Nineteen Eighty-Four vs. Brave New World
Commenter “Zaphod” writes, of the Orwell work versus the Huxley work: “Funny thing is that Brave New World happened first.”
Well, yes and no. Brave New World was certainly written first, and I agree that it touched on many of the trends in science and propaganda that actually have come to pass, although of course not in exact detail. The book is exaggerated (so far, that is) in the amount of control and social engineering exerted.
Give them time,though; give them time.
But Orwell, in his dystopian masterpiece, was more or less describing something that had already happened – Soviet Russia – and grafting onto it two future developments, one connected with the advance of surveillance technology (he foresaw the telescreen rather than the internet, but he certainly correctly predicted ubiquitous surveillance cameras) and changes in language. My opinion is that it was in that amalgam that Orwell’s genius lay, particularly in his knowledge of the power of language and how the left was already using it to attempt to shape thought.
Orwell also correctly understood and described the leftist demand for holding in the mind as true two contradictory thoughts – or even an illogical thought such as 2 plus 2 equals 5 – if the party demanded it. He had already seen that at work with Communism.
I read both books in early adolescence and was fascinated by both. Orwell’s book terrified me to my core, but Huxley’s did not. It seemed imaginative and strange and sometimes even humorous, but also vaguely sinister. I didn’t quite understand its more subtle nature (subtle compared to Nineteen Eighty-Four, that is) at the time. I didn’t understand that Brave New World was about a different kind of assault on liberty, one that stroked and embraced rather than tortured and horrified, and was all the more seductive because of it.
IIRC, Orwell worked for the BBC at one point, and said that ‘1984’ was in part motivated by his experiences in that bureaucracy.
“Who controls the past controls the future/
Who controls the present controls the past. ”
“Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Could any more chilling and ominous warning about the soft-totalitarianism (perhaps soon becoming harder) of the “progressive Establishment” and about the dangers of the poisonous BLM/CRT/1619 propaganda engulfing not only the public schools, but much of the wider culture (including the military and corporate America), possibly be imagined? It is also true that Huxley’s emphasis on mindless hedonism as enslavement has some relevance today.
God, using Orwell and Huxley as mouthpieces was warning us. But by then, many perhaps most Western intellectuals had already decided that there was no God and so, everything was permitted.
And the blind led the blind into the ditch.
1984 vs Brave New World?
Xi Jinping: Hold my Tsingtao.
There’s a pulp SF novel from 1954, ‘Year of Consent’, which is nowhere near as well-known as ‘1984’ or ‘Brave New World’, but is is some ways closer to our current situation. I reviewed it here”
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/64491.html
Coulda been worse. . Coulda been We (Zamyatin).
If one looks at 1984 vs Brave New World from a suburban American point of view, it seemed we were headed towards the carefree sex, recreational drugs and mindless consumerism of Brave New World without a 1984ish worry in the world.
One big difference between 1984 and BNW is that 1984 is concerned almost entirely with actions taking place within the Party. Despite all the talk of Inner-and Outer-Party… the Party as a whole is still understood to be a small ruling/administrative fraction of Society. All that Sapir-Whorf Language Wizardry is aimed inwards at the Party Workers. The Proles just Prole along and are presumably policed and prodded into productivity and kept lubricated with Victory Gin and would have some rudimentary Circuses to keep them entertained.
Language and the perpetual hunt for internal enemies and the constant re-adjusting of History are aspects of the Party’s nervous system, heartbeat, etc.
BNW: It’s clearly pleasure and distraction for all but a tiny technocratic elite. You can bet the Zuckerberg kids don’t get much FB Time — and nor did Mustapha Mond’s close colleagues. Also BNW has artificial cognitive stratification as a feature of the system. We today are moving towards self-selective/organising cognitive stratification. And our Techno Overlords understand Pleasure and Vice and the Dopamine reward anticipation system far better than one might wish.
Neo is right that the Soviets got there first.
But the Race is not to the Swift. The Race is to whoever can design/evolve (will be both) a System which lasts (trigger warning) 1000 years, not 70 years.
There are all kinds of inherent contradictions in the GloboHomo Poz Program, but they have got the Prolefeed part brilliantly solved. They have more or less got productivity solved.. and are therefore two steps ahead of the Soviets already. Tightening the Screws should be Easy.
Much is made of the Chinese Model. I’m less than convinced. The Chinese Social Credit System and techno panopticon stuff is simply China adapting modern technology to fit an ancient Neo-Confucian cum Legalist synthesis. i.e. China is going to be governed the way it always has been governed at the apogee of each fresh Dynastic Cycle, but better — because instant communication, global surveillance, etc. They’ve been literally bred to that for two thousand years. So it’s not a bad fit.
Eventually something will bite them on the ass. Something always does in History. Might not be us next time around, the way we’re going these days.
Westerners are different and require a different flavour of tyranny. Still early days. I think our Techno Overlords have a good chance of succeeding with the pleasure trap. For a while. Problem is that too many of them believe their own propaganda — if they don’t start culling their ranks of the Trotskyites, they’ll end up with competency issues through hiring too much Diversity and firing all the White Proles who make sure the server farms don’t burn down. There’s also the lack of reproduction amongst the Right People. No artificial wombs yet.
