Dystopian Novel : A Brave New World | Part 1: Conditioning and Soma

[food-for-thought]

 

Hello Steemit!   

I’m back with new Key Points. My “Key Points Dystopian Novel” series are not book reports but a presentation of important key points for you as a guideline for thought processes.
This time around I’m addressing A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley! A Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 and published in 1932. This novel is so rich in content, it would take many webpages to describe the entire novel. However, I’m going to analyze the novel by presenting the various themes. In these Key Points I address conditioning and the government issued and promoted soma drug. This is the fifth in the “Key Points Dystopian Novel” series.    

First occurrence of conditioning 

The very first paragraph of the novel in chapter one. 

“A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.”   

First occurrence of soma 

“Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.P. 178.” “He does look glum,” said the Assistant Predestinator, pointing at Bernard Marx. “Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug.” “Let’s bait him.” “Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.” “Glum, Marx, glum.” The clap on the shoulder made him start, look up. It was that brute Henry Foster. “What you need is a gram of soma.” “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” “Ford, I should like to kill him!” But all he did was to say, “No, thank you,” and fend off the proffered tube of tablets. “Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.” “Take it,” insisted Henry Foster, “take it.”    

 Symbols 

Conditioning 

This topic in and off itself is a symbol because it is the main overarching theme of the novel. A Brave New World explicitly mentions: 

1. Heat conditioning
2. Neo-Pavlovian conditioning rooms (for infants)  
3. The Chemical and Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo 
4. Hypnopædia, sleep teaching 
5. Elementary Class Consciousness 
6. Elementary Sex 
7. Death conditioning   

Places where the conditioning takes place: 

• State Conditioning Centres 
• Adult Re-conditioning Centre 
• Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre (he headquarters of numerous World State programming endeavors).   

World State is mandating conditioning of its citizens from embryo state till death. This symbolizes the grip government has on people in concord with the media, education, business, economy, science and technology. The government is making the populace subject to conditioning to an extend that development of a Police State is not even necessary anymore.  I believe the novel suggests this society became the way it is through careful generational, what Alan Watt describes as predictive programming efforts by the government.   

Alan Watt (author, conspiracy theorist, actor and screenwriter): “Predictive programming is a subtle form of psychological conditioning provided by the media to acquaint the public with planned societal changes to be implemented by our leaders. If and when these changes are put through, the public will already be familiarized with them and will accept them as natural progressions, thus lessening possible public resistance and commotion.” 

Soma 

The major drug mentioned in the storytelling that is consumed on a very frequent basis.
The novel presents soma in diverse forms:

• Gram of soma (powder?) 
• Soma tablets
• Soma bottles
• Ice-cream soma 

Soma is equivalent of happiness in the Brave New World society and is actively promoted and distributed through the World State government to people of all ages.    

Aphorisms  

“Community, Identity, Stability”   

“Everyone works for everyone else. We can’t do without any one.” 

“Everybody’s happy nowadays” 

“Happiness” 

“Take the soma!” 

“Oh, I wish I had my soma.”    

Interesting quotes 

“There is always soma, delicious soma, half a gram for a half-holiday, a gram for a week-end, two grams for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon (…)” . "And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue-liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”   

“Soma was served with the coffee.”  

“One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopædia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!”  “In a different key, “How can I?” he repeated meditatively. “No, the real problem is: How is it that I can’t, or rather-because, after all, I know quite well why I can’t-what would it be like if I could, if I were free-not enslaved by my conditioning.” 

“But, Bernard, you’re saying the most awful things.” “Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” “I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.” He laughed, “Yes, ’Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”   

“Just returned,” explained Dr. Gaffney, while Bernard, whispering, made an appointment with the Head Mistress for that very evening, “from the Slough Crematorium. Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course.” “Like any other physiological process,” put in the Head Mistress professionally. Eight o’clock at the Savoy. It was all arranged.”    

