Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Table of Contents
Chapter 3
Summary
The Director leads his group outside to the garden where they first observe a group of children playing a game called Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, an elaborate game involving several complex mechanisms for moving a ball from one place to another. The Director muses on the distant past, when children would entertain themselves with games that only involved one ball or a couple of sticks. He describes this as “madness,” and explains that today’s Controllers would never approve a game that didn’t involve enough apparatus to encourage consumption.
Next, the group turns its attention to a couple of young children playing a sexual game. The D.H.C. calls this “charming.” From behind a different bush, a nurse emerges with an upset little girl and a weeping boy. Apparently, the boy has been resisting playing sexual games, and the nurse is taking him to see the Assistant Superintendant of Psychology to see if anything is abnormal.
After encouraging the little girl to “find some other little boy to play with,” the Director explains to his students that sexual play between young children in the time before Ford had been considered immoral and had been actively suppressed. The students are completely shocked, and what to know what effect this had on society.
At this point, Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller for Western Europe, unexpectedly appears. He is greeted with reverence by the Director and the all-male group of students. Mond begins a lecture on history, beginning with an actual quote of Henry Ford’s: “History is bunk.” Knowing that Mond is rumored to have access to forbidden literature and knowledge of the past, the Director’s face expresses some nervousness that he will tell the boys more than they should know, but Mond assures him, “I won’t corrupt them.”
Mond describes a “Nine Years’ War,” and the “Economic Collapse,” during which time the world was in complete disorder and...
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