Parallels Between Social Conditioning in Dystopian Fiction and Modern Society

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the World State maintains control by manufacturing its citizens' bodies, narrowing their consciousness, constructing their environments, and teaching them to view their social assignment as their whole personal identity. Some parts of this dystopian world remind me of our own world. There’s always some level of truth concealed inside dystopian fiction; the world is fictional, but the patterns aren’t. The movies The Hunger Games and Divergent come to mind.

Before I continue, shout out to my colleague, Isabela, for recommending this book to me <3

Coercion and Conditioning

Coercion changes behavior through force or pressure, while conditioning shapes behavior through repeated learning and reinforcement.

The World State shapes its citizens so they have little to no reason to resist their environments since their desires are already tailored to their assigned roles. The main process taking place throughout this book can be understood as the preemption of individuality—the World State intervenes with individuality before it can become psychologically, socially, or biologically disruptive.

With Brave New World, I want to use the first two chapters in the book as a guide to examine the subconscious mind, conditioning, identity, and control. By focusing on these themes, I intend to connect how Huxley’s imagined world exaggerates familiar social patterns that are reflected in our own world today.

The Death of Organic Identity

The book opens inside the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center. Chapter 1 is presented as a tour led by the Director, who’s leading a group of students through “The Hatchery.” In this dystopian society, people are hatched and then conditioned. Hatched, not born. From the beginning, the language being used throughout the World State conveys how individuals are treated as products being manufactured for a specific social function. Even the word “hatchery” removes the sacredness associated with birth by making human life sound industrial.

The Bokanovsky Process and the Destruction of Individuality

Excerpt:

“One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.” (Huxley, 1932, p.5)

In the dystopian world of Brave New World, a single egg can be divided into dozens of identical human beings through the Bokanovsky Process. Human beings are produced in batches—why? Because a unique individual is too unpredictable, but a batch? Manageable. An individual has the possibility of developing desires, values, and ambitions that exist outside of their assigned social role, whereas a batch can be conditioned more easily and used more efficiently. The Director describes the Bokanovsky Process as one of the major instruments of social stability because the system can’t maintain control without sameness. Stability requires predictability, predictability requires conditioning, and conditioning requires the preemption of individuality.

The World State’s motto, “Community, Identity, Stability,” initially sounds positive, but each word has been redefined to serve the system’s interests. Community means functioning in service of the collective order, identity refers to the caste and role assigned to a person before birth, and stability means preserving a predictable social structure so that nobody develops the desire or capacity to disrupt it. What might seem like social harmony is actually a system that controls people and relies on everyone remaining the same. Citizens may eventually feel as though they’ve chosen their beliefs and their position in society, but Chapter 1 reveals that their lives have already been organized for them from the beginning. We can see similar patterns in today’s society—people are shaped by cultural norms, institutions, and larger social systems before they can critically think about these influences for themselves.

Everyone is born as a baby, not knowing how society works, obviously. Children absolutely need shaping and guidance, but the problem begins when the world defines a child’s limitations and starts enforcing them as the way they’re supposed to live, shaping and limiting who the child believes they’re allowed to become. Everyone is shaped by something, and that shaping is necessary, but the real question is whether it helps someone grow into their true self or molds them into what society prefers.

Guidance vs. Programming

Guidance gives a person the necessary tools to understand and navigate the world by creating structure without eliminating the possibility of questioning, growth, and self-discovery. Programming, on the other hand, narrows a person into a predetermined role by teaching them which version of themselves will be accepted or rejected by society. With programming, the child may believe they’re discovering themselves when, in reality, they’re just becoming the version of themselves that has received the most validation.

When people believe they’ve chosen their path freely, it’s still worth considering how much that choice was shaped by what they were taught to see as possible, worthy, or realistic in the first place. Programming doesn’t feel like someone’s controlling you; a lot of the time, it just feels like common sense. It happens through family expectations, school standards, cultural values, religious standards, respectability politics, survival modes, and societal pressures. It feels normal because it was introduced before you had sufficient awareness to recognize its influence.

