What is Aldous Huxley trying to say about consumption up until chapter 3?
In Chapter 3, we learned their philosophy of “ending is better than mending”. When there was
under-production, the wheels of society stop and thousands of men and women die. They teach
this mindset unethically through hypnopedia, so the idea of constant-consumption is imbedded in
their consciousness. Huxley shows a world relying on over-consumption, where all products are
made, and taught to be useful through commercials, hypnopedia or just forced by the way they
were born. This promotes physical living rather than spiritual living, fulfillment by goods and
products, expensive entertainment and unnecessary sports equipment, rather than religion like
Christianity or devotion of marriage. This is also significant in the motif of everybody belong to
each other, as if they are the commercialized product, waiting to be put on display for people to
date -- “like a piece of meat” in Bernard’s metaphor. Huxley’s imagery of over consumption should
warn us the consequences chasing a material life, such as purchasing thousands of dollars of golf
club, vehicles, houses, and treating people like property, eventually to become the alphas of the
world.