Who Got It Right: Orwell or Huxley?
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Doesn't mean you can't have a curious and thoughtful debate about Huxley and Orwell here, but I don't think the authors are really having one.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
[2]: https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...
Of course when you do go for the whip, you want to newspeak it into something else, so that also works, in small doses. Your problem occurs if it escalates, then you can't hold it down with PR anymore.
So 1984 is metastable and such societies did in fact boil over. BNW is stable and invisible to a lot of people, though I suspect there is some failure mode we have yet to see. Maybe there's a line of thought where people just get sick of every damn thing being massaged to death by PR people, and they do something about it.
Some modern autocracies don't go after enemies but more protect friends:
> The transition [in Hungary] has been nonviolent, often not even very dramatic. Opponents of the regime are not murdered or imprisoned, although many are harassed with building inspections and tax audits. […] The courts are packed, and forgiving of the regime’s allies. Friends of the government win state contracts at high prices and borrow on easy terms from the central bank. Those on the inside grow rich by favoritism; those on the outside suffer from the general deterioration of the economy. As one shrewd observer told me on a recent visit, “The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.”
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-...
The way information passed through the Outer Party technicians was extremely compartmentalized. It was a command economy, did anyone actually know how things were going? The statistics were basically all lies. Eventually the gin and cigarettes would stop flowing.
So the director of the agrar kolchose might lie and so on, but why should the secret informants who are installed in that company, lie about it?
So I am pretty sure, the information was avaiable. It was probably a matter of not wanting to believe the information as that would mean, the glorious sovjet union was maybe not so glorious after all - and thinking that, would make you a traitor. So lets just continue to wave and smile.
That's one of the reason that mullification through the carrot works so well in the United States... It's a very wealthy nation with vast reserves of resources to draw upon to keep people happy.
Perhaps the thing that happens is people see it's all BS and just decide they don't need all the toys, and once they don't need the toys, they don't need to work either. Plus they'll get more critical of the system.
Please take into account that most of us humans are bound by various obligations. Be it the financial type, i.e. paying off your house for 30+ years or, even more captivating, creating substitutes for natural needs. Compare with the fact that most of us live isolated, especially in these times, without real world communication beyond chats, mail, telephone and, well, Hacker News. The lack of face to face opportunities to speak and do nonverbal communication is one of the causes for rising psychological diseases, drug abuse and antisocial behaviours in the last decade.
Our post Neolithic Revolution society is based on the concept of the ruler and the ruled. Why? Because having power is also a desire which may be the most destructive one for humanity in general.
We may be living on a punishment planet or simulation.
"Resources" exist in people's minds, not in the ground. Rocks and toxic sludge have no intrinsic value.
That wealth takes the form of things in the ground, but also influence and the capacity to satisfy the desires of other countries and the people in them. Some of that is powered by processes that use raw materials that are non-renewable and dragged from the ground, but in the United States a lot of it is based on a hugely robust import export economy... Most of the things that push the joy buttons come from China.
You could describe the dystopian part of our condition as a blend of various dystopian tropes: https://i.imgur.com/kDo2NNr.jpg
Which of these is most dominant depends on where you live.
Yes please! A Brontitallian Revolution!
All we need is a mass vision of Arthur Dent Throwing The Nutrimatic Cup.
Possibly my favorite example of the powerful impressing a way of life on a huge number of people is the diplomatic sealed train the Germans used to send Lenin from Switzerland to Russia. i.e. the Russian Revolution was an intentional act done to it by cynical Germans who correctly expected the outcome would help them in the war. And the rest is history.
That describes most of society and for sure a lot of companies. A lot of people realize that something is not right but they still stay confined within that framework.
Claiming that Germany caused the Russian Revolution via the sole act of sending him back to Russia is not true.
While it is true that Lenin ultimately led the Bolsheviks to power, the reason Germany even thought about sending Lenin back was that Russia was already on the brink of collapse due to reasons a mile long and Germany was throwing shit against the wall to hasten Russian collapse.
Claiming a revolution of an entire country was caused by a single person is a bit much.
Yes.
> people work to fix it and eventually do.
No?
My understanding of Orwellian oppression is exactly that even though people are very aware that it exists, only a small minority of people care enough (or are personally harmed enough) to want to take actions change it.
Just look at modern day China. All but the most naive are aware of things like censorship and surveillance. Most have first-hand interactions with both. People joke about it all the time (being "invited for tea" or such and such news was "harmonized" a.k.a. censored). Some of the language has evolved to be almost not that different from what was envisioned in Newspeak.
And yet, the average person does not feel violated enough to actually do something about anything. It's much easier to just go with the flow and not do what the state doesn't like.