 Critique  

1. Government involvement in the psychological, cultural and emotional affairs of its citizens maybe utopia for them but an anti-utopia for us.   
2. Government suppression by medication, soma, which is a representation of the so called blue pill (falsehood, false security, ignorance, naïve). This when people in fact should be taken the ‘red pill’ of knowledge, reality and true freedom. 
3. Efforts of many players in society (perhaps on the background controlled by the same governmental powers) to manipulate us and break our will and our mental faculties and therefore pose a threat to our very freedom. 
4. The author criticizes the hijacking of human rational  and free will.
5. Drug-soaked happiness which is not truly happiness. True happiness is cultivated by real emotions, real psychological weighing of what is right or wrong, what one likes or dislikes. If everything or everyone is ‘oke’, ‘glorious’ or ‘happy’, how can this constitute true happiness? This means that human intellectual, psychological, emotional and even physical growth comes through a life long learning by encountering both strong as well as the weaker elements in life. Only then we can truly constitute for ourselves what true happiness is. 
6. Soma stands for everything that keeps us from a healthy development of self-awareness and worldview. We cannot be a people who ‘swallows the blue soma pill’ every time a challenge comes our way. We ourselves, the people in our direct environment and our societies need us to be sober and vigilant, to be awake and not narcotized, whether in the literal sense or metaphorically speaking. 
7. Aldous Huxley foreshadowed a world where society consists of people with no real purpose in life, being occupied with “balloon animals” presented by their government.
   A society with many labyrinthine dimensions and levels of conditioning ad seriatim to keep everybody in line with the World State’s motto “Community, Identity, Stability”. To a certain degree Huxley describes a very advanced version of Orwellian thought police. The author, through stating the motto “Community, Identity, Stability”, is mocking the effectuation of twisted morals and ethics. A sense is community, identity and stability isn’t wrong in and of itself but when these concepts are twisted are bend against people it give rise to authoritarianism. 
8. The author criticizes existential nihilism which is the core foundation of the presented society. 
9. Aldous Huxley also critiques people being trapped in an depraved psychological copulation relation with the government. 

Conclusion 

Taken the themes of conditioning and soma into account, A Brave New World engenders questions of free will but at the same time laud it. If all these efforts are needed to break the human spirit, to bend our mental, physical and moral faculties, Aldous Huxley actually subliminally shows the strength each and every one of us has. If a World State with all that fervor and power could accomplish this, we can use the same type of fervor and power to break free and keep ourselves and others free from every form of conditioning or imprisonment of a strange tomorrow, or perhaps of the world we subliminally already live in?  

Last occurrence of soma 

“It was after midnight when the last of the helicopters took its flight. Stupefied by soma, and exhausted by a long-drawn frenzy of sensuality, the Savage lay sleeping in the heather.”   

Last occurrence of conditioning 

“Drawn by the fascination of the horror of pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement, which their conditioning had so ineradicably implanted in them, they began to mime the frenzy of his gestures, striking at one another as the Savage struck at his own rebellious flesh, or at that plump incarnation of turpitude writhing in the heather at his feet.”   

//END OF KEY POINTS//   

KEY POINTS DYSTOPIAN NOVEL SERIES BY @FOOD-FOR-THOUGHT 

1. Key Points Dystopian Novel | A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley | Part 2: Sex 
2. Key Points Dystopian Novel | A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley | Part 1: Conditioning and Soma  
3. Key Points Dystopian Novel | Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury https://steemit.com/freedom/@food-for-thought/key-points-dystopian-novel-or-fahrenheit-451-by-ray-bradbury 
4.  Key Points Dystopian Novel | The Time Machine by H.G. Wells https://steemit.com/freedom/@food-for-thought/key-points-dystopian-novel-or-the-time-machine-by-h-g-wells  
5. Key Points Dystopian Novel | Animal Farm by George Orwell  https://steemit.com/freedom/@food-for-thought/key-points-dystopian-novel-or-animal-farm-by-george-orwell  
6. Key Points Dystopian Novel | Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut https://steemit.com/freedom/@food-for-thought/key-points-dystopian-novel-or-harrison-bergeron-by-kurt-vonnegut    

COMING SOON 

1. Key Points Dystopian Novel | A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley | Part 3: Family  
2. Key Points Dystopian Novel | A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley | Part 4: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon 
3. Key Points Dystopian Novel | A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley | Part 5: Separation 
4. Key Points Dystopian Novel | 1984 by George Orwell 
5. Key Points Dystopian Novel | The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 
6. Key Points Dystopian Novel | Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand 
7. Key Points Dystopian Novel | Logan's Run by William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson Key Points Dystopian Novel | The Fixed Period by Anthony Trollope 
8. Key Points Dystopian Novel | The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood  
9. Key Points Dystopian Novel | Demons by Dostoyevsky  

@Food-For-Thought

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