Brave New World-1

"The principle of mass production at last applied to biology." (pg. 7)

What??? My reaction to this first chapter was disbelief and shock. Obviously there's some (a lot of) confusion mixed in there, but mostly I'm just dumbfounded that people would think this way. Yes, I know they're characters in a book, but still. They're talking about making the entire population made to order. We live in a society where there is quite a bit of emphasis on being oneself and not being afraid to be different, and this is the exact reversal of that. My mind is literally blown by how nonchalantly the Director and Mr. Foster talk about scientifically creating thousands of people. They're talking about this pretty much in the same way I talk about the weather. Mass production of people? Seriously? We're not talking about toasters or lawn chairs. These are living, breathing, thinking humans that may have thousands of identical clones. I'm assuming that this is supposed to be sometime in the future, but the series of events that led to this had to have been extreme. It could have been over a long period of time, but it could have been relatively short; I don't know, and I don't know that it really matters, but I cannot imagine what would have made people change their thinking so radically.