Brave New World Caste System Analysis

The caste system. Used in feudal Europe, and modern day India it is a social structure designed to divide society into an immovable, rigid class system. The class you are born into, is the class you will be when you die. No social mobility. No protests. If you are born a farmer, you will die a farmer. In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the caste system reveals itself in full force. Divided into five classes, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, the society classifies it’s people's lives based solely on class, which is predetermined from birth. Throughout the story, it is revealed that this ‘utopian society’ is nothing more than a facade masking a dark dystopia. The caste system in Brave New World exposes totalitarian control, human

As on page 65 of BNW, Bernard snaps at a pair of Delta men who, in his mind, aren’t working hard enough. He treats them as subhuman, and views many of them as such. Alphas and Betas are taught that they are superior to the others, resulting in a great discrimination between upper and lower castes. This in turn results in exploitation of the lesser-thans. On page 159 and 160, John the savage is shown a small factory to get a taste of the new world. He is evidently appalled by the ghastly conditions the workers -all Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons- are subjected to. He is even more appalled at how ‘normal’ this appears to the other Alphas and Betas he is with. They see nothing wrong with using those of lower castes as the equivalent of horrendous physical labor. Life, in their eyes, amounted to little or nothing in their eyes. With the Bokanovsky Process, the production of humans had become so easy it was comical. Life was cheap and easy to replace. They saw the world as such. “Why care about the one, when there are fifty others just like him.” Such logic had made human lives, especially those of the lower castes, amount to almost the same as a