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The D.H.C. takes the students to the Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms in the Infant Nurseries, where nurses have set out bowls of rose petals and bright books. At the Director's instruction, the nurses bring in carts with eight-month-olds on stacked shelves and dressed in the khaki of Deltas. The babies are taken out of the carts and set on the floor. They crawl to the bowls and books, squealing with pleasure. As they start to finger the rose petals and the pages of the books, the Director gives a signal, and the Head Nurse presses a lever that sets an alarm shrieking. The children start to scream, and then the nurse throws another lever, which sends an electric shock along the floor. The tone of the babies' screaming turns to one of terror, while their little bodies twitch and stiffen. The alarms and electric current cease. The Director tells the nurses to offer the flowers and books again, but the mere sight of them sets the babies to howling. The Director explains that the children will develop what psychologists used to call an "instinctive hatred" of flowers and books. For the students, the reasoning behind the books is obvious; you cannot have the lower castes wasting Community time reading books, which also have the potential to decondition one of their reflexes. Nevertheless, one student asks the purpose of the conditioning against flowers. The Director explains that once Deltas were conditioned to have a passion for nature, the idea being that they would go out into the country and thus consume transport. Unfortunately, a love of nature is gratuitous: it does not keep factories busy. They turned to more economically sound conditioning. Now the masses are conditioned to hate the country but love all country sports, thus compelling them to consume not only transport but also the manufactured apparatus required of sports. The Director then tells the students the story of Reuben Rabinovich, a little boy of Polish-speaking parents who lived while "Our Ford" was still on earth. The students are embarrassed by the smutty words "parents," "mother," and "father," which the Director has to clarify for them. One night, Little Reuben's parents left the radio turned on. While the child was asleep, a London broadcast ran, and the next morning Little Reuben repeated word for word the contents of the programme, a long lecture by an old writer called George Bernard Shaw (one of the few whose works are still permitted). Afraid the child had suddenly gone mad, the parents called a doctor, who, having heard the programme the night before, readily identified it. The doctor sent a letter to the medical press, and the principle of sleep teaching, or hypnopaedia, was discovered. This only occurred twenty-three years after Our Ford's first T-Model (as he says the word, the Director makes a sign of the T on his stomach, and the students follow suit) was put on the market. However, hypnopaedia wasn't officially used until A.F. 214, because early experiments seemed to fail. In fact, says the Director, they were on the wrong track. The early experimenters tried to program children with facts, which they could recite but could not understand. They finally realized that you could not learn a science without knowing what the science is all about, whereas, says the Director, moral education ought never be rational. The Director now leads them to a shuttered dormitory, where eight little boys and girls are being sleep-taught Elementary Class Consciousness. A whisper under every pillow describes the colors of the various castes and exhorts the children to be happy with the role they have been given. The Director tells the students the lesson will be repeated forty or fifty times more before they awaken, a hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months, after which they'll go on to a more advanced lesson. The Director calls hypnopaedia "the greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time." The child's mind will become these suggestions, for all his life: the Suggestions from the State. This chapter describes in detail the conditioning that forms the foundation of the Community's stability. The early Neo-Pavlovian conditioning is based on the work done by Ivan Pavlov in the 1920s on stimulus and response. In his best-known experiment, Pavlov conditioned a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell, regardless of whether or not food was offered. In referring to Pavlov's work, Huxley likens the treatment of people, and especially children, in Brave New World to animals. Babies are cruelly frightened and shocked when they instinctively reach for pretty things. However, the Director sees it as a form of discipline—keeping a child from reaching for something that is potentially dangerous. In Brave New World, the danger is in destabilizing the community through individual preference and underconsumption. Consumption is an important value in the book, one that reflects a concern about contemporary society. It is both a source and an inevitable outcome of industrialization and mass production, and it is here that we learn the significance of the "A.F." by which the World State marks the passage of time. Henry Ford, the inventor of the Model T and the modern assembly line, has been elevated to the status of a deity. In worshiping Ford, the people in Brave New World are worshiping both industrialization and consumerism. Furthermore, all the members of the community are restricted by a totalitarian government—a government that attempts to ensure stability through absolute control. This is often accomplished with propaganda, censorship and even violence. The people in Brave New World are morally and socially conditioned from an early age to accept the ideas of the State, including ideas on consumption, class and sexuality.
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