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Comment by dsirijus | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorites too, even though I disagree with seeing both Orwell's and Huxley's visions of future as some kind of dead end.

It's hard for me to imagine something like that lasting for more than 2 generations. Quite contrary, I'm seeing it as a possible catalyst for radical change to something quite positive.

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Agreed; O'Brien's boot metaphor was purest hubris. I don't know if I'd call civilizational collapse "positive", though. Surely things will get better afterward! Things always do, eventually. But, judging by history, we'll be in for a rather ugly interregnum in the meantime, one marked by the sway of Hobbes's dictum ("...nasty, brutish, and short"), by constant insufficiency in all the material necessities of life, and by all manner of short-lived but violent popular enthusiasms; in general, a world fit only for those young enough to love chaos, and one harsh even for them.

I don't fear for the species; we're tough bastards and can survive anything short of heat death. But I would like to think that some day we'll work out the trick of anakyklosis and finally have done with dark ages.

> O'Brien's boot metaphor was purest hubris

It's quite possible Orwell agreed with you there. One thing not everyone notices is that the Newspeak appendix to 1984 is written in the past tense.

Interesting point. Huxley's vision of the future would become a dead end when another entity sees our pleasure-induced ineptitude as their opportunity to pounce

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