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The Director and students proceed outside to the garden, where six or seven hundred naked children are playing in the June sunshine. They watch a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, in which twenty children circle a complicated chrome steel tower that hurls a ball through one of many holes. The Director comments that it is strange to think that even in Our Ford's day, most games were played without more than a ball, a few sticks, and maybe some netting. Imagine, he says, the folly of letting people play elaborate games that did nothing to increase consumption. A nurse emerges from some nearby shrubbery with a small howling boy. When the Director asks what is the matter, the nurse says that the boy seems reluctant to join in the ordinary erotic play. She has noticed it a couple of times before, and she is taking him to the Assistant Superintendent of Psychology, just to see if there is anything abnormal. Inside the Centre, the four thousand electric clocks strike four and voices call over the trumpets to change shifts. Henry Foster and the Assistant Director of Predestination take the lift up to the changing rooms, conspicuously ignoring Bernard Marx from the Psychology Bureau. In the Embryo Store, Lenina Crowne walks briskly toward the door. Outside, the students are joined by his fordship Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe, and one of the Ten World Controllers. He sits down on the bench with the D.H.C and repeats that inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk. Bernard Marx smiles contemptuously as he listens to the conversation between Henry Foster and the Assistant Predestinator in the lift. At the same time, Lenina Crowne walks into the Girls' Dressing Room, where she finds Fanny Crowne, from the Bottling Room. Although they are both Crownes, the two are not related; the surname is a result of having only ten thousand names among the two thousand million inhabitants of the planet. Mustapha Mond asks the students to consider what it was like living with one's family. It is as impossible for the students to imagine as is the idea of "home," a word they are not familiar with. The Controller describes home as a few small, stifling rooms over inhabited by a man, woman, and rabble of children, with no air or space, an under sterilized prison of darkness, disease, and smells. Reeking with emotion and suffocating intimacies, it bred dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between members of the family group. Lenina asks Fanny whom she's going out with tonight, astonished when Fanny says no one. Fanny tells her she has been feeling out of sorts lately, and the doctor has advised a Pregnancy Substitute. Although the first is not required until the age of twenty-one, Fanny is doing it two years early. She shows Lenina the boxes and phials in her locker, which include ovarin, mammary gland extract and placentin. The Controller tells the students that Our Ford (Our Freud, as he called himself whenever he spoke of psychology) was the first to point out the dangers of family life. A world full of fathers was a world full of misery; a world full of mothers was full of "every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity"; a world full of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, was full of madness and suicide. Fanny is astonished to hear that Lenina is still seeing Henry after four months, and what is worse, Lenina has not had anyone else in all that time. Fanny warns Lenina that she ought to be careful. Not only is it bad form to go on and on with one man, especially at Lenina's young age, but the D.H.C. would be furious if he knew. It is no wonder, says the Controller, that the pre-moderns were miserable: "Their world didn't allow them to take things easily, didn't allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty—they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?" Fanny tells Lenina that there is no need to give up Henry, but to have somebody else from time to time. Lenina complains that she has not felt very keen on promiscuity lately, but Fanny says she ought to make the effort. After all, everyone belongs to everyone else. Lenina tells her she is quite right, and she will make the effort. The Controller says that "feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation." Arrested impulse spills over into feeling, passion, even madness. He tells the students they are fortunate; no pains have been spared to make their lives easy, and to preserve them as much as possible from having emotions at all. Changing clothes, Henry Foster tells the Assistant Predestinator that Lenina Crowne is a splendid girl, wonderfully pneumatic, and advises him to try her. The Assistant Predestinator says he will, at the first opportunity. On the opposite side of the aisle, Bernard Marx overhears and turns pale. Lenina admits she is beginning to get bored with nothing but Henry, and asks Fanny if she knows Bernard Marx. Fanny is horrified by the thought of Lenina going out with Bernard; even though he is an Alpha Plus, he has an unsavory reputation—he spends most of his time by himself. But Bernard has asked Lenina to go with him to see a Savage Reservation, and Lenina wants to go. The Controller asks the students if they have ever encountered an insurmountable obstacle or been compelled to live through a long period between wanting and having something. The feeling this produces is just horrible. Then the Controller tells them their ancestors were so shortsighted that when the first reformers offered to deliver them from these emotions, they refused. He says something