Psychoanalysis of Brave New World The book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley focuses on a society based on the ideals of Henry Ford, but also, the conditioning brought on by psychology. Psychology is the study of the brain and its functions, especially when it is associated with behavior. This society uses psychological conditioning and their studies of the mind to control their people. With this control they gain a hold upon the society’s mindset of what their psychological behavior should be. One can then assume the Brave New World society to be dependent upon psychology for it to retain the control and stability it wants to achieve. Even though this society focuses on the ideals of Henry Ford, they use many psychologists’ findings to maintain …show more content…
The society not only conditions them while awake, but also when the children are sleeping. In this society, this is called hypnopaedia, or sleep teaching. While this sleep teaching goes on, the children subconsciously keep this knowledge and will obey or repeat it without even knowing they are doing so. Hypnopaedia plays an important role of helping the society understand their roles and how they learn to be happy with it: “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid…” (27). The sleep teachings are repeated all throughout their childhood and are classified as “moral education” (26). Freud believed that “the unconscious silently directs the thoughts and behavior of the individual.” This shows how much the society is unconsciously violated, how they are manipulated without knowing how truly controlled they are. It’s a type of hypnosis that Freud studied, to be able to manipulate patient’s minds and have them do away with unconscious memories, but instead it’s creating a
Social psychology is a scientific study that studies how people think, feel, and how they behave under the influence of other people (Aronson, Wilson & Akert, 2013, p. 2). Thinking about what social influence really means, we tend to think of a person who tries to persuade another person to acting a certain way. It can be a form of peer pressure, like taking that first puff of a cigarette, or it can be conforming to popular societal views, such as obeying the law of the land. Fiction is a great way to learn about social psychological perspectives. Watching popular theatrical films is the perfect way to learn because it illustrates the application of many perceptions within the subject of social psychology.
The book warns readers by portraying what that over-reliant society would be like. The first instance taken from Brave New World can be found in the beginning when it talks about how “standard men and women” are made “in uniform batches” (Huxley 7). The society depicted in the book has discovered technology that enables them to artificially produce the people they desire. These artificial people are manipulated from the earliest stages of their lives. When they are only an embryo, their traits are predetermined by certain controllers that work at the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre” (Huxley 1).
In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley illustrates ways in which government and advanced science control society. Through actual visualization of this Utopian society, the reader is able to see how this state affects Huxley’s characters. Throughout the book, the author deals with many different aspects of control. Whether it is of his subjects’ feelings and emotions or of the society’s restraint of population growth, Huxley depicts government’s and science’s role in the brave new world of tomorrow.
Brave New World, a novel by Aldous Huxley, attempts to send a warning to the people of today’s society that life in America could change drastically if people continue living in the same manner. Some of the main focus points of the novel were love and marriage, economic systems, and technological advances. Love, the economy, and technology are major contributors in how people interact in today and tomorrow’s society. In America people act in ways to preserve and create intimate relationships with other humans unlike in the World State. Economic conditions mandate what products people can afford to buy in any society. Scientific and technological advances today determine what technology is available for use tomorrow. Huxley wanted to shock
From being shocked by electrical apparatuses to hearing loud sirens and bells, they learn subconsciously what to like and dislike. Children learn to fear pleasures that have no function in a tightly planned world (Watts 77). This wipes out any capabilities of having your own thoughts of your own likes and dislikes. Specific personalities and individuality are lost. Incapable of expressing opinion or judgement (Watts. 77).
The government in the future world uses various techniques to make sure the citizens of the World State are kept in check and conformed. Each citizen is imprisoned within his or her own mind, through the use of several psychological and physical devices. They are conditioned to act a certain way or have certain thoughts and ideas. People who fail to fall in line are deported to far away locations. Before the artificial birth of each child, it has already undergone its conditioning to make sure it conforms. The director of hatcheries and conditioning states, “All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable destiny”(Huxley 87-8). People’s minds are programmed to love their assigned jobs and lifestyles. Even after birth they continue to follow the motto of the World State: “Community, Identity, Stability”(21). This motto is extremely ironic having the words identity and stability in it as the World State has sacrificed identity for stability. Shock thera...
