In Huxley's Brave New World, the Social Predestination Room (SPR) is a laboratorial room wherein embryos are grown, monitored, and conditioned in order to "engineer," as it were, each new person born into the World State. The World State oversees all breeding in order to create individuals who can fill society's various roles, roles which require certain skills and various levels of intelligence, suggestibility, and creativity.
Depending on how their embryos develop, everyone born from the SPR falls into one of the World State's distinct social castes: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Alpha and Beta are the highest functioning, most intelligent members of society, so their embryos are allowed to develop in normal/favorable conditions. However, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are significantly less intelligent and less talented than the Alphas/Betas, and this deficiency is achieved by exposing the embryos to alcohol, decreasing oxygen, and electro-shock therapy among other things. All newborns are also exposed to hypnopaedia, which is essentially playing recordings of phrases that will affect how the newborns think when they grow up, while they sleep.
In essence, this room controls what the World State believes to be every important pre-conscious or developmental factor that affects who people become. The SPR is the ultimate application of science to building a society: it removes the "human" elements of child-rearing like warmth, support, and love. It seeks to remove what it believes to be the risk of human error. The SPR functions like an assembly line for humans, using a repetitive, standardized process so as to remove chance and create every component for a "Utopia" (which, as the novel illustrates, is actually a horrible dystopia.)
No comments:
Post a Comment