the hatred for color is definitely a part of our world becoming cynical and depressing
>"eeew, color? but that's for people who like.... enjoy stuff. fucking preps. enjoying stuff is so lame. its cooler to pretend we dont care about anything"
i sometimes wonder if its intentional, if there's some kinda movement to turn us all apathetic and only have us get excited about approved things
if we loved color and beauty and joy, we might accidentally find it in the real world, we might go outside, smell a flower, watch the clouds, look at a beautiful building or a painting made with love and care and realize theres stuff to care about, and then we'll start fighting for that stuff! before we know it, we'll have some kinda... emotions! itll no longer be cool not to care while were getting destroyed! we'll start CARING about that!
no no no! cant have that! only greys and whites for you, step away from the light now, emotions can only come from buying product, its not keeewl to notice, stop noticing immediately
In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out-a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.
"Now bring in the children."
They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted
shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed in
khaki.
"Put them down on the floor."
The infants were unloaded.
"Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books."
Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on
the white pages. As they approached, the sun came out of a momentary eclipse behind a cloud. The roses flamed up as though with a sud-
den passion from within; a new and profound significance seemed to suffuse the shining pages of the books. From the ranks of the crawling
babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure.
The Director rubbed his hands. "Excellent!" he said. "It might almost have been done on purpose."
The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal. Small hands reached out uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetaling the transfigured roses,
crumpling the illuminated pages of the books. The Director waited until all were happily busy. Then, "Watch carefully," he said. And, lifting his
hand, he gave the signal.
The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever.
There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.
The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.
"And now," the Director shouted (for the noise was deafening), "now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock."
He waved his hand again, and the Head Nurse pressed a second lever. The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was
something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and
stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.
"We can electrify that whole strip of floor," bawled the Director in explanation. "But that's enough," he signalled to the nurse.
The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly twitching bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of infant maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl of ordinary terror.
"Offer them the flowers and the books again."
The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images of pussy and cock-a-doodle-doo and
baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their howling suddenly increased.
"Observe," said the Director triumphantly, "observe."
Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks-already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two
hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
"They'll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an 'instinctive' hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned.
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, leaving behind them the smell of sour milk and a
most welcome silence.
One of the students held up his hand; and though he could see quite well why you couldn't have lower-cast people wasting the Community's time over books, and that there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes, yet ... well, 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 (a century or thereabouts), Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers-flowers in particular and
wild nature in general. The idea was to make them want to be going out into the country at every available opportunity, and so compel
them to consume transport.
"And didn't they consume transport?" asked the student.
"Quite a lot," the D.H.C. replied. "But nothing else."
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave 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; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport.
For of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it. The problem was to find an eco-
nomically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes. It was duly found.
"We condition the masses to hate the country," concluded the Director. "But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At
the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as
well as transport. Hence those electric shocks."
"I see," said the student, and was silent, lost in admiration.
- Brave New World
