Chapter III Summary - Part I

Chapter III is broken up to several parts.

First, is the Controller talking to the Director and his tour of students of the past and how obscene and dreadful it was.

Second, Lenina Crowne and her friend Fanny Crowne are talking about work and what men they are seeing, and Bernard Marx jumps into the scene with his thoughts on the world and how he is the black sleep.

Another random event that occurs in this chapter is the hypnopaedia sleep-teachings in the background.

This chapter is pretty confusing so I will summarize it in parts.

PART I: PAST
The Director brings his tour of students outside into the garden on a nice sunny day. There are about six hundred children running around, playing naked in the garden. The Director talks about how 'charming' it is that the children are playing a primitive sexual game. As the Director continues about how all the games the children are allowed to play must be mind-stimulating challenging games, when one of the ten World Controllers, Mustapha Mond, enters.
Mond begins to talk about history and about the Ford, which is basically the heart and mind of the society. Mond talks about the obscenities of 'mother', 'father', and 'homes' and how mothers used to be obsessed with their children and feed them by the breast thus making Mund state, "Yes, you may well shudder." to the students looking ill at the very obscene thought.
He continues on to say that there are some places in the world where there are savages and yet they have never heard of such a thing as 'father', and says that 'extremes meet for the good reason they were made to meet'.

The Controller's part of the chapter mostly deals with brutality of the past and how old age, poverty, war, disease, mothers, family, and death all used to occur. He describes it in a most morbid way. He says things like this to make the students see the strength of the 'stability' that the society contains, and how lucky they were to never had to have feel such emotions.

The Controller then continues with description of the Nine Year War that took place in the past, or A.F. 141. There were massive killings, corpses everywhere...
Then there was the British Museum Massacre that had two thousand cultural fans gasses with dichlorethyl sulphide, a toxic war gas that blisters the face and attacks eyes and lungs.

He states that government realized that using force was only making things worse.
The government then began using methods of hypnopaedia and conditioning. The government even began suppressing books in A.F. 150, along with anything such as ethics and philosophy that created under-consumption in the society; such as Christianity, God, and Shakespeare.
In A.F. 178, biochemists and pharmacologists worked to create the 'perfect drug' known as soma that has the effects of cocaine and alcohol but without the defects, thus ensuring the stability in the society.
This society has even been able to remove the aging so that youth and beauty can remain constant through a lifetime. Old men were criticized when they retired and would spend time thinking (thinking emphasized as if it were a completely ludicrous idea). Now old men have no time, no leisure, they work all the time and if they should feel the need for a break for even a split second, they can take soma.

"Half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for the weekend, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon.."

He tells them that society is stable. They have a solid grounded job, soma, can partake in any pneumatic girl to girl, and can play Electromagnetic Golf after work.

At the end of the chapter, the Director yells at a couple of children who are erotically playing near the Controller.
The last sentence in the chapter flashes back to the decanted babies glistening as 'rubies' in the red darkness as they move slowly on the conveyors.