О дивный новый мир / Brave New World

“We can electrify that whole strip of floor,” explained the Director. “But that’s enough,” he signaled to the nurse.

The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down. The little bodies relaxed, and yelping turned into a normal cry of ordinary terror.

“Offer them the flowers and the books again.”

The nurses obeyed; but at the sight of the flowers and the colourful books, the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their crying increased.

“Observe,” said the Director triumphantly, “observe.”

Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks—already in the infant mind they were linked.

“They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an �instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.” The Director turned to his nurses. “Take them away again.”

Still yelling, the khaki babies were loaded on to their dumb-waiters and wheeled out.

One of the students held up his hand; he could see quite well why you couldn’t have lower-caste people wasting time on books, he couldn’t understand about the flowers. Why go to the trouble of making it psychologically impossible for Deltas to like flowers?

Patiently the D.H.C. explained. If the children were made to scream at the sight of a rose, that was on grounds of high economic policy. Not so very long ago, Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers—flowers in particular and wild nature in general.

“And didn’t they consume transport?” asked the student.

“Quite a lot,” the D.

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; but to keep the tendency to consume transport.

“We condition the masses to hate the country,” concluded the Director. “But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports.