User:Sataoko/sandbox

A SUMMARY OF BRAVE NEW WORLD BY ALDOUS HUXLEY
There is a world which is considered to be in the future in the story, Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley. According to the story, after the world war nine, a new world emerges. In that world, almost everything is different from the world we live in now. Babies are produced in bottles and trained when they grow up by the world state. They are conditioned as the world state wants them to be. In the conditioning lessons they are made to hate some concepts like family, parents and love with some developed psychological methods. The people are separated into classes such as alpha, beta, gamma. And higher class people hate lower classes. Each class is trained as necessary for its position in society. They have to behave in the way that is wanted. Nobody must think about changing the system. So the ideas against the system and to think or speak about them are forbidden. There is no need to think about problems much. When there is a problem they take some 'soma', a drug which make them relax and get peace. Briefly, human beings have no difference from programmable machines in that world. And the interesting side of the case is that these are done for the safety of the world.

There are some main characters the story is based on. One of them is Lenina, who is an alpha and a beautiful young girl. Another one is Bernard, who looks like a low class one but who is very intelligent. Due to the way the others threat him because of his appearance, he is alone and strange. And he has some dangerous ideas about the state. Because of his ideas, he has some problems with the director of the state.

Lenina likes Bernard. So she accepts his invitation to visit the savage reservation where uncivilized people live. Bernard goes to have the director, named Thomas, sign the sheet of paper for the savage reservation. During this time there is a conversation between them and in this conversation, Thomas talks about his old girl friend and says she was lost in that reservation. In the conversation, Bernard makes the director angry because of his words and so the director threatens him to send to a sub-center like an island.

At the end Lenina and Bernard arrives at the reservation, and they encounters Thomas' old girl friend who has been lost in that reservation and her son John. Soon Bernard thinks that he can defeat the director whom he is in trouble with, if he takes John and his mother back to civilized world. Because having a son is a good enough reason to be defeated in that world and the director, Thomas, has one : John. And Bernard takes them. As a result Thomas will not be a problem for Bernard.

Meanwhile, Lenina and John fall in love with each other but there is a big difference between their ideas because of their training. Lenina is a person who was trained by the world state and John was trained by Shakespeare's books which are forbidden. They are from different worlds and they can not understand each other. John is a strange one and everybody wants to see him, which disturbs him. John is alone in that world where all human values have changed. At the end, he commits suicide.

There is no possibility for the existence of that kind of world. The power of technology is clear but even technology can not dominate the life as in this example. I mean, as long as the world exists, there will be no events like all babies are produced in bottles and state trains them. It seems the writer has the fear that humanity will disappear because of the incredibly developing technology as lots of people do. I think our problem is that we need much more developed technology to reduce its bad effects. Technology is beneficial for mankind as long as it is used logically.

March, 1997