"Brave New World" vs "1984"

CORed said:
Every time I start reading Youtube comments, I become convinced that Pohl and Kornbluth's The Marching Morons was right on the money.
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Or Search the Sky, which I think explores the Society of Morons a bit better.
 
brodski said:
It's been scrapped after being hit from the front, from below and from the side at the same time, before falling out of the sky.
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Nah, it just got caught in the power wires over the road.
 
I think Huxley was right in a lot of ways, but there are Orwellian aspects especially in how foreign affairs are reported in the media and by our gov'ts. I think, for example, of how Afghan insurgents are called 'illegal combatants' while Libyan insurgents are called 'citizen fighters' or civilians.
 
Captain.Sassy said:
I think, for example, of how Afghan insurgents are called 'illegal combatants' while Libyan insurgents are called 'citizen fighters' or civilians.
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This was not soemthign which Orwell predicted, but soemthign which he described during his time as a journalist.
 
Tricky said:
I think Huxley was more on the mark, and by far the better writer. But both were wrong about a whole lot more than they were right.

David Brin's "Earth" is a near-future novel that is a much better extrapolation of present trends than either of those classics. 'Course it has the advantage of being nearer to the time it predicts.

ETA: And I think we should throw Farenheit 451 into the mix too.
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The image of Montag's wife with her ever-present ear plugs and addiction to interaction with the wall screen was chilling. (Second Life?) I notice more people wandering around shopping centers constantly plugged in to their I-phone's etc. It's like they don't want to see or hear the environment they are actually in.

Brave New World presented the idea for slaves being conditioned, drugged (Soma, Prozac) and bio-engineered into loving their servitude. There was no overbearing top-down control. In BNW it would be harder to resist positive reinforcement through instant gratification and the lack of focus for your resistance.

1984 is pure horror, but the least likely because the Winston Smith's who are necessary to administer the state are the same people who are the most prone to "thought crime".
 
brodski said:
It's just a shame that his ideas about the links between language, thought and politics where such utter nonsense.
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By "his" I assume you mean Orwell's "Newspeak"?

Is this a joke? I apologize for being bad at recognizing some satire.
 
MontagK505 said:
Brave New World presented the idea for slaves being conditioned, drugged (Soma, Prozac) and bio-engineered into loving their servitude.
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I'm kind of surprised that Huxley's biologically engineered caste system (his version was crude and fanciful, and if written today it would be done as genetic engineering) seems to have been mostly ignored in this thread. It was a pretty damned big part of the book. The movie "Gattica" seemed to be an updated (and scientifically more realistic) take on that aspect, though with much less rigidity.
 
Captain.Sassy said:
I think Huxley was right in a lot of ways, but there are Orwellian aspects especially in how foreign affairs are reported in the media and by our gov'ts. I think, for example, of how Afghan insurgents are called 'illegal combatants' while Libyan insurgents are called 'citizen fighters' or civilians.
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How about "kinetic military action", "man-caused disasters", or my personal favorite, "overseas contingency operations".
 
Wowbagger said:
Keep in mind that Orwell was not really writing about the future. The year the novel 1984 takes place in is actually one of its least important aspects. It's not even known by characters in the novel. The title was chosen almost arbitrarily (He published it in 1948).

The novel was meant to be a commentary of regimes for his day, disguised as a future nightmare.
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Exactly... Orwell wasn't writing science fiction. Everything he wrote was about the present... and political in nature. Cartoon fail.
 
Two interesting books. As has been pointed out, neither is really about the future. Though set in the future (more obviously in the case of BNW), they're about social trends at the time they were written. 1984 is about conditions in Britain and elsewhere during WWII, and BNW seems to me about the social trends and the sexual revolution of the 1920s, though Huxley stated that it's a satire of H.G. Wells' Men Like Gods. Both seem to have been inspired by We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, to my mind more clearly in 1984, but Orwell himself saw some We in BNW.

Anyway, I could only get much out of either by reading them slant, 1984 as a dark farce and BNW ironically.