Zaphod:
Nice write-up.
I certainly have my BNW/1984/East/West concerns about the future. However, without going full Kurzweil, within 20-50 years I do expect AI machines approximating, then exceeding human intelligence.
Then … new ball game.
@Huxley:
Have you read Iain M Banks’ Culture Novels?
He was nasty horrid Scottish Leftist (but I repeat myself, multiple times) with a twisted violent imagination of the G R R Martin sort. Still, some interesting thoughts on what societies might look like with AI Gods and (waves hands) Free Energy/Matter.
2+2=5
And we had better all pretend trans “ women” have no strength advantage over real women.
Oh that’s right, we cannot even say “ real women” any more without being called “ bigot” .
Zaphod:
I started one Banks book. As I recall, it seemed tedious and big-thinkish, so I dropped it. Perhaps I didn’t give it a chance.
@Huxley:
Consider Phlebas or Look to Windward — can’t remember which one I started out on. Didn’t like his later efforts so much.
Talking of SF. In 8th Grade I found Asimov’s Foundation in the school library and was transfixed. Had no idea he’d gone and cribbed Gibbon. Great stuff.
So Apple TV has their adaptation of the Foundation Trilogy coming out later this year. I’m curious to see just how pozzed and transgressive they’ve made it. Live in hope of being pleasantly surprised and proven wrong about this supposition.
I read 1984 in high school. I never read BNW.
Did BNW have the anarchy-tyranny part?
Like where the government makes a spa allow males into the part of the spa that is for girls and women. ( That would be the government tyranny part). That male shows his penis. People show up to protest the fact that males are allowed in with the women and girls and then the street criminals show up to beat up the protestors? (That would be the anarchy part against the common people.)
https://www.breitbart.com/law-and-order/2021/07/03/watch-antifa-violence-breaks-out-at-california-spa/
@jon baker
Aldous Huxley didn’t imagine quite that level of depravity. We have come far.
You won’t get much of a bite here. The Conservatives in these parts don’t much lower themselves to the level of fighting sexual degeneracy. It’s all on a Higher Plane — which in my metaphor-mangling manner I keep trying to fly into the bog.
Still, some good news. The SF Pedophile’s Chorus has taken down their “We’re Coming for Your Kids” song video after much push back from the kinds of folks who get banned from Twitter and Parler and other places where Good Doggies gather to bark. The Singing Sodomites copped a good therapeutic taste of the Fear in last 24 hours and got zero frisson from it.
Can Do! is so full of himself that he’s totally impacted; yes that can be terminal.
Por que no los dos?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OawrlVoQqSs
Re: Foundation Trilogy
Zaphod:
Foundation was a big deal for me too. I was in 9th grade. I’d never read anything with that scope before.
I’ll be curious to see the TV version, though not expecting much. The “Childhood’s End” which came out in 2015 was pretty disappointing. They added a lot of TV movie elements and it lacked the grandeur of the text.
(Yes, I know about Arthur C. Clarke.)
I share others here view of Bank’s fiction and I too was impressed with Asimov’s Foundation.
David + Foster,
Yes, it is even more prescient.
huxley,
Creativity is the great barrier. Any A.I. without that capability will never measure up to humanity and will remain a tool.
Zaphod,
Hedonistic pursuits cannot sooth the soul. They offer a temporary and ultimately hollow escape. “Charles Aznavour – Yesterday When I Was Young” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N_2esWqNAec
jon baker,
Antifa cannot be dissuaded through appeals to the police. They are only active where it’s safe to ‘protest’. Nothing will change until their ‘protests’ are no longer safe… for them.
Creativity is the great barrier. Any A.I. without that capability will never measure up to humanity and will remain a tool.
Geoffrey Britain:
Computers are already composing music that sounds like Bach and finding new general purpose moves (not tactical calculations) in Go that take Go masters by surprise.
There will always be “No true Scotsman” arguments against computer creativity, as well as general computer intelligence, but computers keep getting better at faking it.
As hardware becomes more powerful and algorithms become deeper, the machines are nibbling their way into intelligence and creativity.
The saying goes, “Fake it till you make it.” The machines may never become truly creative in some ineffable sense, but us humans won’t be able to tell.
huxley:
AI has already succeeded; Can Do! is a Xi Jingping al-goreithm and 42 is the answer. 🙂
I read that on the intertubes somewhere.
Oh, Huxley was first again.
“Brave New World was about a different kind of assault on liberty, one that stroked and embraced rather than tortured and horrified, and was all the more seductive because of it.”
Xi and the Han Chinese are creating a Nationalist Communist (Han) Worker’s Party “Paradise” – and those Chinese not with the program are race and country and often even family traitors.
They know the IQ race hierarchy: Asians (East & South), Whites, Hispanics, Blacks, and they’re fully on board with a “knowledge economy”/knowledge based world.