That’s not to say these influences are inherently bad, because most of the time, they’re not. They can provide structure and valid guidance for navigating life, but when it comes down to how much we value our options and whether certain choices are presented as genuinely possible, choices that were never made available to us, or were made to feel as though they weren’t meant for us, are often left unexamined, pushed to the back of our consciousness and never seriously explored. This can stunt self-discovery because the limitations imposed during childhood can prevent a person from truly getting to know and understand themselves in adulthood. It can also stunt the feeling of fulfillment in their life.

The Bokanovsky Process exaggerates the programming that society and larger forces impose on us. However, its deeper function is to destroy the possibility that a person could become something the system didn’t anticipate by assigning people roles and creating the conditions under which those roles feel natural and self-chosen—in our society, we see this same influence through programming that’s reinforced by social institutions, cultural influences, and the media we consume.

Desentization

Excerpt:

“The workers’ overalls were white, their hands gloved in pale corpse-colored rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost.” (Huxley, 1932, p.1)

Human life is being created, yet the environment feels stripped of life. The sterility of the space reflects the World State’s relationship to human life as simply something to manage and prepare for use.The Hatchery is disturbing because its violence is carried out calmly and precisely. Nothing appears chaotic, and no one has to act openly cruel for the system itself to remain violent. The process is clean, advanced, and efficient, which makes the dehumanization easier to overlook. Human life becomes easier to control once individuality is treated as an obstacle to the system.

Desensitization in Healthcare Systems

Hospitals are institutions built to preserve life, but they can also operate within systems where human life and the patient’s individual experience become secondary to the institution’s procedures. Care is technically still being provided, but recognition of the patient’s humanity can diminish when they’re regarded primarily as cases to be managed on a checklist. What’s life-changing and frightening for the patient may be routine for the staff, and that repetition can create a level of detachment. Some familiarity is necessary for healthcare workers to function, but it can also lead to desensitization, where patients become easier to manage when they’re seen mainly as medical problems instead of people experiencing fear and vulnerability.

Bias makes that reduction even more dangerous. Once a person is filtered through assumptions, especially assumptions based on race, gender, or sexuality, their pain can be underestimated or treated as an exaggeration, and the judgment formed through those assumptions can begin to matter more than the actual person. A place designed to provide care can still produce unequal treatment and medical harm. This desensitization doesn’t mainly happen through intentional cruelty, but through routines and structured systems that prioritize efficiency and put human life second to the process.

Huxley pushes this institutional control to its most extreme form by removing intimacy from birth altogether. The Hatchery, therefore, reflects the most extreme outcome of institutionalizing human life. Once procedure becomes more important than recognition, a person can be treated according to their function before they’re ever understood as a person. Dehumanization doesn’t need to appear openly cruel when the system has already learned to value institutional efficiency over human life.

“It’s For The Betterment of Mankind”

As the Director leads a group of students on a tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, the students follow him, frantically scribbling in their notepads every time he speaks. The students here are learning about conditioning while they’re also being conditioned themselves. So basically, the Director is simultaneously teaching them about the system and teaching them how to feel about the system. As a figure of authority and knowledge, his words shape how the students think because they’re young, impressionable, and learning about the world from someone in a position of power.

During the tour, the Director explains how people are created, sorted into castes, and conditioned for specific roles, and he presents each step as something positive. For example, the Bokanovsky Process is framed as “progress” instead of the mass production of human beings that stunts individuality, and the removal of free will is framed as something necessary for stability. Even though the students get to see what happens inside of the Hatchery, the Director is the one who provides meaning to everything before they can think about it for themselves.

Through conditioning by exposure and reframing, the students are repeatedly exposed to practices that would otherwise appear disturbing. In contrast, those same practices are explained through language that makes them sound logical and necessary. They’re being taught about the system through the same limited consciousness the system intends to reproduce.

