A big theme in the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is the idea of psychology as a means to control the masses and by default society. Psychology is a very broad subject that covers many opinions and ideas. We’re going to cover five psychologists who come from either the psychoanalytic or behaviorist section of psychology. These theories and beliefs they have convey the messages and ideas of control, sleep teaching, and conditioning. These ideas and opinions helped shape several bits and pieces in this novel. There are several different psychologists who discovered ideas that lead to the idea of controlling people.
Most of them did not start out or even work towards the idea of controlling someone. So up first on our tour of psychologists, we have the father of behaviorism, Ivan Pavlov. He started off as a physiologist who was rather passionate with his studies of both the Pancreas and digestion. He did several experiments to conclude data on this subject, earning several gold medals in Russia for his research. One day he began an experiment on dogs to see how the salivary gland works in them. What started out as a simple experiment lead to his discovering of conditioning.
He learned that he could train the dogs to salivate. He would start by giving all of the dogs food and ringing a bell when doing so. After doing this so many times, he began to simply just ring the bell without giving them food. The dogs would still salivate because they now connected the bell to receiving food. This experiment was the stepping-stone for most behaviorist psychology. It was really one of the first physical things you could actually see. It would allow experiments to be done to study just how organisms respond to environmental stimuli.
And that is just what happened. Several people, including Pavlov, began studying the ideas of behaviorism. Pavlov continued to expand on his ideas of conditioning. This idea was strongly used in Brave New World. The main point in the book when they are using the ideas of conditioning is towards the beginning of the novel when they are “training” the children to dislike books and nature. Whenever the young children reached for the book, a loud noise would sound. If they went to reach for a flower, they would receive an electric shock and explosions would go off.
They would do this so much that the memory of that happening would remind them for the rest of their lives not to touch a book nor a flower so they wouldn’t feel that pain again. A man who did very similar experiments to the ones they used in Brave New World was John B. Watson. He came into the time period where behaviorism was just beginning to bloom. His main focus was learning just how you could “condition and control the emotions of human subjects”. He started off doing experiments similar to Pavlov’s but unlike him, he took it a step farther. Watson began doing experiments on human subjects.
Whether it was a step in the right direction is debatable. His most famous experiment is the Little Albert experiment. He gave a little boy by the name of Albert a white furry rat. He let Albert love and play and get attached to the rat. Later on, he would give the rat to Albert and when he went to touch it, Watson would play a loud sound, frightening the child. He continued this until one day he gave Albert the rat without playing a loud noise. Albert was still frightened of the rat. This is the same thing they did to the children in Brave New World to condition them to not like or want books or nature.
Now, one of the biggest psychology influenced ideas in Brave New World is the sleep teaching or hypnopaedia. The sleep teaching is the World States way of getting ideas into the minds of its citizens. But it can only influence people with moral and society ideas. So they wouldn’t be able to force them to do certain things but I guess it isn’t wrong that they could convince them that it is morally okay to do that thing. To enforce these ideas, they have to be rather repetitive with the messages they are sending to them. For example, in the beginning of the book, the Director is talking about how their sleep teaching methods work.
The phrase they have on repeat is telling a certain group of children, in this case Betas, that they should be happy to be one and why the other classes, Deltas and Epsilons, are less than they are. After this was explained. He said, “They’ll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson. ” Sleep teaching in Brave New World came from the ideas and beliefs of psychologists B. F. Skinner and Sigmund Freud. Let’s start with Skinner. B. F.
Skinner, the father of operant conditioning, was focused on the message of conditioning. He believed that if you rewarded someone for an action that action would continue. He created the “Skinner Box”, a maze in which he experimented his theory on animals. He would place a mouse at one end of the maze and food at the other end of the maze. The more often the mouse did the maze, the quicker he was at finding the food because he was motivated by knowing there was a reward, food, at the end of it for him. The results of the Skinner Box experiment directly fit his idea of operant conditioning and thus the theory became a real idea.
Connecting Skinner to the sleep teaching in Brave New World isn’t as directly correlated as the others have been. The idea of it is a little loose but with the sleep teaching, the more repetitive it is, the more effective it is. That’s why they repeat the same phrase over and over again. The more they hear it the more likely it is for it to stick in their heads. Also, they may be rather cautious to believe the things that are being put into their head at first, but once they see that other people believe it too and they feel like they fit in, they will be more likely to strongly believe that idea.
This fits with Skinner’s idea that the action will continue if the action is rewarded. In this case, the reward is fitting in with society and your peers. Like I mentioned above, Sigmund Freud also connects to the ideas of sleep teaching. Unlike other psychologists of his time, he was not a behaviorist. Freud created the psychoanalytic approach to psychology. In this section of psychology, it’s all about the unconscious, not the external environment. He believed that the unconscious was where most decisions and desires were held. It’s the part of your mind that you can’t “see”.
If you put the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud and the ideas of sleep teaching in Brave New World together, you would see that they fit together pretty well. The phrases they are putting into their mind are becoming suggestions in the unconscious. They won’t really be aware of their presence but it will be there working behind the scenes in your mind. By having these ideas or suggestions in the unconscious, they would be directing your life without you even knowing it’s happening. And if you do happen to be aware of it, you are fine with it. By doing this, the whole world can easily be controlled and manipulated by the government.
The book puts it like this, “Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too-all his life long. The mind that judges and desire and decides-made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions… Suggestions from the State. ” (pg. 28-29) Lastly, on our tour we have the ideas of Edward Bernays. He gets his own section for he connects everything all together. Bernays was Sigmud Freud’s nephew who also followed the psychoanalytic approach of psychology.
He was a very persuasive man and was known for his way of manipulating the mind. He used his understanding of the brain, mind, and the unconscious to control the masses. He believed that you can not play to peoples intellectual side, but to their desires that live in the unconscious. He played by the rule that they don’t need it, but if they get it, it will make them better. The big one that he is known for is breaking the taboo of women not smoking. He convinced them that it would make them more independent if they did, and it worked on a huge scale to where all the women in the country were smoking within a few days.
Brave New World as a whole is the idea of Bernays. They are controlling the masses on such a huge scale by playing to their unconscious. They have the sleep teaching going in there along with conditioning them to believe certain thoughts and actions are okay. And then they have, like every other country, propaganda going to continue to enforce certain ideas. And lastly, by mass distributing soma everyday it makes people feel like it’s a part of life and that they can’t live without it. The government of the World State has the whole country wrapped around its finger.
In conclusion, Brave New World is overflowing with the ideas and references to psychologists of the time. Huxley worked these ideas perfectly into his satirical novel in depicting how science and technology created for good can turn against us and turn into a nightmare. Whether Freud or Pavlov, behaviorist or psychoanalytic, he made sure to show all sides of it. He showed it all through the methods of sleep teaching, conditioning of children, and through mass control over the people. As Huxley would think, go on and explore and experiment, but be cautious of its consequences.
