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Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isnt nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand. I suppose not, said the Savage after a silence. But need it be quite so bad as those twins? He passed his hand over his eyes as though he were trying to wipe away the remembered image of those long rows of identical midgets at the assembling tables, those queued-up twin-herds at the entrance to the Brentford monorail station, those human maggots swarming round Lindas bed of death, the endlessly repeated face of his assailants. He looked at his bandaged left hand and shuddered. Horrible! But how useful! I see you dont like our Bokanovsky Groups; but, I assure you, theyre the foundation on which everything else is built. Theyre the gyroscope that stabilizes the rocket plane of state on its unswerving course. The deep voice thrillingly vibrated; the gesticulating hand implied all space and the onrush of the irresistible machine. Mustapha Monds oratory was almost up to synthetic standards. I was wondering, said the Savage, why you had them at allseeing that you can get whatever you want out of those bottles. Why dont you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while youre about it? Mustapha Mond laughed. Because we have no wish to have our throats cut, he answered. We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldnt fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphasthat is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it! he repeated. The Savage tried to imagine it, not very successfully. Its an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron workgo mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socializedbut only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they arent sacrifices; theyre the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which hes got to run. He cant help himself; hes foredoomed. Even after decanting, hes still inside a bottlean invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course, the Controller meditatively continued, goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower- caste bottles. Its obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing. What was that? asked the Savage. Mustapha Mond smiled. Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in a.f. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasnt properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen. The Savage sighed, profoundly. |
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