In the Brave New World by the English writer Adolphus Huxley in 1932, everyone lives in a beautiful new world of happiness.
So what does this beautiful new world look like? Let's talk about this new world from the three aspects of birth, life and death.
born
In Brave New World, people are no longer born from their mothers, but are raised from bottles. The most important factory in this new world was the incubation and setting center, where people of the five ranks of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon were raised.
Alphas are the highest-ranking people in the world, so they are set up to be beautiful and smart, and Epsilon is not only set up to be short and ugly but also silly, but such people are mass-produced.
You read that right, epsilon is mass-produced, and they can grow 8 to 96 identical people with one egg. This allows dozens of identical people to operate dozens of identical machines at the same time.
Each level of people has different conditions: "the same standard gamma, the same delta, the uniform Epsilon", only alpha and beta are a little different.
Epsilon embryos leave them deprived of oxygen as they grew up, and the lack of oxygen affected the development of the brain and bones, but the factory director said that "Epsilon does not need intelligence." ”
The embryos that will deal with chemicals in the future are now influenced by the smell of these chemicals, the embryos who will be rocket engineers in the future are now undergoing balance adaptation training, the embryos who will become steelworkers in the future are now receiving the fear of cold...
All the embryos were injected with pestle in the factory so they didn't get sick.
When Delta was 8 months old, the nursery would bring them close to books and flowers, and then let out sharp alarm bells and explosions as they got closer, repeating them over and over again, in order to make them hate books and nature from an early age.
People of each level have a corresponding class consciousness education, so that people of different levels feel that they are the best level, and people of other levels are not worthy of playing with themselves.
These are all taught through sleep education, that is, when they are babies, they play all kinds of related words while they sleep. Repeat this 120 times three times a week and instill these into each baby's brain to form a unified understanding: "Alpha's children wear gray clothes." They work harder than we do because they are very smart. I'm so glad I'm a beta, because I don't want to work so hard. We're much better than Gamma and Delta..."
Here, there are no fathers and mothers, no siblings, no marriages and families, and all are born on the set terms. So what will their lives look like?
life
In the new world, people's lives seem to be very good.
After work, they would first go to the public bath to take a shower. Hot water automatically flows into the bathtub, the massager automatically massages each body, and the speaker automatically plays beautiful music.
After washing, pick up the hair dryer on the wall, the hair dryer will blow the talcum powder on your body, and "the small faucet on the washbasin can spray eight different perfumes and floral lotions." “
Afterwards, they would take the elevator to the roof and get on a helicopter to go out and play, or go to see some sensory movie without thinking, just feeling.
They receive messages from an early age: "I love flying, I love new clothes, and it's better to throw them away than to mend them." The more patches, the less wealth there is. “
Of course, they don't sew clothes, they just buy new clothes, and they don't have to do hygiene, because there are cleaners, and there are machines wherever they can use machines.
They are only responsible for the fixed assembly line work in their hands, and after work, they are not only paid, but also given to them.
In this new world, we must maintain the total annual consumption.
And the emotional life here should be said to be just a life that satisfies desires. Because they are brainwashed into saying, "Everyone belongs to each other," in fact, any man and any woman can be together, but not for a long time. There is a beautiful woman in the book who has been in a relationship with a handsome guy for four months, and some people say that she is so unorthodox, because the world is against too strong and procrastinating feelings.
The world encourages relationships between different men and women, and they say it's to simplify people's emotions.
If a person feels any distress, they have numbness, eat a little, and immediately enter a state of psychoesthesia. They sang in familiar songs from childhood: "As long as a small piece, all ten kinds of worries are gone." ”
Aging, in this world is even more impossible, there are sex hormones, but also to inject young blood into people, and magnesium salts, so that people will always remain young, and people's personality will be unchanged.
60 years old and 17 years old are the same, so there is no retirement, only work and games, work is to create value, games are to let everyone consume.
People don't want to read and think here. So the stewards either destroyed the books of the world or locked them in safes.
Since the people here don't get sick or get old, will they die?
death
People here will die, death comes suddenly, and death is not terrible at all.
The wards here are also very comfortable, with a TV set facing the head of the bed, and the patient is lying directly on the bed watching. The vents above the patient's head also blow out different scents from time to time, allowing the scent to immerse the patient in the beautiful past.
Because people here don't marry or have children, and there aren't many feelings between people, even if one person is going to die, no one will come to visit.
But there was another group of people in the ward who came to watch the death, and that was the children. Children will often be arranged to watch death because it will make them understand that death is natural and not scary at all.
Around their crematorium, many devices were also installed for phosphorus recovery. They were told that after death, people can be converted into phosphorus, and phosphorus is conducive to the growth of plants, which is their contribution to society after death.
The beta beauty in the book raises a question: Alpha and Beta don't produce more phosphorus after death than people of other ranks to help plants grow.
The handsome alpha guy in the book says, "Physically and chemically, all people are equal, even Epsilon is useful, not without Epsilon." Everyone is for me, I am for everyone. We can't do it all. “
When a person dies, they will say that they were happy when they were alive, and now everyone in this world is very happy.
Happiness comes from where happiness comes from the condition setting and sleep education of their childhood.
postscript
It's a beautiful new world full of biotechnology automation, where people are born and raised on set terms. What they should accept and what they should learn is agreed upon by the world's general managers.
People's lives are simple, every day is a fixed commuting time, followed by entertainment time.
Their desire to eat, wear, live and travel can be easily satisfied, they are not distressed, they do not read, they do not think.
They have no real feelings, they just covet people's looks, and they can easily get them.
It's a world without any pain.
Do you like a world like this?