Imagine talking to your best friend about how you were feeling that day, and how your boss found out you were being too emotional outside of work hours, and you are now about to be sent to an island with "like-minded" people. The last thing you feel is happiness, but you have no right to be unhappy, because you grew up without that emotion, so instead you inject yourself with pills to improve your mood. This is the environment that Aldous Huxley presents in Brave New World, a futuristic society where humans are raised in bottles and have been manipulated to meet certain criteria, or "conditioned" from the time they are embryos . In this new society, emotions, religion and culture are sacrificed for the sake of social stability. People are not allowed any knowledge of the past and everything is only explained according to the most basic truth. The freedoms we enjoy today are almost completely abolished. Naturally, we associate happiness with the ability to do what we want in life, so if we didn't have this ability, can we still be happy in life? In the novel this seems achievable on the surface, but when you look closer it shows that human beings react to their environments in different ways. The reason why the citizens of this new society seem happy is a relative thing; they have little experience with mental pain. The society they live in is loveless and they are rather unintelligent. The citizens of the novel have been conditioned by the state since they were embryos. The state manipulated every aspect of these new babies' development, giving them every chance of building a "perfect" society. When conditioning these babies, the state completely got rid of mental pain. These babies have no idea what pain really is. However, you can forbid the knowledge of pain, but you cannot forbid the conditions that cause it. In the case of Bernard Marx, this condition manifested itself in the form of harassment regarding his physical appearance; and for Helmholtz Watson it was finding life and work meaningless. These conditions are uncontrollable by any external force, and no matter how hard the state tries to eliminate the causes of pain, for example by making everyone look the same and filling these people's lives with materialistic processions , this still doesn't account for a single force. or two odd individuals.