Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell
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It's a very close approximation of the of the two realties depicted in the comic strip. Definitely worth picking and it's beautifully vivid and short, about a novella in length.
That said, I have no doubt that there are many who would wish to see the United States (or other places) become more totalitiarian than in fact they are. The free market system we are in has reduced virtually everything to economic motives, which are good about preserving certain information channels at the expense of others.
Not being snarky, but have you ever had a run in with a cop lately? Especially when the issue is legal and the cop is ignorant or thinks it's illegal? You'll know the imposition of state-sanctioned fear then.
There are some things the state can do to make the encounter better, such as _requiring_ that all police/citizen interactions be required, except in cases that would put the police in harms way (like getting caught in the middle of a shoot out).
I know that there are abuses of policing power but have no indication that they are, today, any worse than the American norm.
Want a real dystopia? Read a history book.
But "better" really means "more choices are available." We should try to make sure that we make the best choices, and that's what posts like these are trying to help us do.
That was good enough for a while. Now we're starting to see worker's discontent again, it's focused on boogeymen, immigrants and liberals for now, but it'll make it's way back to employers eventually.
I think that's a massive understatement. As I understand it half the population is starving.
"A young man Demick interviewed read 1984 after he escaped to [South Korea]. He was startled to learn that George Orwell, back in the 1940s, had perfectly understood the thinking of modern North Koreans."
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/07/24/robert-fulfor...
The government of North Korea was founded by Kim Il Sung who was hand picked by Stalin to run the country, so it's only natural that they would try to implement the model Orwell was talking about.
As it happens, my brother-in-law came into town today. At dinner, he asked my wife what it was like growing up in China during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (she was born in 1951). She told him the hardest part was the hunger. Once she was caught digging up and eating a sweet potato from a field. Her teacher punished her by putting here on an even more reduced ration. This was only supposed to be for a few days, but the teacher forgot and she had reduced rations for the rest of the semester. It was only because a staff member asked about the punishment at the beginning of the next semester that the standard ration was reinstated.
She was just a small girl with ponytails.
And the original discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627476
Edit: (article link was changed by moderator)
Also interesting is Brave New World Revisited, a book written 30 years after he's other book where he compares it with 1984 by Orwell. He also makes some guesses about the future[1].
I love dystopias and Brave New World is the best.
spoiler
[1] The most important one being about soma and how it's so similar to lsd.
As he notes this causes a bit of a problem for a novelist in that a true utopia is actually pretty boring - so imperfections pretty much have to be introduced to give you something to write about.
[NB: I would be more than happy to become a Culture ambassador, if anyone is listening ;-)]
I look at TV as a type of soma. Imagine if tomorrow TV* was gone. What would people do? No longer could they easily escape from the things they don't want to think about. I'm guessing some would turn to drugs, but many others (I hope anyway) would wake up and realize their own reality and thoughts instead just what has been spoon fed to them over the years.
* Like a lot of other 'drugs' TV has many good uses for information and entertainment. The problem arises when large parts of the population watch so many hours/day.
"...in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World as a reaction to H.G. Wells' utopias long before he had heard of We. According to We translator Natasha Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was lying. Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952) he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.""[1]
If Huxley hadn't read We he was def. channeling Zamyatin's aura somehow or another.
Vonnegut is too hard on himself saying Player Piano was a rip off of Brave New World. It is great in it's own right.
For example, even when Winston begins to realize that he's being fed B.S. information by the government, the book he reads for "real" information is also (probably) filled with lies. I find this point to be especially poignant today as some niche alternative news outlets (such as conspiracy theory web sites) are as inaccurate as the outlets they seek to criticize.
Postman wrote this 25 years ago. If anything, his observation is even more true today.
For example, books were banned in "Brave New World" -remember all that Shakespeare drama? Huxley was saying people are going to be controlled by the government because in the Brave New World, the government breeds humans for different purposes, and all those humans know are pleasures which are completely dependent on the government, like daily rations of soma, a drug which prevents aging and sadness.
Books were essentially like illegal drugs in our society. The Government had decided they were harmful to the citizenry and attempted to restrict them from coming in. But it's clearly a fairly minor thing (again equivalent to our drug policy where most personal use offenders get drug treatment rather than punishment).
For example, John the Savage is allowed both to quote Shakespeare and to interact with those who come to the reservation. Yet there's no Government repression and it's certainly not like in 1984 where you get a lobotomy. So the banning of books really reinforces the cartoon's point because what the government has done is to convince the population that books are bad for them and then offered the ban as a way to keep the population from being harmed by them.
I'd also like to note:
Most personal offenders in our government get treatment instead of punishment (drugs). Most personal offenders in the Brave New World get banished (reading).
Note that, unlike Orwell's dystopia, Huxley's doesn't require squashing every voice of dissent - as long as the majority of people don't care, there is little danger in allowing some dissidents.
Some would say that this, in fact, has already happened - Berlusconi controls a sufficiently large part of the population via the media that he's effectively untouchable. In the American situation, there's Fox News and its competitors.
Huxley's vision just required a bunch of people independently trying to make money and becoming good at it, which is pretty much what people do best.
The entire first world routinely asks our politicians to provide us more services and more securities for less money, and then gets upset when they fail to deliver the impossible. They're not working toward 1984, they're just trying to stay in office and leave their offices a little better than when they found it.
