Name: Nikita Patel
Due Date: 15 Nov 2018
In the novel “Brave New World” written by Aldous Huxley, he introduces us to many important components of the future world based on the prevalent circumstances of the society: society and class, sex, science, power, suffering, drugs and alcohol etc. Among those different components, I would like to mainly focus on the society and class which in my opinion are critical in today’s world.
In this novel author describe 5 different type of classes: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon. The caste system still exists today, especially in less-developed or developing countries. Huxley described the caste-system using factors such as skin color, physical ability etc. As per that classification, the people in Alpha class belong to the highest caste, whereas epsilons are the people from lowest caste. Huxley goes on to describe that according to the caste, a person would wear clothes of a different color and people from each caste are assigned different jobs according to their social status. Also, they get some of the additional facility based on their social status. The upper caste like alpha and beta are the ones who receive a more humane treatment during the prenatal stages. The reasoning behind this is to prepare those individuals for more important and challenging tasks which they can perform in the future. But for lower-caste different process is used, since their work tasks mainly include monotonous factory-like jobs. This is the base of the caste system in of this novel, which as a whole is portrayed in the novel as the key to social stability. One important thing to note is that this caste system works as a built-in system of social stratification, which can also be referred as a class system without any possibility of moving between the levels of the societal hierarchy.