truths" are the following two quotes really getting at? How do you know?
• "You can't learn a science unless you know what it's all about."
• "Moral education, which out never, in any circumstances, to be rational."
• What's the purpose of the "sleep learning"? 
• "The mind that judges and desires and decides––made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!"
• Why would any society want to guarantee such strict class breakdowns?

What is more important: what we do or how we do it?

Chapter 3

• Why encourage children to play sexual games? What are the long-term effects of this?
• What terrible things came from not allowing children or adolescents to be sexualized is the Director talking about? Are they terrible?
• What is the purpose of a pregnancy substitute? What does its mandatory nature imply about the flaws in BNW's system?
• How did Ford and Freud get mixed up?
• Why does BNW's society demand promiscuity rather than monogamy? 
• What is stability really? How does someone become stable today? In BNW?
• What is the best version of family? Explain.
• Why does Huxley intermix the Controller's explanations, the Lenina/Fanny conversation, Bernard Marx, and the hypnotic education of the children? Besides a little confusion and chaos, what is the effect?

What happens when someone is unsatisfied with their lives?

What are you really good at? How do you feel about being good at that thing?

Chapter 4

• Why is flying unlikely to be an every day sort of transportation?
• How well does the conditioning of humans work? What's the true secret to its success?
• What purpose do those who aren't perfectly ordinary serve?
• Why does this "idyllic" society allow for someone who is like Bernard Marx? 
• Why does Bernard treat others so poorly? Do people do this today?
• What do Lenina and Bernard actually have in common since she seems like a perfect member of her class and he is not? What is the reader supposed to figure out?
• How does Bernard manage his jealousy about other alphas enough to be friends with Helmholtz Watson? Why?
• Why wouldn't our solutions for dissatisfaction and unhappiness work for BNW's people?
• What's ironic about Helmholtz trying to teach his students to make people feel with their writing?
• "Words can be like x-rays, if you use them properly––they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."