George Orwell Outside the Whale | Hacker News Reader

George Orwell Outside the Whale

newstatesman.com

37 pointssamclemens11 comments

My favorite interaction of Orwell with another writer is that with Aldous Huxley. Aldous Huxley wrote this in a letter to Orwell in 1949:

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that 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. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large-scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. 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."

> What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

And in the middle there's Bradbury, who was convinced that practically no one would read books anymore (because those would be replaced by few sentences-long stories and videos clips, like Twitter and Tik Tok) but at the same time wrote a book about how the few people who still want to read books for some reasons would be prosecuted.

Hmmmm, it's considered okay to read the books, but any conclusions you communicate had really better fit the boundaries of a given dominant orthodoxy or your effectiveness will need to be curtailed. That's how it's almost always been, and that's how it's almost always going to be.

Bradbury covered the spectrum of from literal book burning to idea burning through his characters. In my opinion it's through Faber he hit the nail on the head. It's not just books, but the quality and "texture" of the information, having time to reflect and contemplate it (leisure), and having the ability and willingness to act upon it.

It's funny how both were really prescient about modern use of technology as tools of social control. In a way, we live in the worst of both worlds, where political repression is still harsh and driven by tech (Snowden leaks, Drone warfare, IoT devices etc), yet most interactions are drowned in a sea of nonsense entertainment produced by the media establishment (owned by States and big corporations) and the new caste of videocasters/influencers (bought and paid for by the same "sponsors").

Everybody should read Homage To Catalonia. His best books and superb account of what the experience of war is like.

And while you are in the 1930's, check out his book, Down and Out in Paris and London. What a time to be a dishwasher!

Add The Road to Wigan Pier for the Orwell trifecta.

Funny: "We at The New Statesman value your privacy

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Newspeak lives on.

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