The problem is it requires a lot of people to make a difference. A single person or a small group protesting gets thrown into a reeducation camp for 20 years (if they are lucky). That's one of the reasons mass surveillance is so nefarious; you can't start to plan a mass assembly/protest to address grievances without being noticed beforehand and thrown into a reeducation camp for 20 years (if you are lucky). You can't even talk about grievances with more than a few other people in a dark closet somewhere.
In North Korea I suspect most everyone knows the propaganda is bullshit, but even a whisper of dissent will send the police knocking at your door. We aren't as bad as North Korea of course, but it sure smells similar.
Kafka is the one who really got it right. I've never felt a more realistic depiction of my life than The Trial.
Even when I was there 20 years ago, people had to hush whisper and look around to see who was listening when talking about the problems they were facing.
What's stopping you from saying what you think are the real reasons?
At least in 1984, oppression wins. It is a very bleak ending.
1984 makes a fairly strong point that this is not true.
The proles do not conceive of the fact that they are oppressed. Only the outer party can even think this, and at best its a muted response. Newspeak is about making it impossible to see or conceptualize oppression or injustice.
"Totalitarianism was Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the state controlled everyone through the infliction of pain and terror"
That sounds far closer to our current existence than BNW. Where are my bread and circuses? Circuses were shut down for much of the last two years, because of the need to fight an ever-shifting war against a terrifying virus ... a danger that cannot be directly perceived because almost everyone who gets it has mild symptoms and recover after a few days, but which rather, can only be truly perceived through the telescreen in our living rooms and the pronouncements of the ruling classes.
The parallels to 1984 are everywhere recent times, yet the majority cannot see them. Newspeak is in abundance. Policies change overnight and yet the Party claims that the policy was always the same, previously famous people get erased instantly the moment they object, and the population is trained to demand their own oppression, believing ultra-harsh conditions to be an expression of love.
But were the proles forced to use Newspeak? I thought they were singing folks songs and stuff...
The proles made up the majority of the population, but are almost invisible in the book, which leads to some odd Internet comments. The proles have zero political thought, and they live short lives of poverty. The proles are programmed to be interested in meaningless songs (produced by the versificator machine), meaningless persuits (such as lotteries), and other diversions. The proles do not speak newspeak, because they are not political. They certainly didn’t sing traditional folk songs (English aka ‘oldspeak’ is slowly abridged, removing all political words and nuances, and old literature is destroyed by rewriting it to remove all political nuance).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-F...
"The proles are free"
Newspeak was supposed to stamp out "bad" thoughts from members the party.
https://twitter.com/molly0xfff/status/1483831201823703041?s=...
In the modern era there's no visible plumbing to fix. Harry's only way to help the everyperson with their locked account is to tweet at the company's help handle. He's built up quite the celebrity doing just that and companies are forced to act on his demands. In the end, people are impatient, mention him too often, and his phone is DDoSed by a flood of tweets coming his way. He's never seen or heard of again.
“But Huxley clearly plundered Chapter 15 of Russell’s book, ‘Education in a Scientific Age’. Russell here departs from his expository mode (he was an incorrigible pontificator) to try his arm at a satirical prophecy about the socially engineered and class stratified society of the scientifically managed future. Children, he predicts, will be conditioned ‘some time before birth’ (by ‘thermal treatment of the embryo’) for their station in life. Manual workers (like Huxley’s Epsilons) ‘will be discouraged from serious thought and in general will be bred for patience and muscle rather than brain’. The society of the scientific future will be tranquillized by ‘new forms of drunkenness’ (i.e. ‘Soma’ in Brave New World). The only problem in this perfect world state will be ‘the psychology of the governors’ (i.e. disruptive Alpha-pluses, like Bernard Marx in Brave New World). If there were patent-protection in fictional scenarios any lawyer would have taken Russell’s case. The whole framework of Brave New World is to be found in the fifteenth chapter of The Scientific Outlook.” - from the Editorial Review below the fold at: https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldoux-Huxley-ebook/d...
There's nothing like that in Brave New World, though I think it's the wiser book.
It seems forgotten but i think it is still great and dusturbing.
"Who got it right, J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K. Rowling?"
Obviously the two books are a worse case scenario dystopia played out in a fictional world as a sandbox.
Orwell takes communism to the extreme of totalitarianism [1] to shows us what it might look like.