called Christianity forced the women to go on being viviparous. Bernard Marx is angry that the Henry and the Assistant Predestinator are talking about Lenina like a piece of meat. At the same time, in the Girls' Dressing Room, Fanny says Bernard Marx is ugly and small; she heard somebody made a mistake when he was still in the bottle that made him come out stunted. Lenina says that's nonsense. Henry tells the Assistant Predestinator that he's welcome to Lenina—everyone belongs to everyone else, after all—and Bernard Marx, a specialist in hypnopaedia, thinks about the sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions that make one truth. As Lenina tells Fanny she is going to accept the invitation, Bernard thinks how much he hates the two men. The Controller tells the students that the Caste System was proposed and rejected because of something called Democracy, but after the Nine Years' War (which began in A.F. 141), the great Economic Collapse forced a choice between World Control and Destruction. A conscription of consumption compelled every man, woman, and child to consume so much per year, in the interests of industry. Government gave up force, and ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning, and hypnopaedia took hold. An intensive propaganda campaign against viviparous reproduction and the Past was accompanied by the closing of museums, the destruction of historical monuments, and the suppression of all books published before A.F. 150. Lenina gets dressed for her date with Henry Foster, donning around her waist a green Malthusian Belt with the regulation supply of contraceptives. Fanny compliments her on the belt, and Lenina tells her Henry gave it to her. Christianity—the ethics and philosophy of under-consumption—was a crime against society in an age of machines, says the Controller. All crosses had their tops cut off and the thing called God was replaced with the World State and Ford's Day celebrations, Community Sings, and Solidarity Services. In the past, they also had a thing called Heaven, but they drank enormous quantities of alcohol. There were things called the soul and immortality, but people took morphia and cocaine. Finally, two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized, and six years later developed soma, the perfect drug—"euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant." It has "all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects," he says. "Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or mythology." Henry Foster and the Assistant Predestinator decide to bait Bernard; they tell him he looks glum and offer him some soma. The Assistant Predestinator quotes some hypnopeaedic wisdom: "one cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments." Bernard calls them idiots and thinks how much he hates them. The introduction of the Controller is used to provide the historical and philosophical background of the New World. In this chapter, Huxley jumps back and forth between the scene with the Controller and the scenes in the changing rooms, creating a sharp contrast between the dry explanation of present values and the personal impact it has on the characters, whose main conflict will be between conformity and individuality, free will and slavery. As had become evident by the end of Chapter 2, religion has been replaced by consumption, and the individual values of the family have been replaced by the values of the State. In fact, the idea of family is now associated with a selfishness that is both obscene and claustrophobic. In the New World, everyone belongs to everyone else. On the face, this is not a bad sentiment, except the World State has taken it to an extreme. In order to ensure stability, all strong emotions have been eliminated from people, including intimate bonds with one another. One natural result is the emphasis on promiscuity. At the time Brave New World was written, people were demanding more sexual freedom, which came into conflict with contemporary moral and religious teaching. In the story, conditioning has created a society in which promiscuity is not only accepted, it is necessary and expected. Though many of the women in the society are sterile freemartins, unsterilized women like Lenina are conditioned to use contraceptive belts, called Malthusian Belts after the eighteenth-century Thomas Malthus, who argued for population control. Again, we see conditioning used as an explanation for the beliefs in the story. By the same token, we have to question what role conditioning has played in our own beliefs, however different. In the Controller's mind, relationships encourage the kind of intimate bonds that provoke strong emotions and unhappiness, which he believes are incompatible with a stable society. Therefore, individual desires are sacrificed for the good of the Community. Lenina Crowne is warned by her friend Fanny about becoming too close to Henry Foster; Lenina might prefer to be less promiscuous, but such a violation of social policy can only come to a bad end. Fanny's warning foreshadows the crisis later, while Lenina's decision to accept Bernard's invitation to the Savage Reservation starts the actual plot of the story. Bernard Marx is introduced as a character isolated by his own individuality. Unable to conform to society despite his conditioning, Bernard is snubbed by the other Alpha males. When he overhears them talking about Lenina, he is enraged by the thought of her as a piece of meat. This implies that Bernard's particular difficulty is in suppressing his own individual identity, as well as the individuality he perceives in others.
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