You're conditioning yourself;;

Huxley, Pavlov and my fried brain you probably won't read it cus it's longer than usual, you lazy donut

In the second semester, I think, we read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. They made us read it and worse, assigned us a chapter each and asked us to explain it in front of the class. I chose to explain the second chapter because I wanted to be done with it (and because it was comparatively shorter than the other chapters).

Brave New World is a dystopian novel, a futuristic satire on a highly controlled social hierarchy that sacrifices its true emotions in exchange for constant, artificial stability and happiness.

It's scary how accurate his predictions are.

The social hierarchy is similar to the caste system in our country. Except it's worse, as they condition the humans even at their birth. They're divided into five groups: Alpha being the highest in the ranks, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon being the lowest. When I say conditioned at birth, I mean literally. They inject alcohol into the blood surrogate that nourishes the embryos(sort of like IVF) so the babies will be born weaker. (The concept of parents doesn't exist. It's considered taboo to have parents, but sex is as casual as drinking a glass of water.)

Everyone will be as the government wants them to be. Familiar, huh

Anyways, I'm not here to talk about the government. Fuck the government.

So, in the second chapter, the Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre gives a bunch of the students(who are all Alpha and Beta because the lower castes only receive the education needed for their assigned work) a tour around the Centre to show them how the children are born and conditioned.

Then comes my favourite part: Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning. The Russian physiologist Pavlov's experiment explains how an automatic, involuntary response can be learned by pairing with a natural trigger. Basically learning by associating certain things with pleasure and pain.

Lemme just explain it through the scene itself: Delta babies, who are fourth in rank, are conditioned to not go near books or roses. The eight-month-old Delta babies are wheeled into the nurseries where big bowls of roses and colorful books are placed. The babies crawl towards them, obviously attracted to the bright objects. But when they go near them, a lever is pressed and shrill alarms and explosions go off. Followed by another lever being pressed to give mild electronic shocks to the babies from the floor. This is to make the Deltas hate nature and books, so they'll avoid free pleasures.

Oooh, so cruel but we do that to ourselves too. We were being conditioned to be the way we are, too. “If you don't do this, you'll be punished” “If you do this, I'll give you chocolate” - probably everyone's mom. You know how to act according to your father's mood, you know when you can't mess around with your mom. But not just others, you conditioned yourself to be the way you are too. Or maybe not?

When I was a kid, I remember I used to use a unique method to study. I used to place my book on the table and stand in front of it. I won't allow myself to sit unless I've memorized the answer. If I couldn't focus even then, I'd start running in place and that'd work. Bah, conditioning.

Humans condition themselves more often than they think. “Since I ate too many calories for lunch, I shall not eat dinner. Since I did well this week, I shall treat myself with a cheat day.” Rewards and punishments according to the stimuli. We're basically like the dogs Pavlov experimented on. Like circus animals. The world's a circus and we were trained or we trained ourselves to perform in a certain way.

Such a pity

We're also conditioned to be a “good” man or a woman, a “good” wife or a husband, a “good” mother or a father, a “good” student or a teacher. But you zoom out and you don't find any good in anything. So we were conditioned for nothing, maybe. It doesn't really work. Some dogs might still get tempted to try and get out of the cage, even if they know they'll be electrocuted.

You might hurt yourself whenever you repeat the same mistake again but you're bound to repeat it again.

In the process of conditioning yourself to become something you're not, you've lost your true self. You want to be like someone, let's say a classmate who studies well, so you try studying using the same methods as her. Now you study well too. You use this method in every field and now you've become a hybrid of everyone around you. Who are you now? Bah, conditioning.

The way of life, sigh.

Conditioning yourself is pointless, unless it actually helps you. Like how I memorized answers by torturing myself, because I actually managed to get my work done. Doing the chores before your mother yells at you, being aware of your father's mood, well, cause you don't want to deal with it. It does help, but it can't end up changing who you are.

Like how Murakami said, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” If you read a book so you'd be as intelligent as the person you saw reading it, because you want to be as cool and intelligent as them, bub you're now them, congratulations. You read and learnt everything you heard from others, now their thoughts are yours. What are you now, or, where are you now? Who are you, eh?

So I might be overdramatic or exaggerating the whole thing because my brain is fried cus of exams. If you think about it, the fear of exams isn't probably something that was conditioned, exams simply just suck. Likewise, some stuff in life naturally sucks, so not everything conditions us, ok?

Joanna Braithwaite

Anyways, if you wanna know what fried human brain tastes like, dm me (don't)

byes