Conditioning by Means of Miseducation

Education itself isn’t the issue; miseducation is. Miseducation occurs when information is false, distorted, or presented in ways that limit how people understand what they’re being taught. Miseducation can happen depending on the curriculum, the institution, the geographic location, and the person delivering the information. Education can become a form of conditioning when information is framed in a way that boxes people into a limited understanding without encouraging them to question it, and that limited understanding is then reinforced. Even when the information is technically true, it can still be taught from a biased perspective that shapes how people view themselves, other groups, and the world around them.

This is how education can reinforce xenophobia, political propaganda, or the dehumanization of certain groups while still presenting itself as neutral knowledge. The danger comes from the context that’s removed and the interpretation that’s placed around the information by imperfect humans who may carry their own biases. In this case, education is used as a weapon to limit the perceptions of these young individuals rather than expand them.

Limited Knowledge Control Through Hierarchies

Excerpt:

"Just to give you a general idea," he would explain to them. For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently, though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.” (Huxley, 1932, p.2)

The hierarchy’s function is to manage knowledge and control power. In most institutions and in society at large, people are assigned roles that grant them different levels of access to information. They’re taught what they need to know to perform their role and keep the system functioning, but they’re not always given enough information to understand how the entire system works. This separation of knowledge helps preserve the hierarchy because the system depends on people remaining within the limits of their assigned roles. If everyone had access to the same information, then they’d have more power to question how the system truly operates and decide whether they wanted to continue participating in it, or how they wanted to participate. Limited knowledge keeps people involved without allowing them to fully understand what sustains the system. They’re not completely ignorant or excluded from it, but they’re only included to the extent necessary for them to perform their role without disrupting the hierarchy.

***Brief Social Studies Academia Advocacy!***

Fields like psychology, sociology, social work, criminology, history, cultural studies, etc, help people understand human behavior and the systems that run society. Yet, these degrees are often seen as less practical or less attractive. Subjects in the Social Sciences give people a deeper understanding of themselves and the world. But, people can be discouraged from studying them because building a stable career in these areas often means more schooling and more debt, and, in some cases, no promise of the income or recognition people expect for all that effort. You’ll often see people working in these positions are “overworked and underpaid.” Society tends to make “high-status” and conventionally secure careers look more appealing, while careers that encourage deeper thinking about society are seen as less valuable. Hm, I wonder why…

The Caste System: The Manufacturing of Inequality Through Conditioning

In Brave New World, society is divided into five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Alphas are given the highest level of intelligence and prepared for positions of authority. Betas are also educated and developed, but they work beneath the Alphas. Gammas are created for routine work, while Deltas are mass-produced for lower-level labor. Epsilons are placed at the bottom and deliberately restricted so they can perform the most basic and physically demanding work.

Excerpt:

Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par." Again he rubbed his hands. "But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?" asked an ingenuous student. "Ass!" said the Director, breaking a long silence. "Hasn't it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?" It evidently hadn't occurred to him. He was covered with confusion.  (Huxley, 1932, p.15)

The Director’s response to the student reveals that conditioning continues through the environment. The State understands that assigning someone to a position isn’t enough on its own, because the environment must also reinforce that position and teach the person what to expect from life. An Epsilon needs an Epsilon environment because that environment helps keep their consciousness within the limits of the role they’re expected to fulfill. It shapes what feels normal and what feels possible and within reach. When someone is surrounded by the same conditions, expectations, and limitations for long enough, those conditions can begin to feel less like something imposed on them and more like the natural structure of life.

This same process occurs throughout our society, as meanings are attached to different environments and geographic locations. Neighborhoods, schools, institutions, and entire communities can become organized in ways that place people into social categories before they’ve had the opportunity to define themselves. Certain environments are given more resources, access, and opportunities, while others are intentionally structured around limitation and then treated as though the people living within them naturally belong there. The environment teaches the person where society has placed them, and over time, it can also teach the person not to imagine themselves outside of that position.

Chapter 2 shows how the World State teaches people to feel about these differences. In Huxley’s dystopian world, these categories are explicitly named, while our own world has a similar structure of categories that also shape how people are viewed. Both are enforced by means of sleep-teaching, although that sleep-teaching is carried out differently in the book than it is in real life.

Sleep Teaching (Hypnopaedia)

During a sleep-teaching lesson, Beta children are repeatedly told that they should be happy to be Betas. They’re taught that Alphas are intelligent but have to work too hard, while Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are presented as inferior. The lesson allows the Beta children to feel satisfied with their own position by teaching them to look both upward and downward within the hierarchy. They don’t resent the Alphas because they’re taught that authority comes with an undesirable burden, but they don’t identify with the lower castes because they’re taught to look down on them.

Excerpt:

“The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively. "Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet." At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch. “…all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta." ". .. There was a pause; then the voice began again. 'Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able…” The Director pushed back the switch.” (Huxley, 1932, p.30-31)

This relates to our world through the programming we receive from media and entertainment. The media can carry subconscious messages through the way stories are written and the roles certain people play, plus the meanings attached to those roles. When the same patterns are shown over and over again, they can begin to shape how people view others without them consciously realizing what they’re taking in. Sleep teaching can still apply while someone’s awake, because a person doesn’t have to be physically asleep to absorb information unconsciously. When people take in media without actively thinking about what they’re being shown, the subconscious can absorb the attitudes and beliefs underneath it. This is what people mean when they talk about being “woke” versus “asleep” in society.

Over time, these subliminal messages embedded throughout the media can influence how someone perceives others and how they treat them. The differences are subtle, but they still affect how a person’s behavior is interpreted and whether they’re viewed or treated with the same level of respect. People can also be conditioned to view themselves through these same messages and start limiting who they believe they’re allowed to be. Through repeated exposure to the same viewpoints, especially when there’s limited access to anything outside them, those ideas can be mistaken for personal judgment rather than programming.

Programming and Human Connection

Programming that conditions a person to remain psychologically asleep reduces their ability to think for themselves and form meaningful connections because they’re no longer approaching people as individuals, but through preconceptions that were already placed in their minds. The more those beliefs go unquestioned, the more they shape the person’s entire perception of the world. They make shells out of everyone, and they also make a shell out of themselves too.

When a person is programmed to operate within a certain way of thinking, they can become rigid in how they perceive the world and approach human connection. Connection can start to feel scripted or performative because it’s being measured through social expectations that tell people what connection is supposed to look like. Someone can appear connected to others and still not feel genuinely connected because an unconscious layer of programming keeps them from recognizing what they actually want in their relationships. That programming can also affect how they respond to people or experiences they don’t fully understand. A negative reaction doesn’t always come from genuine dislike. It can come from the tension between what the person naturally feels and what they’ve been conditioned to believe they should feel.

This is important when discussing manufactured inequality because inequality is sustained through the meanings society attaches to different people. Those meanings become preconceptions that affect how people relate to one another and how they understand themselves. They can interrupt human connection before it even has a chance to develop because the person is responding to the category they were taught to see rather than the human being in front of them. Over time, this can stunt self-discovery and create a deeper internal conflict between a person’s real responses and the beliefs they’ve unconsciously absorbed.

Dehumanization Through Scientific Language

This excerpt from the book is an example of the desensitized language surrounding human life. The Director and Mr. Foster are discussing human beings in terms of calculations and production measures.

