All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” The hypnopaedia is used to “inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour.”… “Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions. As the Director of Hatcheries so neatly puts it: “That is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you’ve got to do. schools) their minds are conditioned by a variety of methods from nightly hypnopaedia to cruder tactics such as giving toddlers electric shocks. Conditioned physically while still being hatched, later on in State Conditioning Centres (i.e. In order to ensure that all future members of this new society are content, they are conditioned by the State. By treating or more accurately mistreating the embryos in the Social Predestination Room, it predestines them to a social class, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon with only the necessary desires and skills the embryos will need to fulfil their allotted lot in life.
Not content with now being able to hatch humans, Brave New World also predestines and conditions them.
“Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!” It’s reminiscent of one of the more striking images from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis where the workers are portrayed not merely as working the machines but become in fact part and parcel of their working apparatus. In Brave New World standard men and women are regarded as a sign of progress and a major instrument of social stability – where a small factory can be staffed with the products of one single egg. In a world of two thousand million inhabitants there are now only ten thousand surnames. Foreshadowing the Nazis and their industrial processing of the bodies of their countless victims in concentration camps scattered around Eastern Europe, here bodies are incinerated in the Internal and External Secretions Factory and burned for phosphorus recovery.Īiming to make the fertilizing process as efficient as possible, the Bokanovsky Process has been developed which allows 96 human beings to grow from one egg where only one grew before, leading to 96 identical humans who are just one step above pond life but able to do the more menial tasks required by society, and thanks to conditioning, are happy with their lot. Death is seen as a useful means of recovering phosphorus. Children undergo death conditioning from 18 months. As with birth, death is regarded “like any other physiological process”. In other words, the birth of new life is seen not as an act of creation but merely as a fertilizing process. This is after all a world without families, without mothers and fathers, where the idea of someone giving birth to another human being is considered abhorrent. We are first introduced to this world by a visit to the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre where babies are hatched, conditioned and decanted. “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol none of the defects.” (This drug seems to have the effects that the internet, social networking sites, and computer games have currently – numbing you from the present and taking you to a virtual reality instead). It’s a world where an individual’s freedom is subsumed for the apparent good of the social whole and where the populace is conditioned from childhood in the mores of this Brave New World and kept compliant by constant use of a drug called soma. Written in 1932, it’s chilling how prescient the author, Aldous Huxley, seems to be.īrave New World is a world where mankind serves the advances of science rather than the other way round where promiscuity is compulsory to avoid humans having close personal ties with each other the concept of family has been abandoned for the very same reason thereby thwarting any possibility of divided loyalties.
After Ford and the novel depicts what happens to society when Americanisation/Globalisation has reached its zenith. Brave New World depicts what the world will be like in the future.
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