Chapter Take Sham Truth and Conditioning into the Vibro-Vacuum Machine? of Brave New World - Study Guide by Aldous Huxley

the cracks that appear from time to time in the make- up of the World State. The apparently perfect Alpha-plus Helmholtz suffers from what can only be his deeper nature showing through. As he says to Bernard, "Did you ever feel... as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?... a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something important to say and the power to say it - only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power. If there was some different way of writing... Or else something else to write about..." And Bernard says to Lenina, hovering above the channel in his helicopter, "It makes me feel as though... I were more me... more on my own, not so completely a part of something else, not just a cell in the social body." Conditioning is a powerful force in shaping behaviour, but it has to do so against natural urges. Similarly, the Neo-Pavlovian electric shock treatment works to override the babies' natural love of the beauty of things such as flowers.

There are other imperfections in the World State's conditioning. Whilst Bernard has been subject to the same hypnopaedia as the rest of the population, his diminished stature has laid him open to the conditioning that everyday experience imposes. Prejudice shapes his world almost as powerfully as sleep teaching has shaped the world of everyone else: "For Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons had been to some extent conditioned to associate corporeal mass with social superiority. Indeed, a faint hypnopaedic prejudice in favour of size was universal. Hence the laughter of the women to whom he made proposals, the practical joking of his equals among the men. The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone..." Even Lenina, an apparently model promiscuous and 'pneumatic' citizen, finds herself spending unduly large amounts of time with Henry Foster, and even finding herself attracted to the unconventional Bernard. And Huxley reminds us that however perfect the World State appears, there is always the potential for human fallibility: Bernard's stature is attributed to a mistake in his 'production', and Lenina, in a moment of distraction brought on by human emotion, fails to immunise an embryo against sleeping sickness. He is to die twenty-two years further into the future. There is always the potential for trouble in 'paradise'.