"Stability," said the Controller, "stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability." His voice was a trumpet. Listening they felt larger, warmer.

The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning—forever. It is death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.

Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment.

Crying: My baby, my mother, my only, only love; groaning: My sin, my terrible God; screaming with pain, muttering with fever, bemoaning old age and poverty—how can they tend the wheels? And if they cannot tend the wheels… The corpses of a thousand thousand thousand men would be hard to bury or burn.

Basic Set up:

The Controller, one of the spooky leaders of this dystopian society, explains to a group of students why society is organized in the way that it is. In this "brave new" society babies are born in baby-factories, basically. There are no moms and dads.

The Controller in this passage argues that in a perfect society, there's no place for mothers, fathers, or lovers. The bonds of love that hold people together just aren't efficient enough. We can't "tend the wheels" of society if people are crying over their ex-girlfriends.

Is he right, or is he wrong? Well Brave New World suggests that the Controller has got it all wrong. That's because, even though this society is run "efficiently," it's actually very oppressive. People just don't have any freedom to do what they want, including loving who they want to love. And because of this, the society that the novel depicts is actually a dystopia. It looks all pretty and wonderful on the outside, but when we dig a little deeper we see that it ain't all it's cracked up to be.

The excerpt above is written in quite a disjointed way. We get snippets of the Controller's words. And then there's this poetical section about the "machine" of society turning and turning. And the last section is all about how human emotions can get in the way of society functioning properly.

The style of this excerpt serves to convey the Controller's point of view. The imagery is strong: we can really see those wheels turning and those millions of people prospering, or dying. The force of the language makes us see why the Controller thinks as he does. But in the end, we'll find out he's very, very wrong.