Trey Smith
One of the central features of Huxley's imagined future world is a very fixed caste system. In fact, world population has been set at 2 billion people and most of these people are "decanted" (created in a bottle) to be members of the lower castes. The thinking here is that, in order for society to hum right along, there needs to be sufficient workers to take care of the manual and menial jobs. We can't have world leaders digging ditches or plowing fields!
While Huxley presents this caste system as being futuristic, we can find similar examples in our present day. If we westerners are at all honest, most of the world's population has been forced by us into the lowest positions. We need oodles of people to struggle to eke out a life so that we can hoard the amount of resources we claim. We need "third world" workers to toil for pennies per day to meet the demand for our insatiable desires.
Just like in a fixed caste system, most of these people have no realistic hope of ever climbing above their current situation. There is no one at hand who can right the injustices heaped on them daily. If they try to resist the machinations of imperial capitalism, they are squashed like bugs. If they try to protest their horrific living conditions or 14-hour work days, their complaints fall on deaf ears.
All most of them can do is try somehow to survive until tomorrow. That's pretty much what their lives are all about. This is not to suggest that these folks don't laugh, smile and sing like the rest of us. I'm sure many of them do the best with what they have. But a realistic hope of rising about their sorry situation is not in the cards...and they know it!
That's most likely the worst part of all.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are unmoderated, so you can write whatever you want.