Social Control In Brave New World

In the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley the society conditions its people and this is a form of social control. This approach to social control makes the citizens happy and trouble free because of the conditioning they are unable to be any way other than content. The conditioning that they receive happens before they are even alive in the society. One example of the type of conditioning the society uses to control the population is when the Director talks about, “oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par” (Huxley 14). They do this conditioning to keep certain people in a certain environment and some of these people are called Epsilon. The conditioning does not stop at the embryo stage it continues during infancy, childhood and continues to affect the adults. An example of this is when they condition the Delta babies …show more content…
Soma is used by the citizens to escape reality when life gets overwhelming and it is described as a vacation reality in the book. The soma is a form of social control because it keeps the citizens from thinking anything is wrong because the moment they do they are conditioned to take soma to solve the problem. Lenina uses the soma and she desperately wants the soma when she visits the Savage Reservation with Bernard because the shock of the Savage’s lifestyle is too much for her (Huxley 94). The Savage’s mother Linda comes back to civilization and she then eventually dies from taking too much soma to escape the reality of her life and to feel good because she believes the only soma can offer that (130). Lastly this drug keeps the people from being free according to the Savage and this social control because the people are so unaware that their being controlled that the children try to kill the Savage when he is throwing the soma out the window instead of thinking about what the Savage is saying or that the bliss they have is a lie