Brave New World
I like both 1984 and BNW, for different reasons, so my comment is not directly related to those books; I'm simply growing somewhat frustrated of "happiness as an end-goal" being perceived as wrong, and that's certainly not the point either of those books were trying to make. I agree that there has been a sickening amount of "feel-good" propaganda in the relatively recent past, in no small part thanks to the movie industry, but please note that this "feel-good" tendency and the true pursuit of happiness are two completely different things. I'm under the impression, possibly wrongly, that a…
I actually agree with some of the other commenters in this thread: Huxley's dystopia is, well, far less dystopian than Orwell's. Or, in a more nuanced look, Huxley's book suffers an unfortunate dichotomy: the things that are bad are not realistic and the things that are realistic are not bad. The legitimately dystopian part of Brave New World are often technical in nature—effectively mind control through drugs and a caste system propped up by genetic engineering. These don't just require advances in technology but also a surprising level of social organization. Where 1984 feels like a…
> The legitimately dystopian part of Brave New World are often technical in nature—effectively mind control through drugs and a caste system propped up by genetic engineering. These don't just require advances in technology but also a surprising level of social organization. Where 1984 feels like a continuous progression from a Soviet Union that never collapsed, these core parts of Brave New World comes of as discontinuous, a jump both socially and technically. These seems like crazy steps in our modern society, but keep in mind, Huxley was writing this in 1931. Eugenics were something…
> departure from ... our obsession with certain abstractions (the poorly defined "real vs superficial", "honor", "the dignity of work"¹...etc) That's easy to say in California, but not New England. Mental models give one the ability to plan ahead, and are necessarily based on heuristics. Winter is coming. Some specific heuristics, and the ways they are interpreted, are a bit outdated. But it sounds like you're advocating for letting go of independent moralistic thought, and going along with the flow of what feels good. > It's also a bit grating because I sense some condescending…
"If not for the eugenics, genetics and soma, it sounds like a nice place to live! Freer sex, freer entertainment, more automation, more leisure... It's radical, certainly, but not in a bad way" Well, it's all fun and games if you happen to win the genetic dice roll and end up as an Alpha. I imagine it's considerably less fun if you're a Gamma. More to the point, the world in Brave New World isn't dystopian on account of torture suffered, atrocities committed, or free expression squelched, a la 1984. The real horror of Brave New World is the complete reduction of the human race to a…
"Technologic/scientific achievements don't hold any intrinsic meaning. It's like saying you make art for art's sake instead of for an audience. That's the same as saying there's no point to your work." I'm not sure I follow your logic from sentence A to sentence C here. I think I get what you're saying, but you kind of lose me on the point about "That's the same as saying there's no point to your work." Are you suggesting I've made a statement whose logical outcome is "There's no point to your work?" "You're saying humans are going to stop being competitive." That's not really what I said.…
As the grand parent, i also see the society of Brave New World as much less dystopian than usually portrayed. > Well, it's all fun and games if you happen to win the genetic dice roll and end up as an Alpha. I imagine it's considerably less fun if you're a Gamma. Yes, from the external point of view of a book reader, i would prefer to "win the genetic dice roll". But if i were decanted as a Gamma, i wouldn't mind, i wouldn't prefer to be an Alpha, with all that complex work they do, i'd prefer my simpler life. The casts system in BNW works only because the members of each cast feel happy to…
I think Neil Postman wrote the most concise examination of this topic in the foreword to "Amusing Ourselves to Death"[1]: "We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief…
This comparison comes up fairly regularly in my circles, both online and offline, and my response is usually the same. Note that Huxley says, "Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World." This is why my response is almost always that it is Brave New World for the people, and 1984 for anyone who dares resist. And if you doubt the…
Brave New World is already here to some extent largely due to the work of Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays. The excellent documentary "The Century of the Self" explains this better than I ever could: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self. Overview from Wikipedia: "This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." —Adam Curtis' Edward Bernays also wrote a book titled Propaganda and he invented the term Public Relations. From wikipedia: Edward Louis Bernays was an Austrian-American…