Amusing ourselves to death • Hacker News Board

Re: Amusing ourselves to death

#121

Post by eru » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 1:58 AM UTC

teekert wrote: post #79

timje1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, 1984 always seemed a bit 'Lord of the Rings' to me, with the dark lords scheming in their towers. Huxley presented a future in which the ruling class knows what the lower classes need to be happy, and set that up nicely. Everyone wins!

Actually they create a lower class by adding alcohol into their incubation chambers. The rich/smart make them stupid. They make them cheap laborers like a dictator keeping the value of a currency low with respect to other countries.

That always bugged me about the novel.

On the one hand, they say that they can't have automation: they tried, and the lower castes got too bored. On the other hand, they need the lower castes as menial labours.

Do away with the alcohol, and add robots, and you'll have a much nicer society.

Re: Amusing ourselves to death

#122

Post by greenyoda » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 7:09 AM UTC

cooop wrote: post #29

Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931. Is anyone aware of the technologies or behaviours at the time that inspired the novel? I've always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that culture was very different then and have been always been curious as to how he came to his prediction.

The selective breeding of humans as "alphas", "betas", etc. may have been inspired by the eugenics movement[1], which had prominent supporters in the U.K. at the time (e.g., Winston Churchill).[2] Except that in the novel, instead of just getting rid of "inferior" people, they actively bred them into a servant caste. (After Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, it became much less respectable.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Supporters_and_critic...

Re: Amusing ourselves to death

#123

Post by cincinnatus » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 1:15 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #120

Doesn't practically every high schooler (in the U.S. at least) read both books, be assigned an essay to ask which one has happened, and then come to the conclusion that we're far more like Brave New World? As a foreword to a book, this isn't exactly original stuff. But there's also a counterpoint, which is that all the distraction, or the pleasure, or gossip, or whatever it is -- that's the stuff that it means to be…

I'm afraid most are only exposed to 1984 and then reassure themselves we dodged that bullet.

Re: Amusing ourselves to death

#124

Post by normloman » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 2:55 PM UTC

kristofferR wrote: post #118

normloman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have less freedom than you think. Timesinks are addictive. We've all clicked on a link-bait headline, even though we knew it would waste our time, because the text was so enticing. And most can remember playing a boring video game longer than they wanted because they were distracted by some manipulative aspect of the game (need another level / badge / chicken on my farm). It's gotten so bad, people regularly refe…

Sure, but what's the alternative? Should the government ban stupid stuff in order to force people into "more satisfying pleasures" though a "moral ecology" that discourages addictive/pointless things?

No.

Re: Amusing ourselves to death

#125

Post by kristofferR » Thu, Jan 09, 2014, 5:25 PM UTC

normloman wrote: post #124

kristofferR wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but what's the alternative? Should the government ban stupid stuff in order to force people into "more satisfying pleasures" though a "moral ecology" that discourages addictive/pointless things?

No.

Exactly.

Re: Amusing ourselves to death

#126

Post by macrael » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 6:35 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #121

teekert wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually they create a lower class by adding alcohol into their incubation chambers. The rich/smart make them stupid. They make them cheap laborers like a dictator keeping the value of a currency low with respect to other countries.

That always bugged me about the novel. On the one hand, they say that they can't have automation: they tried, and the lower castes got too bored. On the other hand, they need the lower castes as menial labours. Do away with the alcohol, and add robots, and you'll have a much nicer society.

Yeah, I felt like you could consider the novel without the class system and it would be more interesting.