586 Huxley, Aldous
that way goes against her conditioning and is, thus,
impossible for her.
On their second date, Marx takes Lenina out on
the reservation. He indulges in the luxuries of the
hotel room and later worries about the bill because
he has left the tap of perfumed water running. This
instance is, interestingly enough, the only time in
the novel that Huxley makes a direct reference to
money. It seems that every citizen in the World
State, independent of caste, earns sufficient funds
to afford a kind of lifestyle that keeps the people in
the Brave New World happily consuming. Natu-
rally, this makes sense, for dissatisfied citizens might
become rebellious, and that is the last thing any
government could wish for.
With its emphasis on consumerism, the World
State creates a nation of shopaholics. People who
shop are happy—a message that sounds disturbingly
familiar if we take a comparing look at our present
consumer ideology. The fact that in the Brave New
World this consumerism serves the stability of the
state and is achieved through questionable methods
and at a high price is highly unsettling and intended
as a warning sign by Huxley for future generations.
However, it cannot be overlooked that Huxley—
influenced by communist and socialist ideas—also
implies that in order to have a flourishing economy,
citizens need to have sufficient money to spend on
consumer goods—all citizens, that is, not only the
middle and upper classes.
Elke Brown
education in Brave New World
While we like to think of education as giving people
the means and information they need to be able to
think for themselves, in Brave New World education
has become a strict and cruel way of conditioning
people from early childhood on. The educational
system in Huxley’s novel is determined by the World
State’s focus on productivity and efficiency. Since
human beings are predestined from the moment of
fertilization to belong to a specific caste, their skills
and abilities depend on the caste to which they have
been designated. After decanting, the process that
replaces natural birth, each citizen enters a caste-
specific educational program that hinges on two
main methods: actual instruction and hypnopedia.
The World State’s focus on productivity and its
regard for human beings as a technological resource
results in the conviction that each citizen ought to be
instructed only as much as he or she needs to know
to be able to perform his or her duties as a produc-
tive member of society. Thus, for example, children
are discouraged from reading books and from loving
nature. To the end of producing useful members of
society, the World State uses drastic and cruel meth-
ods: During a tour the Director of Hatcheries gives
to Alpha students, he shows them toddlers who are
taught to shy away from books and flowers through
the use of shrill sirens and electroshocks that leave
them twitching on the floor. This education through
traumatization is extremely effective in furthering
the goals of the World State: Without knowing why,
those children, as adults, will not waste any valuable
time with reading (a very solitary, and thus forbid-
den, pleasure) or on loving nature for nature’s sake,
that is, without consuming anything.
In matters of life and death, the World State’s
educational approach is as honest and blunt as it
is unorthodox. Because adults do not procreate,
sexual activity has become another pastime and,
basically, the unavoidable end of a pleasurable
evening between a man and a woman in the Brave
New World. Promiscuity, indeed, is a virtue, not a
vice. Therefore, the children in the World State are
encouraged to play erotic games and explore their
sexuality, only to leave such childish behavior behind
as adults.
Similarly, children in the World State are being
death-conditioned. In the Brave New World, death
has been planned for just like everything else. At the
age of 60, the system of a person simply shuts down:
Worn out from youth-enhancing medications and
the use of Soma, the person dies in the Hospital for
the Dying. This passing away is considered merely
the natural end of the process of living. Even after
death, a citizen of the World State can still be useful
to society because his or her cremated body produces
phosphorus, which can be used as fertilizer. To
understand death as another contribution to society
and as a natural process, the hospital hosts field trips
for children to view those who are dying.
In addition to this way of instructing children,
the World State relies heavily on hypnopedia: a