Beyond Independent Thought

“In the World State in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, embryos are placed in a social class and conditioned to the careers and peers that best meet the needs of the community … we learn about the social class called Epsilon.

Bred to Be Unintelligent.

The World State produces five distinct social classes named from the Greek alphabet. Alphas and Betas are society’s elite, while the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons make up the working class. Each caste has a distinct responsibility in the community, as society could not function without any of them. 

Epsilons are conditioned before birth to be the lowest class worker. Embryos are deprived of oxygen to ”keep the embryo below par.” To make sure the Epsilon will be satisfied with the monotonous labor, ”an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity.” Intelligence would get in the way of happiness for an Epsilon. — Study.com

World Uniformity

“The uniformity of the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons is accomplished by careful poisoning with alcohol and produces — in Huxley’s word — “sub-human” people, capable of work but not of independent thought. For these lower-caste men and women, individuality is literally impossible. As a result, built on a large foundation of identical, easily manipulated people, the society thrives. Stability lives, but individuality — the desire and/or ability to be different — is dead.”

“Scientific Dictatorship“

“Democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit…

“The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they possess a really effective system of mind-manipulation. In the past free-thinkers and revolutionaries were often the products of the most piously orthodox education. This is not surprising. The methods employed by orthodox educators were and still are extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictator education will really work—with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.”

Still, “… permanent crisis is what we have to expect in a world in which over-population is producing a state of things, in which dictatorship under Communist auspices becomes almost inevitable.” (ibid.)