Bureaucrat may be well-intentioned, but they are mostly more prone to "do their job" than to question the correctness and impact of their deeds.
And that is without considering office politics or politics in broader sense. I'm working with government and I wouldn't rely on bureaucrat to do the "right thing".
They say that bureacracy is organization whrere group of people that think all "A" agree on compromise "B".
His utopia is based on a very open education and a love and understanding for the natural world. It reminds me of Iain Bank's 'Culture', sans the technology.
It's relatively overlooked as a work. My guess is the same factors that make doom and gloom sell newspapers make BNW the more popular novel.
I'd recommend it as a read to anyone.
They weren't. Before they were playing video games, they were playing ping pong, board games, cards, or catch. Before they were watching YouTube, they were watching TV or listening to radio shows. Despite the journalistic myth-making about their own industry, the news has always been cluttered with trivialities and partisanship in every medium.
And there have always been people complaining how everyone but they has descended into terrible trogolodytes who only care about their own lives and interests - and not what smart people like themselves find important.
Just as startuprules points out that while many in the US are thinking that they have big brother looking over them, when they are compared to China they realize that it is mostly just their imagination.
What I find most interesting is how many of us would say we are part of the problem? So if it affects everybody, but we're not a part of it, does it really affect everybody.
Also, lets not forget about the drop in things like tv ratings, where a big show in the 80's was 10s of millions of people, and a big show today has a much smaller viewership.
We still think everybody is watching American Idol (or whatever) because it's everwhere, but in reality, it seems very few are actually watching or even taking an interest.
At least if my neighbors amuse themselves to death, I am not forced to participate. I also don't think average people of all ages (as in centuries, eons) were usually preoccupied with highly intellectual endeavors. So the lament of us all becoming more stupid is probably also an old one.
I think the books are a warning and contain some truth. I have not read BNW, but 1984 can be used as Machiavelli's Prince, as a prescription, rather than description, of how it could be.
So the book is a warning.
Also, I wanted to say, although it might have been written to describe communism, I think unless you take it literally, much of it resonates with democratic societies also. For example, how the three states keep being at war one day and friends another and how everyone forgets this and how they always are at war. That is quite a good description of the west in some ways.
EDIT: Just read aardvark's comment. So never mind.
Case in point: US. It restricts information that would undermine its authority as the world's dominant power, such as BP spill, bankruptcy of its banks/cities/states, ineffectiveness at resolution in afghanistan, etc. The government offers discounts/low rates for large home mortgages, expensive cars, and big student loans that would shackle the majority of the population in debt chains. It also condones mindless consumption such as reality TV, sports, celebrity news, and facebook games by not taxing them as addictive hazards.
Case in point: China. It restricts, well, pretty much anything it doesn't want the people to know with the great internet firewall and state news programs. It also encourages huge risk taking in mortgages, which recently has seen home prices go up to 30X average income. It encourages its citizens to forget about the abysmal living condition by allowing internet game cafes to spread like wildfire and trapping the players in pointless alternative realities. So they don't realize they are doing slave labor at $1/day to make ipads.
I further propose that this will continue as long as these governments worldwide can keep feeding its citizens at a minimum (food stamps, unemployment benefits, carb/sugar loaded cheap food), while offering cheap, mind-numbing entertainments to keep people at home, so they don't go out and riot on the streets. They can then keep on taxing/raising the retirement age on the productive workers
Until oil is at $150/middle class is wiped out/Iran is attacked/North Korea attacks/US defaults on SS and medicare/Japan defaults on its bonds/food prices double/Israel is attacked/automation renders most of population useless, anyways.
More like these people have taken on these Orwellian characteristics on their own rather than read about how to do EVIL.
There are human beings who are very good at manipulating people, but it doesn't mean that they know the science of manipulating people.
Part of that blame has to come down on capitalism. There exists a market for these things and if the market demands it, is it the government's job in matters of entertainment and nutrition to step in and decide what we can indulge in?
There's markets for low-brows, which everyone use. Then there are "high-brows" market in which people can engage in their perspective curiosity/sophistication.
For every mindless entertainment, there are niche hobbies which people engage in and put enormous amount of energy into.
For example, my hobby is to speculate on currencies. The side effect is that I learn about money emerge naturally in a free market economy, security schemes, and P2P networks. (Yes, I actually do that.)
The only thing that can really knock the average American out of this is long term exposure to alternatives that exist in other cultures. Ever notice how people who are well traveled often have a more nuanced understanding of most contemporary topics?
Why is fascism so closely associated with control and discipline? The purpose is to conceal the totalitarianism inherent in our own society, like how we were taught that American society is free because individuals can enjoy their consumer pleasures, while people in the Soviet Union are subjected to discipline and control.
I don't know if the government encourages it, but recently they "banned" third mortgages to cool the market down. House-flipping isn't really a Chinese phenomenon.
"It encourages its citizens to forget about the abysmal living condition by allowing internet game cafes to spread like wildfire and trapping the players in pointless alternative realities. So they don't realize they are doing slave labor at $1/day to make ipads."
Wrong demographics. Factories consist of mostly poor migrant workers from the countrysides, they probably don't have the time/money for gaming. Internet cafes cater to urban middle-class kids who can afford to spend all their free time in LAN parties.