Consumerism In Brave New World Essay

Words: 806
Pages: 4

When we first think of conditioning in human behaviour, the first name that comes to mind is Pavlov, a Russian physiologist who originated the term conditioning during the 1890’s while observing learned behaviour in dogs (McLeod). Conditioning in Huxley’s novel Brave New World parallels advertising in society today. The ideology behind the World State, emphasizes the practice of conditioning by unethical means and focuses on consumerism in order to establish success and pseudo happiness in the World State. Conditioning is a strategy used by the World State to indoctrinate its citizens into behaving a certain way. A favoured technique of this is hypnopaedia, also known as sleep hypnosis, used by the World Controllers to train individuals …show more content…
This way of thinking is also becoming evident in our society today, with marketers using sex appeal to draw in audiences and this in time, is creating a culture of promiscuity where it is becoming more popular for people to use one another without remorse. More importantly, the citizens of the New World are also robbed of their freedom and are instead exploited for the purpose of economic gain and consumerism. Consumerism as it is presented in the novel, Brave New World, is the force driving the flow of society in all its success and “happiness”. Citizens of the New World feel as though their identity is secure and comfortable, however, deceivingly their original identity has been obliterated by mass production and consumerism (Smith 3). This type of deception is also prevalent in today’s use of advertisement, with “present commercial practices [hiding] the most various methods of manipulation” (Neacsu, Nicoletta-Andrea, et al. 190). Thus, we can see how both worlds, our World and the New World, are governed by a society whose values and happiness are based on the ability to satisfy desires and whose successes are determined by economic