“His conditioning had laid down rails along which he’s got to run. He can’t
help himself he’s foredoomed. Even after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle.” (222)
Conditioning is not limited to Huxley’s grim depiction of a controlled utopia. Everyone is conditioned to believe a set of values of what is truth and what is a lie. The utopia pre-determines the likes of the society by hypnosis and instrument conditioning (rewarding of punishing a subject when something is done so that it is associated with pain or pleasure). Huxley has taken our own community’s conditioning to an extreme to show how being made to believe what society wants robs us of our own freedoms. Bernard Marx was too short for his caste and suffered for it; however, because of his isolation that resulted because of his difference, this allowed him to become aware he was “enslaved by [his] conditioning” (91) and realized that the conditioning the people of the utopia received as infants still affected them today. Are we being conditioned to “like [our] inescapable social destiny”(13) and if so in what way?
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Another quote that goes slong this subject is "People believe in God because they've been conditionedto believe in God." (235) This a way we are conditioned, in religion. Ususally we practice the religion that our parents practice. The only difference between this type of conditioning and the conditioning in Brave New World is that in our world, when we reach a certain age, some of us may convert.
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