Death Conditioning In Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a novel about a society in which everything is controlled, determined and conditioned with nothing being left to chance or undecided. Conditioning is what the novel is based around and is so important that the opening chapters are dedicated to explaining the process. In the World State, sex and death are normal events as the people are numbed to them both. The society also conditions the people by banning books and focusing on technology. Sex is a sport, ultimately ruining intimacy. Death is taught to be a part of the process, ultimately killing feelings towards loss. Books are banned, ultimately killing intelligence and curiosity. Although Brave New World takes conditioning to an extreme, our societies experience certain types of conditioning such as

In Brave New World, death is simply something that happens to your body when it has gotten worn out. In chapter 14 the nurse said the savage was, “Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry as though death were something terrible, as though anyone mattered as much as all that!” It shows how death is conditioned into the people to be certain. Death, especially of the lower classes, is simply brushed off as no big deal. The nurse also says, “Number 3 might go off any minute now” shows that the people have lost their identity and as if no one cares. In our society video games are becoming more and more deadly and violent. With video games such as Grand Theft Auto , Mortal Combat, and Call of Duty centralizing death and murder, the act of killing becomes normalized and dulled with the repeated action. According to Charisma News several mass murders have been linked to video games, such as the Sandy Hook shooting, the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado and the prayer group shooting by Michael Carneal which were all frequent players of some violent first-person shooter video