Nature Versus Nurture in Brave New World - 1182 Words

Brave New World depicts a world in which Resident Controller Mustapha Mond governs a society where every aspect of an individuals life, from decantation onward, is determined by the State. Predestination by God has been replaced by predestination by the government. Through the Bokanovsky Process, future-citizens are made with a virtually inexistent level of individuality. Once decanted and technologically altered to comply with their pre-determined caste, children are brought up and conditioned by state officials, not by a traditional family. Value has been stripped away from people as individual beings; humans have become standardized and interchangeable. Brave New World portrays a society in which innate originality has been sacrificed†¦show more content†¦It is this fundamental conflict between John’s desire for love and Lenina’s desire for sex that illustrates the profound difference in values between the conditioning of the World State and the natural orde r. Since decantation, the World State has conditioned Lenina through hypnopaedia, the caste order, as well as Nursery conditioning, to conform to the societal ideals of â€Å"Community, Identity, Stability† (p. 5). She is unable to remove herself from the implanted State values as they have become her own personal values as well; they were not inherited, yet they are the influential components to her life. Aldous Huxley also uses John’s mother Linda to illustrate the facility with which conditioning dominates over innate traits. Linda is a Beta from the â€Å"Other Place† (p. 78) and has therefore been conditioned to be promiscuous, to take soma and to be repulsed by the idea of having children. During a visit to the Reservation she became impregnated and was too ashamed to return to the World State with a baby so has lived there ever since. Though she has tried to immerse herself in the â€Å"savage† (p. 76) culture her state conditioning has made her an outsider. Since living in the Indian village, Linda has followed her conditioning to the best of her abilities: she continues to promiscuously sleep with other men, takes the alcoholic beverage mescal as a poor yet available substitute for soma, and is still horrified at the idea of taking careShow MoreRelatedThe Theory Of Science And Technology1856 Words   |  8 PagesEvery generation, every era, has its own cu lmination of moral dilemmas and ethical quandaries that challenge what we believe of ourselves and the world around us. Ideas of race, religion, animals and sentience, god and man—among others—have pressed us into reconsidering what we believe and progressed our knowledge pertaining to not only the physical world, but the metaphysical. In this flurry of philosophy, we have come to ask, what even makes us human? 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