Huxley's vision of the new world has some surprising similarities to our own world,
especially the fact that people are subconsciously forced into doing things. In the Brave New
World, people had things repeated to them while they slept to make them make certain
decisions without realizing it. In the world today, we are shown things through commercials
and advertisements so many times, till they come to us naturally. There are advertisements
everywhere, on the television, on the radio, by the roadside,
in movies, in magazines, basically everywhere. After hearing a message many times, even if
a person isn't paying attention to it, they can remember it if they just think a little bit. For
example, a couple of summers ago, there was a commercial for a legal team where an old
guy simply explained what they were and gave you the number. Later at a picnic, my step-
brother was able to remember the number in seconds when he found a pay phone even
though he never specifically paid attention to the commercial. This is
scarily similar to Brave New World, where if the situation fit, phrases from the sleep-talking
would simply roll off their tongues without giving it a thought.
One of the phrases often repeated to the children in their sleep is that old and torn
clothes are bad, and that if someone rips their clothes, they should buy new clothes instead of
mending them. Nowadays, if the average person tears their clothes, they don't even think of
fixing them, they simply throw them away. In the world of Brave New World, they may think of
fixing it at first, but because of the sleep-talk, they move away
from that idea. In the current world, most people don’t think of mending clothes because they
don't really know how anymore, and because everyone wants clothes that are "in style,"
anyway. People want new clothes all the time because the media keeps changing the way
that people are "supposed to dress," so that people are constantly buying clothes. For
example, a while ago, in all the media like movies, everyone wore ties that were very wide,
which made everyone want wide ties. After everyone had wide ties, all the people in movies
started wearing narrow ties.
The sleep talking in Brave New World also was targeted to make you happily accept
the part in the caste system that they had been put in. Here in America now, we don't quite
have a defined caste system, but there are poor people, middle class/average people, and
very rich people. The very rich and famous are obviously happy with their position since they
have so much money, which is like in Brave New World how all the alphas were happy to be
alphas since they were better looking and smarter than everyone else. 