![]() ![]() When you filter out the speculative details that make both books fun to read, you are left with similar grave messages about the possibility, perhaps the inevitability, of a future in which a utopian philosophy gains power and crushes individuality, true freedom, and the greatest achievements of human culture in the name of state security or social stability. Whether the revolution is driven by socialist ideology or by unchecked consumerism and the dehumanizing march of scientific progress is really only a detail. ![]() I wouldn’t choose either one over the other, or set them up as alternatives. Both of them resonate in certain ways with the trend of today’s civilization. Both began to be regarded as prophetic within a very few years. Both are regularly featured in lists of “100 Books Everyone Should Read” and the like. It is impossible to read both of these books today without filtering them through the lens of each other. Such a person in Huxley’s world is only sent to an island where he can enjoy the company of other exceptional people without disturbing the stability of society. A person who sticks out of the norm, in Orwell’s world, might be disappeared and made an unperson, the very memory of him erased by a communal fear of sharing his fate. Huxley’s John the Savage resists the sex play of the infantile, happiness-centered society he finds himself in, and eventually destroys himself rather than submit. Orwell’s Winston Smith fornicates as an act of political defiance, and pays for it by being brainwashed back into conformity. Concepts like “mother” and “father” have become obscenities, throwbacks to an all but forgotten world. Hypnopedia, mass entertainment, and unrestricted sex and drugs combine to keep them happy with their lot in life and leave them no time for solitary reflection. Their socioeconomic destiny is fore-ordained by genetic tests, hormone treatments and chemical intervention before they take their first breath. Children are decanted from bottles, not born. In Huxley’s world, the family has been totally abolished. In Orwell’s world, a citizen’s absolute obedience to the state is ensured by allowing him to form only sanctioned relationships, while family ties and other personal intimacies are neutralized by the fear of being betrayed for thought crime and whatnot. In Huxley’s fantasy, it’s the word of our Ford, whose symbol (based on a model of automobile) is the T, and whose vision of mass production and mass consumption has become the guiding principle of civilization. In Orwell’s imagination, religion has been replaced with devotion to Big Brother. Hypnopedia, they call it: sleep-teaching. Where Orwell’s nightmare future state uses coded language and, on occasion, torture to condition the thoughts of its citizens, Huxley’s uses a cocktail of drugs, mass entertainment, and propaganda recordings repeated over and over while people sleep. Huxley’s best known work came even earlier, in 1932. Orwell’s vision of a world enslaved, body and soul, by a totalitarian communist state, dates from 1949. After reading it, I don’t really see them as opposites so much as complimentary, dystopian views of the direction our world may be headed. I was never very interested in reading this book until lately, when political pundits began setting it up as an opposite to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. ![]()
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