Huxley vs. Orwell: Infinite Distraction Or Government Oppression

"ow my balls" is definitely a reference to wasting time on YouTube...

Technical people understand how fragile modern systems are. As life gets more complicated, innocent mistakes can turn a country into a desert. Malicious intent raises the body count even higher.

Four to five decades back, everyone grew up convinced that atomic war was inevitable. That was the zeitgeist, but wrong. Nuclear war is a great stride forward in that it's the only methodology of war yet invented that is both aggressively pursued by leaders and presents those leaders with a dire and immediate threat of death if used. (As opposed to, say, war by assassination, which only satisfies one of those criteria). So the incentives were aligned against what popular sentiment said was inevitable.

Then all of that determined, grim sentiment sloshed over into the ready and waiting environmentalist hair-shirt death cult after the collapse of the USSR.

As someone who advocates for engineered human longevity, I see a lot of this. Most people, the majority, don't have a positive view of the future. At present that is largely informed by what in a sane world would be extreme environmentalist views, but in this world are middle of the road environmentalist views - most people are convinced that the world is falling apart, that there are too many people, that no-one should be allowed to extend human life, that all resources are running out, and in short that Malthus was right.

This view of the end of the world will no more come to pass than nuclear war did. All the incentives are aligned against Malthusian limits of any sort, and always have been. Hopefully one doesn't have to explain why that's the case to the present audience.

Well, today women can vote but it doesn't matter who you vote anymore, the country is segregated in practice which is as worse as being legally segregated (and hypocritical to top), the labour movement is gone and burried, children are burdened by overprotective parents, money-grabbers ran rampant in the practice of medicine (including Big Pharma), the environment is severely damaged with the pollution of the industrial revolution, we have the capacity to kill everyone several times over with nukes (and bio weapons), neo-colonialism runs rampant, drones and similar technology pretty much ensure a future dictatorship of the most technologically advanced, mass surveillance was never as widespread as now, torture became en vogue again and somehow killing and or adducting citizens of sovereign states is now an acceptable practice even for western democracies, huge corporations control the worldwide food chain (Monsanto) and even invest in the water supply, while others patent DNA.

(I didn't even got into the economic depression that will be long-term, the wars for water of the future, or the possibility of peak oil).

>We live in a better world today than has ever existed for the greatest number of people

No. We just have better technology. Nothing special about our ethics or practices.

Because we learn lessons from history.

Every "empire" that has improved humanity's standard of living throughout the centuries has met the same result, and it's no accident. There are such clear patterns throughout history that anyone who has taken the time to study it can make some pretty reasonable predictions about the world tomorrow.

For starters, the past 100 years included two world wars, and countless others - costing the lives of countless millions. If we continue the historical trend - this century will see at least a billion killed in wars. Is it worth it for the progress, or better standard of living people 'might' have in 100 years time - only for them to repeat the mistakes over again.

While today, the greatest number of people might have the highest standard of living that they've ever had - it must be realized that it's no coincidence that this is not shared between everyone. The developed world enjoys a high standard of living today largely because it has taken advantage of countries which don't have the same standard. We've raped and pillaged nations, and supported countries which still engage in slavery - for our own economic benefit.

Technology could bring a high standard of living for everyone on the planet - but not with our current capitalist system, which uses technology to transfer more wealth from the poor to the rich. Consider the ongoing trend to replace manual labour with robotics to get an idea - human labour is becoming obsolete, yet there is nothing to replace it. Humans still need to "earn" to eat, yet they can no longer earn - and they don't own any land - thus, we are becoming enslaved to those who do own land, and those who have the robotics to manufacture goods.

And lets not forget that our political systems are becoming more and more irrelevant. We are still using systems from hundreds of years ago, which didn't account for an idea like the internet - where people can communicate so effectively, that voting on people to represent you elsewhere is unnecessary. The increasing police state is a reaction by those in power to try and remain relevant, but their obsolescence is about due.

The irrational thing about it is that despite generations of these prophets fore-telling us of the end-times humanity has continued to survive and in the last few hundred years it might have even improved. I suspect that even if we ushered in an era of ever-lasting peace and solved all of our problems that these cynics would just find another story to tell.

Thinking that something might not be right in the future is a rather good incentive to try to make it better.

I'm not arguing that the world is not evolving in a better way, but, for example, the awareness risen by Orwell and Huxley might play a part in the fact that some people are trying to make a better future.

Sure there may be a lot of people who aren't educated about the dangers we face, but from my own experience the bigger problem is all those that understand but feel powerless to do anything meaningful about it.

Sure, but what does that really mean? To me, not much, as peoples memories are short.. There are numerous examples in the last few centuries of much, much worse political discourse. Think about the Lincoln-Douglas debates where newspapers that were controlled by political parties would edit the transcripts of the opposing candidate to enhance the standings of their own horse in the race.

Furthermore, the siciety is completely static -- it's designed that way. It cannot grow or adapt in the face of new opportunities or needs (eg climate shift, resource depletion). Would you want to live like that?