With lockdown in full spin, everyone’s had more time on their hands to get round to reading the books they’ve always been meaning to. And it seems, ironically, that at a time like this, dystopian novels are becoming increasingly popular.
As I’ve been reading books like ‘A Brave New World’ and ‘Handmaids Tale’, it became shockingly clear to me how easily psychology could go wrong. While there is no doubt that the knowledge we have gained from psychology has been invaluable to our understanding of the world we live in; it is terrifying to think how simply it can be lended to the concept of social control.
The concept of conditioning to encourage so-called ‘desired’ behaviours is used in our everyday lives, without most of us even recognising. Loyalty cards, reward systems used in classrooms etc are few of the ways that we allow our minds to be moulded to benefit the system distributing such reinforcements to us. This, however, may not be a bad thing, Positive reinforcement for example, is famously used to encourage discipline in schools. A lot of the social niceties and polite behaviour that adults demonstrate daily has, arguably, been built from these very foundations.
Conditioning, however, was just one of the psychological theories that had been manipulated in Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ which imagined a future world from an early 20th century perspective, in which an intelligence-based hierarchy dominates. Babies are conditioned from birth to adapt to the sector which they will be thrown into. The result was a futuristic world state which no one challenged. The theory of conditioning, which was initially supported by Skinner’s research, involved Skinner’s aim to create an ideal society as illustrated in his book ‘Walden Two’. Skinner wanted to apply his learnings and understanding from using the ‘Skinner Box’ to build a tightly controlled human society based off a system of punishment and reinforcement. But the idea of an ideal society is subjective. What makes it right that one person alone can decide what’s right for society? The concept that operant conditioning can be manipulated, breaches respect for individual liberty and suggests that we as humans don’t have free will. Is it possible to train the whole human race to function in a tightly policed community? In some ways, we already are. After all, a degree of social control is necessary for any civilisation of people to live relatively harmoniously together. But how will we know when social control goes too far? The frightening thing about dystopias such as ‘Handmaid’s Tale’, ‘1984’ and ‘A brave new world’ is that they illustrate how subtly power can be abused to create a whole new way of living: a new restricted world. Even though these tales of modified lifestyles depict the ‘worst case scenario’ and are, evidently, told from a dramatic perspective to grip us as readers, it seems now more than ever, when our world is changing in such extreme ways, that such dystopia’s bear shocking resemblances to certain aspects of our current lives. By Zoe Wreford
