Brave New World Revisited, Revisited

You don't think we're being conditioned to value the abstinence of violence for whatever reason regardless of claims of justification?

You don't think we're being conditioned to ignore the reasons people blow up and instead ask how they had the means to be able to do so?

You don't think we're being conditioned to complain about the way things are without thinking about the way things could, or even should, be?

The book should be taken at face value indeed.

It seems to be working quite well.

Huxley put more abstract ideas about humans and science into his world. Human engineering, happiness pills and genetic predispositions (like Douglas Adams' cow that wants to be eaten). This makes it feel more like a parable, a world that exists to play with ideas, like discworld.

Orwell's grim world was just a lot closer to stuff that existed, and still exists.

In a recent vice documentary about Assad's Syria, a policeman confesses "I am Winston Smith" after taking a journalist on a tour of Orwellian lies. It's not a coincidence, Assad's regime is built on ideas from Nazism and Stalinism, the regimes 1984 was parodying.

I think the work by the Situationists is more relevant, particularly the concept of the Spectacle. But it was "in the air" at the time, arguably even the works of Hunter S. Thompson reflect it.

In the early 90s though, the documentary played to packed houses of college students who suddenly claimed to have a longstanding concern for East Timor...then East Timor became unfashionable and they went back to not giving a hoot. If anything, Chomsky "manufactured" his own "consent", for a time.

with the ubiquity of photo editing, and ai driven video manipulation, i'd argue one can contest images too(i):

>> Ghost in the Shell addressed this issue in 2005(o) >> The Tachikoma units are debating how to stop a nuclear strike and one suggests that broadcasting a live feed of the nuclear sub would help, but the idea is reasoned against due to the technological capabilities to fake such a feed: >> "Pictures don't prove anything anymore. It would just end up as a source of amusement for the uninvolved masses, an image from an unknown source that showed up at an all too convenient time." >> beyond this inflection point one must now trust both the content and the source

(o) https://youtu.be/yAoj3AskFMI

(i) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16522643

I completely agree. The idea of someone, or a small group of someones, who control the world is another scapegoat, a kind of fantasy we sometimes revel in to explain why everything is going wrong. "At least someone's in control".

The fact is, we're all in this together. Certain people have more influence on the direction of certain societies, it's true, but the whole mass is some kind of undulating, chaotic consciousness constantly trying to adapt to itself. The people "not in control" compose most of the mass, influencing the people "in control" from the bottom-up, like how plate tectonics et al cause tsunamis, while those "in control" attempt to place restrictions on the crowd. There is not usually a state in which one body can contain the other, unless we do have a society akin to what we have in 1984, or unless we don't have class mobility (distributing influences).

Fortunately, in societies dominated by European and "western" philosophies, we have class mobility and we have sectors of the mass actively attempting to keep the upper influences manageable and the greater mass informed. Our focus on intellectualism, scientific thought, and individualism are, in my opinion, the biggest reasons why this is the case. We want to understand how the world works, we want to know where we fit as individuals and how our individual power contributes to the collective. We want to mark our place on the world, which means we generally strive to expand our individual influence radius as far as it can go, which means any top-of-the-pyramid actors do actually have much less control of anything that might shake the boat (since we tend to shake the boat very often).

BNW has taken many things to the extreme, especially with regards to the cementing for a class system through destroying anything that's remotely human about our existence. 1984 on the other hand makes people freak out because the idea of truthless-ness and state surveillance and language controls are much more real and close than a forced societal divide.

Really, I don't see what the real problem with BNW's world is, aside from deliberately creating idiots to do boring jobs. But that's one thing Huxley missed: in our future, we're going to automate away all or most of those jobs, so we won't need a bunch of idiot Deltas to do them. The main problem is that we won't have much to struggle for, since that's when humans seem to do well, but along with that struggle always comes a lot of horrors, so is it really worth it?

You might conclude that everyone has been brainwashed .. or maybe all these people have looked at the issues themselves and are becoming increasingly worried about what the answers might be?

Brexit plans fall apart when confronted with questions like "how is this going to work, exactly?" and "why would they agree to that?"

I’m sincerely mystified, and I’d like to know what the objectors’ problem is.

There's nothing that can be done about it. You can't just magically educate an electorate; that's a change that takes a generation or three.

I'd go further and relate it directly to MDMA, LSD, and other drugs. The government knowns about Burning Man, music festivals, etc. If they really didn't want people doing these drugs do you think these events would be allowed to happen?