Brave New World: Adults All The Time

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

"'It suddenly struck me the other day,' continued Bernard, 'that it might be possible to be an adult all the time,'" (Huxley, 94).

Bernard's statement seems paradoxical, but the idea is actually novel to someone with his carefully planned conditioning. He is beginning to discover that the free way that people use one another in his society may be irresponsible and base (he describes this as how a child would act). His attempts at self control are not easily understood or accepted by Lenina and she ponders turning him into the psychologists or authorities for his refusal to follow the mainstream way of doing things. Often, novel thinkers are responded to like this because their ideas are so contradictory to what we have been conditioned to accept and prefer.