Although our world is not extreme as the World State, we are closer than we have ever been to Aldous Huxley’s future prediction of the world. In this dystopian novel, people want what they want, but never what they can’t have. They live through meaningless relationships, extreme censorship, and a substantial amount of soma. Writer, Frances Tapon, says, “Psychologists believe that there are seven factors that influence your happiness: wealth, education, personal freedom, equality, health, social position, and positive life events.” The only difference between what makes us happy and what makes them happy is conditioning. In the World State, people are conditioned from the day they are decanted with chemicals, hypnopaedia, and Neo Pavlova. Humans today have always been told “money is power” and “go to college, get a good job, then you will be happy.” Even though we feel emotions, people will do anything to feel happy just like the World State. Brave New World is our world with a surplus of drugs, sex, and people conditioned to think that their life is happy and
Aldous Huxley is a visionary for his philosophy that we as humans will be destroyed if one must adhere to be just as the rest of society, and for creating a dystopia that echoes todays world in the United States. Brave New World is a novel by Aldous Huxley, which portrays life in a future dystopia, and the repercussions of removing intellectual challenges and morality from a society. Huxley’s goal in writing Brave New World may have been to stop a trend that has already begun: society shaming individuals for being different, as well as the mechanization of the modern world.
Social restriction robs individuals of their creative personalities by preventing freedom of thought, behavior, and expression; but is vital to the World State for maintaining complete control over the society. Social restriction’s purpose is to enforce obedience conformity and compliance out of people. The World State achieves this through two methods; hypnopaedia and shock therapy. Hypnopaedia is sleep-teaching where morals are taught on on repeat during the infant years of children while they are asleep, these messages become permanently embedded in their mind and become their permanent, new, artificial personality. This is proven in the quote “... drops of liquid sealing wax, drops that adhere, incrust and inc...
From the beginning of the novel technology has been a focal point. Brave New World is first set at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. This center is where all the humans are being produced and conditioned. Conditioning a method used to influence ones mind with a variety of different values and morals, predestines these new beings into five different classes Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. As written in Huxley’s Brave New World “All conditioning aims at that making people like their unescapable social destiny.” (16) This quote signifies that each group is designed by the World State to hav...
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World illustrates a colorful, fantastic universe of sex and emotion, programming and fascism that has a powerful draw in a happy handicap. This reality pause button is called “Soma”. “Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.” ( Huxley 54 ).
In Huxley’s, Brave New World, there is a society, known as the World State, where people are divided into different castes, and depending on the caste they are set in determines their place in the community and purpose in the world. If one is an Alpha, he/she will be highly intelligent and be a leader of the free world, while one who is an Epsilon has lowered intelligence and is conditioned to do physical labor. From the process of the human beings being created in test tubes, to their birth and development, they are trained to believe in certain truths. Brave New World is a Utopian novel that uses a form of brainwashing to conform people to the ideal society placed in the plot. Other literature works, and real life occurrences, make it evident that brainwashing is used to condition to believe and behave I certain ways, which become their morals and truths.
This book can be a warning to humanity, telling society that brainwashing can become common and destroy the modern day world. This book makes the people of the modern day world think about what could happen in the near future if society decides to go farther and more into scientific research. Misuses in science could contribute to the making of man into an animal, not a smart, adapted, emotional connected human being. In “Brave New World,” Huxley creates a world that is complete and utterly disturbing to what humanity could become. The people in the World State are controlled through psychological conditioning on a ground breaking scale.
Technology, which has brought mankind from the Stone Age to the 21st century, can also ruin the life of peoples. In the novel Brave New World, the author Aldous Huxley shows us what technology can do if we exercise it too much. From the novel we can see that humans can lose humanity if we rely on technology too much. In the novel, the author sets the world in the future where everything is being controlled by technology. This world seems to be a very perfectly working utopian society that does not have any disease, war, problems, crisis but it is also a sad society with no feelings, emotions or human characteristics. This is a very scary society because everything is being controlled even before someone is born, in test tube, where they determine of which class they are going to fall under, how they are going to look like and beyond. Therefore, the society of Brave New World is being controlled by society form the very start by using technology which affects how the people behave in this inhumane, unrealistic, society.
They program these humans to have needs and desires that will sustain a lucrative economy while not thinking of themselves as an individual. Huxley describes the World State’s intent to control their society through medical intervention, happiness, and consumerism, which has similarities to modern society. Designing life from conception is an intriguing concept. Brave New World’s World State is in control of the reproduction of people by intervening medically. The Hatchery and Conditioning Centre is the factory that produces human beings.