Like my old Naval Academy motto: Through Knowledge, Power
Titanic competition is coming – hope it doesn’t get to war over Taiwan (for Women and glory).
“and those Chinese not with the program are race and country and often even family traitors.”
There’s a word for that: “Hanjian”. And you get to memorise a list of them in school.
Having said that, 99.9% Han are with the program in the Current Year. Why wouldn’t they be? The High Speed Trains run on time. The hardest thing is to see the world through other people’s eyes.
Taiwan is a great place. And its people are mostly gentle and friendly. They face a terrible internal split though. The current ruling coalition is Pozzed up the Wazoo and more interested in Tranny Rights and Green Energy (it is to laugh) than serious defence buildup.. and the alternative party, the good old corrupt KMT of yore is more than happy to do a deal with China for reunification provided that KMT high ups and their business cronies (most whom own vast manufacturing businesses in China Proper) continue to prosper.
Further complicated by the Racial Split. KMT is largely descendants of mainlander refugees who came over when Chiang Kai Shek bolted. Current governing coalition is Taiwan Nativists — people of basically Piratical Fujianese stock who had a pretty good time under the Japanese from 1895-1945.
Honestly, Negotiated KMT Peaceful Sellout would be best outcome. The smart blood-shed-avoiding, face-saving, imperial collapse delaying US foreign policy would be to work towards a KMT win at the next election. Naturally therefore the opposite will be done.
There’s also the small matter of TSMC — the most strategically valuable company in the world. This and all its employees and their families needs to be moved lock stock and barrel to an underground lair in Utah or something before China gets Taiwan. Too complicated for the rotten state of US Leadership — which once upon a time knew how to relocate an entire Nazi Rocket Science Program and went to the moon with it.
Zaphod,
I’ve been hearing a variety of surprising things about Taiwan Semi of late.
Intel has at least temporarily lost the “best fab” war to TSMC.
The current US chip shortages are connected, in part, to TSMC.
TSMC has factories in Taiwan and many on the mainland.
TSMC is, or seems to be, well integrated with the mainland and is furthering the interests of both Taiwan and the PRC, possibly over the interests of everybody else.
Maybe I’m wrong on the last part. If not, it sounds like it is too late for your last paragraph (time 5:07).
I also wonder about S. Korea and their current regime.
Surprised and shocked! Can Do! proposes strategy for Tiawan that lines up with the CCP, inconceivable, but here it is, again.
@Z: “Negotiated KMT Peaceful Sellout would be best outcome.”
I dispute that. Better is if Taiwan gets nukes and declares it will use them if attacked, so that MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is turned on, again, but this time for China. Same reason US doesn’t want Iran to have the Bomb, China won’t be so happy with Taiwan.
But it’s Chinese aggression for the last few decades which changes the strategic balance so that the Taiwanese can, maybe, choose to go nuclear. Tho the important fact that many in Taiwan would rather accept China, surrender, than fight – many would rather fight.
Xi won’t be living forever, and since he’s been successful at destroying the prior succession process from Deng Xioping, there will be some interesting times in China at that time.
It might be that China chooses to invade rather than “allow” Taiwan to get a bomb.
It might be that a US Dem President would rather accept losing Taiwan rather than supporting a fight.
But I don’t accept the claim that surrender is the best outcome.
I’ve been thinking about this like (from Deteriorata)
“Give up the things of youth.
Birds,
Clean air,
Tuna,
Taiwan.
And let not the sands of time get in your lunch.”
Hmm, guess I better check. Yep, got the words right, tho this version is not quite the Dr. Demento version I recall listening to. (6064311 Ask for “Candy”).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey6ugTmCYMk
@Tom Grey:
I’ve got no problem with (mostly) Rational People who don’t believe much in the Afterlife like the Han getting nukes. Once the tech is out, it’s out.
Problem you got with Taiwan is that the Lesbian Cat Lady’s current ruling coalition is shutting down the nuclear power stations despite TW having a pretty critical situation power-wise. Lots of nonsense about green and renewable energy, but you can’t run a society on those and what has happened is that Taichung in particular is now often terribly polluted because the coal fired plants there have to run at full capacity all the time to supply Taipei and environs. They’re a bunch of incoherent incompetent clowns. Nicer, kinder, better people than the CCP goes without saying. But Nice doesn’t win. Ever.
So chances of these guys nuking up are very low. KMT is corrupt as @$%^ but more competent and could do it. But KMT has more upside with negotiated settlement with China.
We all suspect Japan can nuke up with the turn of a screwdriver in a cavern somewhere. They have all the constituent parts ready to go. A bit like their ‘Helicopter Destroyers’. Doubtless South Korea too.
I love Taiwan though. Bicycle Heaven.
Zaphod:
I don’t pay much attention to Taiwan. Perhaps I should. I must say I find your summary disturbing.
I wouldn’t have thought the Taiwanese, next to an existential adversary like China, would have the luxury to indulge American-Euro elite fantasies.
I assumed Taiwan’s potential nukes were screwdriver-ready like Japan’s.
1984 is what happens to people who don’t take their daily dose of Soma…
JTW – ba-da-bing!