Excerpt

“Eighty-eight cubic metres of card-index," said Mr. Foster with relish, as they entered. "Containing all the relevant information," added the Director. "Brought up to date every morning." "And co-ordinated every afternoon." "On the basis of which they make their calculations." "So many individuals, of such and such quality," said Mr. Foster. "Distributed in such and such quantities." "The optimum Decanting Rate at any given moment." "Unforeseen wastages promptly made good." "Promptly," repeated Mr. Foster. "If you knew the amount of overtime I had to put in after the last Japanese earthquake!" He laughed good- humouredly and shook his head. "The Predestinators send in their figures to the Fertilizers." "Who give them the embryos they ask for." "And the bottles come in here to be predestinated in detail." "After which they are sent down to the Embryo Store." "Where we now proceed ourselves." And opening a door Mr. Foster led the way down a staircase into the basement.” (Huxley, 1932, p.9-10)

When people are reduced to numbers, biological material, categories, and outcomes, cruelty can be masked through the language of expertise. The more technical the language is, the easier it is for the characters to avoid the moral weight of what they’re describing. The racialized language used throughout this chapter further complicates the depiction of dehumanization because the text references bodies from different geographic backgrounds as objects of scientific management, using a detached biological vocabulary that screams of the racism and colonial attitudes present within both the fictional world and the real historical context of Huxley’s era.

By categorizing and describing people according to supposedly innate biological differences, the narrative exposes how scientific discourse can be used to reinforce racial hierarchies and justify unequal treatment. In doing so, the Hatchery’s approach doesn’t only reduce human beings to measures of biological value, such as reproductive capacity or efficiency, but also reflects broader patterns of racialized exploitation. This process turns existence itself into a resource to be managed, further illustrating how systemic prejudice can become embedded within the systems used to organize and control society.

Femininity, Reproduction, and State Control

Excerpt:

“In a gap between two tunnels, a nurse was delicately probing with a long fine syringe into the gelatinous contents of a passing bottle. The students and their guides stood watching her for a few moments in silence"Well, Lenina," said Mr. Foster, when at last she withdrew the syringe and straightened herself up. The girl turned with a start. One could see that, for all the lupus and the purple eyes, she was uncommonly pretty. "Henry!" Her smile flashed redly at him—a row of coral teeth. "Charming, charming," murmured the Director and, giving her two or three little pats, received in exchange a rather deferential smile for himself.”What are you giving them?" asked Mr. Foster, making his tone very professional. "Oh, the usual typhoid and sleeping sickness." "Tropical workers start being inoculated at Metre 150," Mr. Foster explained to the students. "The embryos still have gills. We immunize the fish against the future man's diseases." Then, turning back to Lenina, "Ten to five on the roof this after- noon," he said, "as usual." "Charming," said the Director once more, and, with a final pat, moved away after the others.” (Huxley, 1932, p.17-18)

This excerpt brings out the attitudes toward women and femininity in the book. Lenina's introduced while performing a medical procedure, but Huxley quickly shifts the attention away from what she's doing and toward the fact that she's pretty. I noticed that the male characters aren't described through their attractiveness in the same way, but with Lenina, her appearance becomes one of the first things the reader is told about her. We also don't really learn anything about what she thinks. She turns, smiles, and responds pleasantly to the men around her. It makes her seem almost aloof, like her role in the scene is to be attractive and agreeable. When Mr. Foster asks what she’s giving the embryos, Huxley specifically says that he makes his tone “very professional.” That detail makes the professionalism feel performed, to me at least, almost as though he and Lenina are briefly playing their expected roles before returning to the familiarity already present between them. The Director giving her “two or three little pats” reinforces that dynamic and performance by making the interaction feel patronizing and childlike.

In our world, women are still looked down on in ways that aren't always obvious. More women now hold “positions of power” than in the past, but that doesn't mean the attitudes toward women and femininity have disappeared. A lot of the barriers against women have changed, but the subconscious beliefs remain the same. Women are still susceptible to being seen as less competent than men and more emotional, and they're usually evaluated based on how agreeable they are toward society.

Reproduction and State Control

In the Hatchery, most female embryos are intentionally made sterile. They’re called freemartins. A freemartin is a female body that appears structurally normal but is unable to reproduce. The World State still wants women to exist inside of society, participate in sex, work, and function within their assigned roles, but it doesn’t want reproduction happening naturally through the body. Fertility is treated like an unnecessary feature, something that can be removed unless the State has a specific use for it.

