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The money quote from the article: “…the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” – Aldous Huxley, from a 1949 letter to George Orwell.
It turns out they were both approximately right about dystopia.
The money quote from the article: “…the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” – Aldous Huxley, from a 1949 letter to George Orwell.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
The book was released on 1985, and its main premise is that the mass-media has a damaging effect in our capacities to understand and elaborate rational arguments. In his opinion, TV was their age soma. I wonder what he would think today...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were we're heading, we will wish that discrimination was based on biological factors. Instead, it will be based on mental factors. Cruelty, deception, hypocrisy, psychopathy, inhumanity will be rewarded. The determinant of class will be good and evil, with evil at the top. At the top, there will exist a form of altruism so superficial and devoid of substance that only insane people will be able to join the elite clas…
> Were we're heading What makes you think we're headed that way? Are there other plausible directions?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are in a world of Orwell's surveillance devices, lovingly toted by the proles as Huxley suggested.
It seems a lot of literary dystopias have merged and manifested into our current reality. At this point I'm just waiting for someone harpoon at my car as I approach an onramp.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're just going to ignore the entire engineered caste system part of the book?
I actually do entirely ignore it because I think it's purely a creation of the author for the purpose of making his point. Caste society is not a symptom of modernity, in fact the opposite. It's an anachronism in the book, sort of like putting your ideological opponent into a Nazi uniform and giving him a tiny mustache and making him speak with a scary German accent. Slavery (which is really what it is in the story)…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems a lot of literary dystopias have merged and manifested into our current reality. At this point I'm just waiting for someone harpoon at my car as I approach an onramp.
Despite all the insightful intellectual back and forth on this thread, this is my favorite comment.
BNW remains to this day one of my biggest disappointments when it comes to the classics. I remember reading it maybe fifteen years ago and I went in with this expectation to read this brilliant critique of modern consumer society everyone was referencing, what did I get? The antagonists of the book are called Marx, Lenina and Mustapha (read: muslims, women and commies running the world government), and the hero is a…
The case he makes is his horrifying depiction of the alternative to the monogamous family. You're correct in identifying his fears, but I personally don't see that they're unfounded. I can't help but feel an instinctual revulsion at "the monogamous family being washed away by technology and higher forms of social organization", its a profound loss of individuality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)
But apparently the world wasn't ready for a utopia of Tantric sex and drugs where people are genuinely happy.