[379] This leads me to a more fundamental anthropological^a problem that belongs here, the problem of conditioned reflexes. You know that this is the most beloved Russian theory because it was a Russian who invented it, Pavlov^b, and today the Russian philosophers--if we call them like that (at least the interpreters of the system)--are determined by this idea. But unfortunately there is so much truth in this idea that many people in the Western world also have accepted this truth and have now generalized it into a doctrine of man^c: man is a bearer of conditioned reflexes, so if you condition him, then the outcome will be as you want it to be. And we are here in the sphere of two books which have carried through this caricature to the most radical point. The one is Huxley’s^d Brave New World, and the other is the year, 1984, by Orwell^e. These two books are

completely dependent on the theory of conditioned reflexes and use this theory to the extreme. The dictators also did it in the concentration camps and in many other ways--marching, working in gangs, etc. And they had a very good result, especially in the concentration camps where they wanted to transform human beings completely into objects^f determined exclusively by conditioned reflexes. That was the meaning of these institutions, which had no meaning otherwise because when they were in full swing, there were no enemies any more. But the intention was to point within a whole nation, places where the whole nation is subjected to radical conditioned reflexes. Not everybody was in the concentration camp; but the fear of being in it was enough to

produce, even in the others, as much conditioned reflexes as the dictators wanted--BUT NOT QUITE AS MUCH--and this is the important thing to learn from these experiments in which theory