Fahrenheit 451

The first couple of chapters of Fahrenheit 451 introduce us to the books protagonist, Guy Montag. Guy is a special type of fireman whose job is to burn books. He enjoys his job greatly and wears the number 451 on his helmet. 451 is the temperature at which paper starts to burn. He also wears a salamander on his arm and a phoenix disc on his chest. One day, on his way home from work he meets his neighbor, Clarisse McClellan. Clarisse says she is crazy and says that firemen used to put out fires instead of create them. She tells Guy that she comes from a strange family and does weird things, like read and walk places. Guy is attracted toward her, but she makes him feel nervous. Calrisse's unorthodox views and incredible power of identification intrigue Guy. The chapter ends with Clarisse asking Guy if he is happy, and Guy leaving to think about the troubling question and his new neighbor.

“Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.” – Mustapha Mond

Mond, Resident Controller for Western Europe, and one of only ten World Controllers is introduced in the third chapter as a very important character.

The middle of the book tells the story of how the World State came to begin.

Mond tells the reader how life was like, in regards to reproduction control, child-rearing, and social relations. Mond makes an analogy of emotion and desire to water under pressure in a pipe. One big hole will make a big stream while many small holes will create several calm streams. Mond says that emotions that come from family relationships, sex, and delayed satisfaction of desire go against the World State's idea of stability. Mond says without stability, civilization cannot exist. Mond also says that before the creation of the World State, instability was caused by strong emotions. These emotions caused disease, social uprising, war, countless deaths, suffering, and misery.

Mond tells us that people initially resisted the World State's use of the caste ststem, artifical gestation, and extreme human conditioning. During the Nine Years' War, chemical and biological warfare combined with propaganda and suppression of books weakened all resistence. The World State destroyed importance figures and ideas of the past like Shakespeare, religion, museums and the idea of a family. The World State chose the date of the introduction of the Model T to begin their new era. To assist the World State, a mircle drug, soma, was created to cure the problem of old age.

The end of the book ends in a philosophical argument between Mond and John, the illegal son of the Director. and Mustapha Mond. Before this arguement, they argued about human experiences and what that the World State has destroyed and in the last chapter of the book they argue about religion. Mond shows John his collection of banned religious scriptures, and reads passages from the nineteenth-century Catholic theologian, Cardinal Newman, and from the eighteenth-century French philosopher, Maine de Biran. They say that religious belief comes from the threat of loss, old age, and death. Mond says that in a prosperous environment there is no loss, old age or death and therefore no need for religion. John wonders if it is a inhert response to believe in god, to which Mond responds that people believe what they have been conditioned to believe.

“Providence takes its cue from men,” is the famous line he says that encompasses the entire book.

John claims God is the reason for “everything noble and fine and heroic,” and says that if people in the World State believed in god they would not feel degraded and have reason to feel guilt. Mond replies that no one in the World State is degraded they just live by a different code of morals and belief. Mond says that if anyone in the World State is unhappy, Soma will cure them. He profoundly states that Soma is “Christianity without tears.” In the end, John wants god to help keep himself disillusioned from reality, whereas Mond is more logical and knows that Johns belief in god will lead to unhappiness, which is the ultimate human condition.

Brave new world

Brave new world so far has proven to be an aptly named book. It starts out introducing a world that is astoundingly new to the reader. This world has a caste system including 5 different levels, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. At the start of the book the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is giving a tour to a group of new students at a Hatchery and Conditioning center. The Director explains to the students that the center uses the Bokanovsky Process to create 96 identical humans beings from one embryo. The reader finds out that babies are grown and conditioned in a "factory" and that viviparous living is a baffling idea to citizens in the World State. The reason for the 96 identical twins is so that everyone but the Alphas and the Betas (Bokanovsky Process weakens the egg so it would never be done to them) could more effectively do their jobs, and to create a stable society. The World State's motto is therefore also aptly named: Community, Identity, Stability. Podsnaps technique is another method introduced to us by the Director. Apparently it can speed up the ripening process of the egg in one ovary and can produce up to 16,000 siblings in batches of identical twins from one ovary.

The Director goes on to describe how the embryos travel on a conveyor belt for 267 days and on the last day they are decanted. The Director explains in detail the extreme conditioning some of the embyos may go through. The conveyor belt may shake at certain intervals to simulate movement, some embyos may be treated with alchohal or oxygen deprivation to ensure it fits into a lower intelligene and physical stature caste. Rocket-plane engineers would be kept in constant motion, and chemists would be made immune to toxic chemicals. Furthurmore some embyos destined to work in tropical climates are condition to be physically and emotionally dependant on heat in order, in the Directors words, for them to accept their inescapable social destiny.

The dystopian similarites between the first chapters of Brave New World and 1984 are very clear. The extreme conditioning in order for people to accept their "inescapable social conditioning" remind me of the conditioning that goes on in Orwell's novel. Big Brother wants to erase all knowledge of the past in order to condition everyone born. The reason is that if no one knows about the past, they will "inescapeably" be conditioned to accept and love Big Brother.