This is probably the last dystopia book I read. Most of them criticize "community" and advocate "individualism" by depicting an extreme world, but reality is more complicated and the real world is not an extreme case.
Chapter 1 2021-02-06
By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. "We would condition them to thrive on heat," concluded Mr. Foster. "Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it."
Chapter 2
"Now bring the children."
They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed in khaki.
Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.
thoughts:
The children were assigned different castes upon birth, and were "taught" to look up to people of higher ranks and to look down to people of lower ranks. These teachings will be planted in their minds since born.
Even though this is a novel, but perhaps this, to some degree, depicts human nature. We thought we, as human-beings, had consciousness, but had we thought of the possibility that our consciousness are formed by our past-experiences, surroundings and genes? Perhaps all our thinking, our actions had been determined, and our consciousness is just an illusion.
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