Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.īut we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves.

Behaviourism's founder, John B.“We were keeping our eye on 1984. Pavlov's conditioning research had inspired some of his followers to propose general models for explaining and controlling human behaviour. Huxley had heard of Pavlov, for the scene is set in the ‘Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms’.

But what of the basic idea – is it feasible? Some psychologists at the time certainly thought so, and others since have devised techniques intended to control behaviour and shape personality. Huxley's psychology is all wrong, for he proposes 200 pairings of flowers, books and shock modern research on traumatic avoidance learning suggests one might be quite sufficient. ‘Quite a lot’ replies the director, ‘but nothing else.’

‘And didn't they consume transport?’ asks the student. Once upon a time, Deltas, Gammas, and even Epsilons has been conditioned to like flowers and nature, so they travelled to the countryside at every opportunity and consumed a lot of transport. Why, asks one of a class of visiting Alphas, make it impossible for them to like flowers? ‘He could see quite well why you couldn't have lower caste people wasting the Community's time over books, and that there was always the risk of them reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes’, but why flowers? On grounds of high economic policy, comes the answer. Unsurprisingly they soon become frightened of both books and flowers. In Aldous Huxley's fictional 22nd-century Britain, children of the Delta caste are presented with books and flowers, but when they touch either, alarm bells sound and the floor delivers painful electric shocks.

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