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Unit 18: Aldous Huxley—Brave New World: Detailed Study of Text-I

times which indoctrinates them to believe they are superior to Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, Notes
but not as clever as Alphas.

Analysis

Huxley reveals some of the main sources of social stability. Science creates and conditions
people to become happy members of society. The comment by the Director, “What man has
joined, nature is powerless to put asunder,” reveals the extent that the conditioning can alter
behavior.

Pavlovian conditioning comes from Pavlov’s research, which showed that animals could learn
to do an action through punishment and reward. Huxley expands this concept to humans,
who use it to condition the babies of the lower classes. In his example, Deltas learn to avoid
roses and books by giving them electric shocks when they touch those items. Psychologically,
this conditioning also lowers these classes to the status of animals.
The use of hypnopaedia strengthens the conditioning and indicates the subversive nature of
the state. Huxley is showing the readers that propaganda starts at birth and can occur even
when we are unaware of it, as when sleeping. He reinforces the point that people are unaware
of how influential the propaganda is by constantly having his characters quote “hypnopaedic
phrases.”

The goal of the state is to ensure social stability, and the conditioning creates the “community”
by segregating each infant into separate classes. This promotes stability by creating a group
of workers with state-controlled preferences. Thus, economic stability comes from creating
preferences that promote spending. This is touched on more in Chapter 3.

Chapter 3

Summary
The student tour goes outside where they watch some children playing a game of Centrifugal
Bumble-puppy. The game is elaborate and requires complex machinery. They learn that the
heavy reliance on machinery increases consumption of material goods and thus boost the
economy. Young children are also encouraged to play erotic, sexual games. A boy who refuses
to play with a young girl must go to a psychologist.

The Director begins to talk about the past when parents rather than the state raised children.
Mustapha Mond, the Controller of Western Europe, interrupts him and tells the students that
the “home” consisted of a mother, father, and children and, along with being diseased and
smelly, contained overbearing intimacies and emotions.

Freud receives credit for showing that the “appalling dangers of family life” lead to individual
instability. The Controller indicates that this in turn leads to social instability. Society has
therefore coined the phrase “everyone belongs to everyone else” in an effort to eradicate
individualism.
The Controller also gives a history lesson, and describes how the old governments banned the
first reformers. After the Nine Years’ War destroyed most of the old world and brought the
World Controllers to power, they struggled to defeat embedded culture by initiating a campaign
against the past, destroying monuments and books, and banning sexual reproduction. Religion,
and in particular Christianity, was reduced to a form of worship of Ford. To emphasize Ford’s
great contribution, mass production, they cut all the crosses to make a T in honor of the Model
T car. Additionally, a new drug called soma was invented which acted like cocaine or heroin
but which had no ill side effects.

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