2019 Year 12 IB Extended Essays

wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with the Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta” (p. 22 – 23). These powerful prejudices become the opinion of the individual and are so embedded into the society that it stops people from viewing each other as an individual, but rather as a specific caste: “leaf-green Gamma girls and black Semi-Morons swarmed around the entrances. Mulberry-coloured Beta-Minuses came and went” (p. 54). By defining people by their caste, it further drives a wedge between the idea of individualism and prevents citizens from developing a sense of identity. Huxley uses this to highlight the negative effects of viewing people as a collective, rather than as individuals, which is reflective of the ideas of communism which were so threatening in Huxley’s time. World State human reproduction is completed through Bokanovsky’s process, allowing for up to 96 clones to be produced from a single, optimal zygote. This process of human cloning can be likened to that of a mass-produced, identical entity with the Director of Hatcheries stating that “the principle of mass production at last, applied to biology” (p. 5), and further explaining that “Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability” (p. 5). The ability to mass clone people represents a homogenisation that has ultimately left the World State citizens devoid of their identity as human beings as they are denied a defining feature of individuality: physical uniqueness. Abolishing individuality on a physical level is the primary tool the World State uses to implement its planetary motto: “community, identity, stability” (p. 5). This technique further devaluates a human life, as people are seen as nothing more than a product with the possibility of more being created with ease: “after all, what is an individual?...We can make a new one with the greatest ease – as many as we like’” (p.128). Through the protagonist John, a person born outside of the World State, and his abhorrence towards the “nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness” (p.183 – 184), it is evident that this dystopian society has essentially eliminated human difference, instead favouring a mass-produced assembly line of identical human beings. Huxley uses this conclusion to demonstrate the horrifying possibilities of control over individuality and its detrimental effects on society.

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