Amusing ourselves to death
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Amusing ourselves to death
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Re: Amusing ourselves to death
#2If you are interested in a rather in-depth examination of this line of thinking, I highly recommend Adam Curtis's 2002 documentary "The Century of the Self"
Re: Amusing ourselves to death
#3What made Brave New World far more interesting to me than 1984 is that the bad guys in 1984 are really clearly bad guys who hide behind an impossibly thin veneer of public mindedness in order to live exactly as grandly as they want whereas in Brave New World the man at the top truly believes that he is a force for good in the world. His life is not a selfish one, not in the same way, he just believes that most people are happier living in his pleasure dome. He doesn't hate or fear the protagonist but instead he wants to help him by spiriting him away from the happy drugged masses to let him live out his life with the other people who don't want to live that way. It's an entirely different kind of conflict and much much more compelling.
Re: Amusing ourselves to death
#4If you are interested in a rather in-depth examination of this line of thinking, I highly recommend Adam Curtis's 2002 documentary "The Century of the Self" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
Here is the entire series on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAD989035A4E8883D
Edit: It's there alright, but it's blocked by the BBC. Sorry guys. It's on the interwebs but you'll have to do a quick look. I highly recommend it.
Re: Amusing ourselves to death
#5We seem to have got both
Re: Amusing ourselves to death
#6We seem to have got both
I would take it a step further and say we have Orwell because we've fallen into Huxley.
Re: Amusing ourselves to death
#7Now we have indications of the worst of both the Huxleyan and Orwellian dystopias: an Internet designed to exacerbate the proclivity toward hyperbolic discounting of the future, and runaway surveillance on a planetary scale.
Re: Amusing ourselves to death
#8Anyone actually read that book? Would you recommend it?
Re: Amusing ourselves to death
#9[deleted]
Re: Amusing ourselves to death
#10I never finished 1984 but both seem to ignore the ultimate driving force behind both authoritarianism and consumerism that continues to rule the world, money and capitalism. In 1984, or at least this comic, power and violence seems to happen for their own sake, "power corrupting power", and similarly for Huxley's hedonism. The comic claims "Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity..." uh no, no one just gives us TV and distractions, they sell it to us.
Maybe that's a shallow analysis, and if so, tell me: where is the aspect of capital in either work?