Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.
I will look up We.
About his ideas for utopia he wrote "Island": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)
Erm, yes, that does sound a bit like Aldous' "Brave New World". How about "long [term] unemployment should be a ground for sterilization..." (From "Man in the Modern World" 1947) i.e. get a job or be sterilised.
"Unless [we] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay ..." (From "Essays in Popular Science", 1926)
And read this, bearing in mind that Julian Huxley was upper class. That first quotation in context: "we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata... less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive." (From "Man in the Modern World" 1947)
Aldous wasn't much better. Childhood conditioning for the masses: "Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis 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 them and kicking them into obedience." ( "Letters of Aldous Huxley" published in 1969)
I encounter this exact thought in every comment thread that mentions 1984 without fail.
And usually 3 or so comments later I realise that they poster of this amazing idea hasnt read (or at least doesnt remember) 1984 anyway.
>Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.
You mean some sort of situation where the masses (or "proles") are kept happy with puerile entertainment while those people with political impulses are kept under heavy surveillance? Kind of like the novel 1984?
It shows what a system would evolve into without independent temporal continuity, and how truth can keep changing in a flow-like fashion while central power remains the only stable reference. Here, correspondence with reality is no longer treated as sacred, only useful. The Party does not need or want truth in any moral or objective sense. It only needs enough contact with reality to keep the machine running. Records still have to be managed, wars still have to be administered. Everything beyond that can be made fluid.
It also attacks the usual consolations: hope, love, that there's something human that remains untouchable. It shows how humanity is a fragile construct, and meticulously presents a procedure for how to break it
It shows precisely that no matter who you are or what you think you can do, a well-established system that seeks power for the sake of power will crush you just because it can. And if you're about to be crushed, they already declawed you systematically. Propaganda controls the present, manufactured records dissolved the past, Newspeak narrowed what you were able to think, manufactured dissent absorbed any idea of rebellion. And if the system wants you to love the act of being crushed, it has methods for that too. And why would it do that? Because power is an end in itself. And that's all you need to understand about unchecked power.
It also directly addresses that it's a new system and, unlike the Catholic Church during the Inquisition and unlike the communists, it is honest about its relentless accumulation of power, and doesn't need any kind of external legitimation from God or some placard of equality and prosperity for those who don't know better.
Let it also sink in that the book being ultra class-aware seemingly passes by almost everybody.
The current vector of the world has all the potential to end up in a blend of both.