It is no accident that Bernard Marx in Aldous HuxleyÆs Brave New World is tormented by his awareness of his individuality. Huxley uses BernardÆs last name to refer to Karl Marx, who is famous (infamous?) for his quote that ôReligion is the opium of the people.ö Marx was a socialist, and the quote was meant to explain his belief that religions were organized to relieve peopleÆs anxieties about their personal responsibilities for the inequities in life. Instead, the State would relieve peopleÆs anxieties because in a socialist society everyone was technically ôequal.ö For this reason, the State in Aldous HuxleyÆs Brave New World essentially has created a single religion for its people. But rather than a religion based on a spiritual God with whom people may communicate individually, the StateÆs religion is based on the materiality of Henry Ford and his representation of a mechanical assembly-line society.
Huxley uses the name Ford as a reference to Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company (Gannon 41). Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company revolutionized manufacturing around the turn of the 19th century by devising the assembly-line technique (Gannon 41). Paul Gannon believes that Huxley used the name Ford to reference the alienation the individual feels from his work product that the assembly-line technique fostered. GannonÆs reading is supported in the text by HuxleyÆs use of the ôsign of the T,ö which seems to be a reference to the Model-T Ford, the car that Gannon argues is often used to signal the opening date of a new industrial-capitalist era (Gannon 41). The people in Brave New World use the name Ford as we today use the name God. So the Director shouts ôOh, Ford!ö when he wakes the children (Huxley, 20) and refers to the Controller as ôhis fordship, Mustapha Mondö (Huxley, 23). Time is even measured as A.F., or ôAfter Ford,ö just as we measure years with B.C. (Bef
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