Not-so-close encounters
An interesting bit of trivia:
While at Eton, Eric Blair (future pen name, George Orwell) “was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley.”
England’s a small place, isn’t it?
That wasn’t Orwell and Huxley’s only exchange. Huxley wrote to Orwell on the occasion of the publication of his masterwork 1984:
…congratulating him on “how fine and how profoundly important the book is”. In his letter to Orwell, he predicted:
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis 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.
It might not be “infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis” that are the main tools, but I think Huxley had the basic principle down pretty well. There’s room for more than one kind of tyranny in the world.
In other words, lying is the new normal. That seems to fit the current MO of the left.
It’s too bad that so many political leaders regard both Brave New World and 1984 as how-to manuals.
I’ve been saying since sometime in the ’80s that the modern world–or perhaps I should say the most influential parties in the modern world–is/are divided between those who want 1984 and those who want Brave New World. The latter is favored in capitalist countries and since the fall of the Soviet Union has been very much in the ascendant.
Orwell might have said:
“Power is not a mean, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
Wait. He did say that. He might as easily said one fundamentally transforms a country to establish a dictatorship.
It matters little the means; it’s the result that matters. In the results, drama first repeats itself as imitation and second as prophecy. Apropos of that:
“Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of … any … regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.” – George Orwell
Warning and prophecy to the MSM.
Good point, rickl.
I wonder what percentage of American
yutesyouths (i.e., under 30) have read all of the following:Ayn Rand-“We the Living”
Aldous Huxley-“Brave New World”
George Orwell-“1984” and “Animal Farm”
Ira, follow up that question with how many adults have read any of those books. Anyway the subjects of those books aren’t FUN and therefore not relevant to a young Americans understanding of the world. Freedom and prosperity are the natural order of things after all. That’s why I am beginning to look forward to an Obama victory; the aftermath will be so amusing.
It’s not quite “infant” conditioning, but the conditioning of young people by colleges and Comedy Central is alive and well.
Re: Bob in Virginia
I went to a public high school in Massachusetts in the 90’s, and we read Brave New World and 1984 in English class. And we were specifically told NOT to read the second half of “The Jungle” by Sinclair in US History class (which was all socialist propaganda).
20 years later, who knows what they do? They probably only read the second half of “The Jungle” now.
It is promises to fulfill dreams of instant gratification (i.e. physical, material, ego) without perceived consequences, which will corrupt individuals and society.
People will elect to exchange their liberty for submission with benefits.
Who cares about freedom? I’ll be on my parent’s health plan till I’m 26! Huzzah!
It was TS Eliot who turned down Animal Farm for the publisher for which he was then editor.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/30/eliot-george-orwell-animal-farm
Another instance of the small British world.
People will elect to exchange… and individuals who resist will capitulate to emotional extortion and threats of violence.
Fortunately, as we normalize behaviors which constitute evolutionary dysfunction, these tactics will become progressively less necessary. We are voluntarily committing generational suicide (e.g. a majority reproducing in the minority, elective abortion of our progeny) and will be replaced by individuals who exhibit characteristics with superior evolutionary fitness.
Jack: I would add almost all of TV. It is the circus part of our modern day “bread and circuses”. It is today’s version of narco-hypnosis. It has dangerously damaged attention spans and dumbed down discourse.
I had to read Brave New World when I was a freshman in high school (luckily I went to a private HS). I read 1984 when I was a junior.
The thing is, when you’re that young these works don’t resonate with anything you’ve learned or observed, because you haven’t learned or observed much of anything. However, they plant something in your mind that can resonate later when you have learned and observed.
That was my experience. Even when I was politically rather insane, the combination of reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in college (on my own initiative, natch) and the realization that it contained the reality of what Huxley and Orwell put in fictional form was enough to make communism forever out-of-bounds as an ideology I might adhere to.
But on another note, perhaps the following is revealing. When I first read Brave New World I found John the Savage very disturbing. In fact, of all the things that stuck with me about the book, it was John and his “barbaric” behavior. I thought he was a weirdo and I did not identify with him. I wonder if my revulsion at John was rooted in a failure to grasp just what kind of world he was living in. I can’t remember this exactly, but I’d guess that my thinking, age 14, was along these lines:
“Yeah, the Brave New World is ridiculous, but it isn’t THAT bad. I wouldn’t make so much fuss about it. There’s a lot of good in there too.”
In other words, Huxley probably came closest of all the dystopian authors to depicting the Totalitarian Id. He really understood the desires and dreams that issue in totalitarian ideology – e.g., the desire for constant sensual pleasure, the yearning to be free from illness and randomness and all the other things that signal to us that we and our world are fallen and imperfect – and I’d imagine that a lot of young people had similar reactions to my own for that reason.
And that brings us to the root of “the changer” phenomenon. Speaking of his own change, Benjamin Kerstein put it quite well in his newly published “Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite:”
“In the prospect of radical change, I began to see the gulag, not utopia.”
Huxley reveals, about as clearly as can be done, the almost logical structure of the implications of our longing for radical change. The reality of the gulag, however, is better filled out by others, including Orwell and (particularly) Solzhenitsyn.
Jack
I read The Jungle on my own from cover to cover when I was a junior in high school. At the time I thought it was a good book, though most of the socialist propaganda went over my head. Four decades later I started to reread it. I couldn’t finish it, as I found it to be a sociological polemic masquerading as literature, with wooden stereotypes instead of flesh and blood characters. The. Good. But Deceived. Workingman. The. Evil. Businessman. I stopped rereading it after about 70 pages.
As social history, it is an interesting book. As literature, not. The book did have an influence- reaction to it helped spur the Food and Drug Act. Fortunately, American society did not respond to the deeper Socialist message of the book.
“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”
– George Orwell
I recall reading both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four in the very late ’50s, in high school.
What I remember distinctly, in those halcyon days, was the endless debate about which was worse. For an adolescent, of course, the brutality of Nineteen Eighty-Four was nightmarish – but still there was something horrible about Huxley’s vision of Paradise.
Remember the Gamma-minus elevator operators, whose sole joy in life was reaching the roof? Remember the faces on the new owners of the latest iGottahaveit yesterday?
Brr.
And by the way, note the spelling of the Orwell book. It ain’t numbers, sister.
George Pal…AMEN!!
All of human history, not to mention the recent past of the 20th century, testifies to what averting one’s eyes from massive, obvious Evil & Danger purchases as a result. President Bush knew. Obama doesn’t care. One was a Big Man. The other a Moral Coward.
‘We have the fun tipping point passed where leftists can double think just about everything. We’re socialists? ‘Crazy talk’… one minute. Next minute; take over the medical system…
Knowing this then, it should come as no suprise to anyone that Huxley was the architect of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA.
In high school lit class we read either 1984 or Anthem by Ayn Rand. In my class we read Anthem, which I still consider underrated.
(I did see a college stage production of 1984 while in high school though.)
Anthem touches on some of the same themes, and even pre-dates 1984.