Huxley takes late stage capitalism to the extreme of authoritarian capitalism [3] to show what powerful elites running the world might look like in the far future.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_capitalism
1984 and Brave New World are fiction books designed to be popular and have good sales, earning the authors a living. They are not accurate representations of reality and anyone who bases their understanding of modern domestic and international politics & power on them is just as deeply unserious as someone who compares China to Mordor or Putin to Voldemort.
i believe your cynicism is unwarranted for 1984. That might have been true of a couple of Orwell’s novels, but as he became more political, he spent his life on his socialist ideals. He fought in the trenches fighting against the fascists in Spain. He lived in the north of England for a bit, trying to understand poverty from the inside (although Orwell himself came from an ‘English upper class’ family, a family that lacked the money to keep up their social appearances). Orwell lived socialism, he wasn’t primarily a novelist, which is why his writing is so real. 1984 is written as a political book, using the novel format as the foundation for exposition, similar to many good fantasy or sci-fi novels. Much of his writing is political non-fiction, although 1984 is his most famous work. 1984 was published when he was ~46, near the time of his death.
China - Orwell
USA/EU - Huxley
I've lived in Orwell's country (communist dictatorship) when I was young, now I live in Brave New World.
Cons: you don't have parents or a family, you never experience real human relationships or love, in all likelihood your fetus will have been intentionally handicapped before birth, and if you did win the lottery and were born with your intellect in tact you'll get sent to an island to die if you start thinking too much.
http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html
The main thrust:
> More broadly, though, Huxley is arguing for people to continue leading the sorts of lives that make for high art rather than those that make people content. His chief complaint about the Brave New World is that people have taken the dizzying highs and terrifying lows that lend "nobility" and "heroism" to life and traded them in for the creamy middles of happiness. For that argument I have less sympathy. By which I mean fuck that noise. The notion that suffering is ennobling is a particularly destructive piece of social engineering, and the suggestion that other people should suffer because Aldous Huxley enjoys the "over-compensations for misery" that the artists among them produce is pretty vile.
Orwell wrote a dystopia.
So, whatever they wrote about is framed by their experience and understanding of reality. As part of the class that believes it is right to manage us, do you think that they were trying to warn the proles about the future? Were they trying to help us live a more meaningful life?
They were not. Their works were not a service to mankind, they were not warning us about the future or that old trope. What they were doing is putting down in writing their best understanding of the plans that were in store for us. It was a mental exploration of how future management might pan out, what it might look like.
I suspect that this writing was partly as a tool to give to the upper/administrative classes so that they had a clearer goal in mind. I also suspect that these works were disseminated more widely, as a population that is aware of the ideas does not respond in shock and reject them - mentally they have acclimatised to the future horrors. (Aka Predictive Programming.)
If this sounds implausible, consider the fact that Aldous's brother Julian, created UNESCO. His grandfather Thomas played a role in establishing the theory of evolution (which in many ways provides a biological justification for the role of the elites as 'they are the fittest'). George Orwell's actual name was Eric Blair - and of course there is a famous British politician - Tony Blair. (It is claimed they are not relations, but it remains possible - how can we know?)
The books themselves are purported to be set in the future. However, it is possible to read them in a different light (as I suggest above) - as a sort of visionary guide for those administrators of the 30's and 40's. This is to say, that a lot of power was already in existence then. Eugenics (a feature in both books) was an overtly accepted ideology of the upper classes at the time. The nazis made the term unfashionable, but there is are reasons to think that this ideology is still popular amongst the self-proclaimed elite class.
In direct answer to the question, I think the elites would prefer us to self-select our future slavery along the lines of BNW - we can have moral degeneracy (its already here!) drugs (ditto) and just do our epsilon/delta jobs. However, Orwell was right about the talking screens, and ultimately if we won't self-select our slavery there is a harder form soon available - Chinese credit scores (aka bio-medical-ids/crypto-wallets) which thanks to the technocracy we have been working hard to achieve (esp in IT), will mean some of us will be locked out of life in the system. So, its a mix of both visions.
https://abc7.com/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-crime-la...
Felon -> “justice-involved person”
Juvenile delinquent -> “young person impacted by the juvenile justice system”
Drug addicts -> “persons with substance abuse history”
Ex-cons > “formerly incarcerated”
"convicted felon" is a smaller subset than a "justice-involved person". Felon implies "felony", which isn't the only type of individual they want to talk about (probably involving things like misdemeanors, diversions).
Same with "drug addicts". The new wording states that the person is seen to be using multiple times, but doesn't make a statement about whether or not they are addicted. They could just like drugs, without meeting the definition of addiction.
"ex-con"... you can be incarcerated without conviction (pre-trial, contempt).
With "Juvenile Delinquent", it's the other direction. Delinquent is a larger set than the new wording, the previous term includes miscreants who aren't in contact with the justice system.
This is more precise speak, it gives the actual definition instead of a broad term.