Excerpt:

For of course," said Mr. Foster, "in the vast majority of cases, fertility is merely a nuisance. One fertile ovary in twelve hundied—that would really be quite sufficient for our purposes. But we want to have a good choice. And of course one must always leave an enormous margin of safety. So we allow as many as thirty per cent, of the female em- bryos to develop normally. The others get a dose of male sex-hormone every twenty-four metres for the rest of the course. Result: they're decanted as free- martins—structurally quite normal (except," he had to admit, "that they do have just the slightest tendency to grow beards), but sterile.  (Huxley, 1932, p.13-14)

Fertility is considered a nuisance because natural reproduction can create life outside of the institution, and it creates the kind of unpredictability that doesn’t align with the State, which is exactly what they’re trying to prevent. The World State decides which bodies are useful for reproduction and which bodies need to be sterilized in the name of social stability.

The freemartin shows how the World State redesigns femininity and reproduction around usefulness. A female body is allowed to exist, but only in the way the system prefers. If fertility doesn’t serve the State, then it becomes something to manage or remove. The question is never what the body means to the person living inside of it; it’s only whether the body serves the system usefully. This also changes the meaning of womanhood, motherhood, and sexuality in the book. Sex still exists, but it’s been separated from reproduction. People are encouraged to participate in sexual life, but pregnancy, family, motherhood, and natural attachment are stripped away from it. The World State wants women without reproductive power unless the institution is using that power.

This connects to our world because reproduction has always been one of the main areas where society tries to organize women’s bodies. Women’s reproductive lives are constantly shaped by laws and social expectations that influence how their choices are judged. A woman’s body is treated as both personal and public. People debate it, regulate it, moralize it, judge it, profit from it, and build belief systems around what women should do with it.

The World State views fertility as a threat to social order because it introduces unpredictability and creates a form of biological autonomy that can’t be entirely regulated. Similarly, in our own world, women’s fertility has long been subjected to external control, reflecting the ongoing attempts of states, religious institutions, and other social authorities to manage reproductive autonomy.

This control doesn’t only appear through direct legal intervention, such as restrictions or permissions surrounding abortion, contraception, and assisted reproductive technologies, but also through medical practices, cultural norms, stigma, and expectations surrounding motherhood. When we look at historical and current examples, including forced sterilization, pro-natalist and anti-natalist policies, unequal access to reproductive healthcare, and ongoing political debates about reproductive rights, we can see how fertility becomes a public issue where women’s bodies are treated as subjects of regulation. In both Huxley’s fictional world and our own society, the management of fertility is deeply connected to how power is organized and who controls the body.

Conclusion

The first two chapters of Brave New World, in my opinion, offer a solid psychological framework for understanding how identity, conditioning, and the subconscious mind interact. Although Huxley takes these ideas to an extreme, the patterns themselves aren’t unfamiliar, and they encourage us to ask where our own beliefs come from.

A lot of the limitations people experience within human connection, personal transformation, becoming better people, or becoming our best selves can be connected to programming and subconscious limitations that were imposed way before we were aware of them. These patterns have been passed down through generations, and they continue to shape how we think, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to other people until we consciously begin questioning and unlearning them. This is also where shame and shadow work come into the conversation because questioning ourselves isn’t always comfortable, especially when it requires us to recognize that some of the beliefs we’ve accepted as our own were never actually chosen by us.

This breakdown only covered the first two chapters of Brave New World. I think there’s so much more to explore throughout the rest of the book, and maybe in the future I’ll go through the other chapters and touch on some more points.

Thank you for reading! Check out Sibyl Subliminals on Youtube if you want support reprogramming your subconscious mind.

— SIBYL¹¹ ꒷꒦♛❤︎

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References

Huxley, A. (2006). Brave new world. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.