Conditioning and Fordism
By Ripley Beaver
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley is a story of the dystopian future where mass production overpowers quality of a person. In this dystopian future, people are made into a group in a form of a caste system where, through conditioning and mind-altering drugs, they remain throughout their entire lives. This idea is brought about by the philosophical school of thought of behaviorism, as defined by David Hume, as demonstrated by John Watson and Rosalie Rayner on various animals and “Little Albert”.
David Hume advertised the school of thought called monism where, by using logical arguments, that there can only exist the physical world or the mental (in the mind). Behaviourism states that the physical world exists and the mental world only exists because it has been brought about by the physical world existing. Epiphenomenalism, a form dualism, acts as a sort of compromise between dualism and monism by saying that physical events exist and they influence the creation of mental events (thoughts) and are able to be manipulated. This idea was proposed by Thomas Huxley, Aldous Huxley’s grandfather. During the early 1920’s, there was an experiment put forth by John Watson testing this hypothesis in which a small child, nicknamed “Little Albert” was placed around various items, pets, etc. After “measuring”(qualitative data) a baseline, when Albert would approach an animal, Watson or Rayner would strike a piece of metal behind Little Albert. Little Albert, being a baby, would begin crying. After repeating this event several times, whenever Little Albert was placed by the animal, he would begin crying and crawling away from the animal. This led them to the conclusion that by associating the rat with loud noises, Little Albert would subsequently always associate rats with loud noises and be afraid/cry out (Dodson).
Huxley references the idea of mass production, or Fordism in society. The mass production of goods out produced normal handmade items and subsequently goods came at a much lower cost than other handmade goods, thus running them out of business. Huxley uses this argument, pairing it with social darwinism, to say how if a society can be more stable and efficient than the surrounding societies than they (if they are self sufficient) would survive longer than the others. Thus by using the aforementioned conditioning used on Little Albert on an exponentially larger scale, one would be able to theoretically create a society in which there is no civil unrest, simply because the civilians don’t realize the problems they have and are incapable of change.
Kevin Dodson. Ways of Knowing Selected Readings. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2000.