To someone like Lenina, who clings to an infantile happiness, the freedom to “be happy in some other way” is merely frightening nonsense. This conversation illustrates the disconnect between someone who questions the World State definition of happiness and someone who’s never considered anything else.
#BRAVE NEW WORLD QUOTES ABOUT CONDITIONING FREE#
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.” But perfectly conditioned Lenina is distressed by Bernard’s words and his strange fondness for activities like viewing the sea in solitude, and she lacks the capacity to make sense of his ponderings. On their date, Bernard tries talking about happiness with Lenina: “hat would it be like if I were free-not enslaved by my conditioning Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We begin giving the children that at five. This idealization of comfort and stability as society’s highest virtues effectively trickles down to the rest of the population, leaving them completely unequipped to think critically or even conceive of taking risks for the sake of their own freedom. When stability is equated with happiness, anything that undermines stability-many of the very things that had once been seen as enriching and character-forming-must be rejected as harmful. And feeling strongly how could they be stable?” This sums up the way citizens have been conditioned to think about the meaning of life: the feelings brought about by close human bonds and struggles have no redeeming value.
What with mothers and lovers, what with the temptations and the lonely remorse, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with all the uncertainties and the poverty-they were forced to feel strongly.
The pre-modern world “didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. When Mustapha Mond gives students a facility tour, he portrays the distant past as a repugnant place where people were entangled in stifling relationships and constant suffering.
Brave New World thus argues that guaranteed happiness and stability are fool's gold, making adults into infants who do not care about truth or progress. Without these things, humanity loses the possibility of the more significant fulfillments provided by the pursuit of truth in art and science, or the pursuit of love and understanding with another person. But through Bernard, Helmholtz, the Savage, and even Mustapha Mond, Brave New World poses the question: at what cost does this happiness come? What gets lost when every one of an individual's desires is immediately met? The novel's answer is that the satisfaction of every desire creates a superficial and infantile happiness that creates stability by eliminating deep thought, new ideas, and strong passions. All three methods are successful: in the World State, almost everybody really does seem to be happy all the time. And third, whatever sadness slips through the cracks can be brushed away by using soma, a drug with no side-effects that gives the user a pleasant high and makes all worries dissolve away. Second, through the promotion of promiscuous sex as virtuous and the elimination of families or any long-term relationship, the government ensures that no one will ever face intense and unreciprocated emotional or sexual desire. First, psychological conditioning is used to ensure that each citizen is not only suited to their job and role, but actually prefers that role to anything else. This universal "happiness" is achieved in three ways.
In order to maintain its stability, the World State in Brave New World ensures that all its citizens get exactly what they want all the time. This satisfaction of desire, the person would believe, would make them happy. If someone were given the choice between getting what they wanted and not getting what they wanted, they'd probably choose the first option every time.
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