James Hughes
Fleming, 5th

It’s not very easy predicting the future, and it can be easily proven wrong. Aldous Huxley has though, in his book Brave New World. He predicts the future with respect to many aspects of life. He touches on the subjects of drugs and consumption, as well as families and relationships. The book is about life in “Our Ford” about 2540 AD. The book is about how families and relationships are not taken seriously, as well as drugs and dependency upon them with a legal substance named soma. A large amount of the population is made through the Bokanovsky process (a test tube type process) that makes many twins from one sperm and one egg. They are manipulated to be good a certain tasks so there is no shortage of work and are sorted into five groups, once born that predict the rest of their life in the World State. Family separation and dependence on drugs are not only the futures problems though, they are ours too. Huxley describes his depiction of life in the possible future and how we could end up in real life, that is already coming true in some aspects of our life.
Relationships and family in the World State are run completely different than current times. In Brave New World, Huxley depicts family as a sin or public unacceptance. Since a vast majority of the population is made by test tube and the Bokanovsky process, most don’t have a known mother and father. The population is also taught to have a mother and father is “bad” and that mother and father are both inappropriate words. In the world state, everybody in the five groups live together. They don’t have an understanding of what a family is, and the benefits it can bring you mentally and physically. In comparison to current times, in the U.S. we love and cherish our families. They are the ones we lean on in troubled times, and give us stability. If we did not have them we would be devastated and most likely become an unproductive society, with all slipping slowly into depression. Parents teach us our morals (or the lack there of), and what is right and wrong. Without them, who is to teach this? The government? Will we become such an uncontrolled society where the government needs to take drastic measures to contain us? With resemblance to the future, Huxley and his satire may be trying to tell us about how our family situation is heading towards less involved parents and children wanting to lead their own lives; which in some ways are already happening in the U.S. With children leading their own lives and becoming more and more independent, the space for parents in their lives is becoming more and more shallow. If this continues, parents may become irrelevant part of life and just there to birth you. Our situation now is looking more like the World State every day with unknown or uninvolved parents. Another theme in Brave New World that can connect to us to current times is drugs and consumption and how the human race has and will become more and more drug dependent to feel normal. In the world state most take soma, a legal, “harmless drug” that lets people escape current reality. If not taken, many are irritable and believe they cannot survive. Why is there soma in the first place? It may have been planted by the government, as a control tactic to create a totalitarian government, after a collapse and to maintain control of