Who are you?

“That is the secret of happiness and virtue- liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” (pg. 12)

Brave New World was one of the first dystopian novels ever written. However, it is not as harsh as many other dystopias, such as 1984. Everyone in the society in Brave New World is happy, but without any choice in their lives. If they are perfectly content and want to do what they are supposed to do, it begs the question: does freedom exist? The society seems to believe that they have a certain amount of choice, but their minds are manipulated so that things that appear as choices were decided a long time before in their conditioning. It forces us to question how different anyone- even in our society- would be if they had been raised differently or had a different combination of DNA. How much are we formed by how we are brought up- is there a certain amount of our personalities that is dictated by our own “conditioning”?