1984 makes me laugh because that degree of torture and oppression is so pointless. The resources required to have all the telescreens monitored would be enormous, and for what? Systematically playing head games with people otherwise useful to the state and then killing them. Such a state could not be stable. Besides, it is so much easier and cheaper to allow people to engage in their own oppression, which they are always eager to do anyway. As Frank Zappa pointed out, "with a big ol' lie and a flag and a pie and a mom and a Bible most folks are just liable to buy any line, any place, any time."

The most interesting thing to me about 1984 was Newspeak. This seems to me to be a direct reference to Basic English, a limited vocabulary version of English. Nowadays, Basic English is used as an introductory vocabulary for ESL students, but during the 30s and 40s, advocacy was extremely political, based on the idea that certain "undesirable" things would be impossible to say in Basic English (and therefore think, under a radical interpretation of Sapir-Whorf). I still run into some of these nutcases today. Orwell was an advocate but by 1945 was a critic.

There were some good commentaries on 1984. One is 1985 by György Dalos, which starts with the death of Big Brother in Soviet fashion after having most of his organs and limbs removed due to a temporary condition and continues with essays by some of the characters of 1984. The most enjoyable I've seen was an episode of Second City Television. In 1981, Edith Prickley falls asleep and dreams of the world in three years. Jim Bakker's PTL club has become Praise Big Brother, and Charlton Heston denounces the regime on air while "Thoughtcrime" flashes in red.

I have to read BNW ironically, because really, some of the aspects of the society seem pretty good to me. I see the Savage as a destructive force, because after all, he is the one who beats the snot out of his girlfriend in a jealous rage and then kills himself. Besides, I've always like bonobos more than chimpanzees.
 
Ziggurat said:
I'm kind of surprised that Huxley's biologically engineered caste system (his version was crude and fanciful, and if written today it would be done as genetic engineering) seems to have been mostly ignored in this thread. It was a pretty damned big part of the book. The movie "Gattica" seemed to be an updated (and scientifically more realistic) take on that aspect, though with much less rigidity.
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I was going to mention it only as another example of the way the world didn't turn out to be a Huxley book. There's still plenty of opportunity in this world if you want to rise above your station in life. Not 100% of course, but at least it's possible. In BNW you were programmed from birth and that was that.
 
epepke said:
The resources required to have all the telescreens monitored would be enormous, and for what? Systematically playing head games with people otherwise useful to the state and then killing them. Such a state could not be stable. .
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See East Germany.... replace telescreens with microphones.

ETA. (quote from epepke) "1984 makes me laugh because that degree of torture and oppression is so pointless."

Actually, the way Brits treated the Burmese was quite effective (very few people dominated millions). Orwell is writing from personal experience here.
 
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Ziggurat said:
I'm kind of surprised that Huxley's biologically engineered caste system (his version was crude and fanciful, and if written today it would be done as genetic engineering) seems to have been mostly ignored in this thread. It was a pretty damned big part of the book. The movie "Gattica" seemed to be an updated (and scientifically more realistic) take on that aspect, though with much less rigidity.
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In "Gattica" there was prejudice against people with genetic-defects. The pressure was mainly social. If you wanted your kid to have a good job, you needed to clean up his/her genome. The process of submitting to gene-testing through skin scrapings every where you went was disturbing. This could be used in a Orwellian tyranny to track people's movements.
 
NoScotsman said:
You mean the idea that you can control thoughts by controlling language?

Political correctness would argue against you.
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It would if it could but it would be wrong. Ad I said upthread, just look at the treadmill of language relating to mental retardation. There are countless other examples and that is just the tip of the nuttery. The idea that if you remove words from a language then people can't even think about the concepts those words expressed is utterly crazy.
 
NoScotsman said:
See East Germany.... replace telescreens with microphones.

ETA. (quote from epepke) "1984 makes me laugh because that degree of torture and oppression is so pointless."

Actually, the way Brits treated the Burmese was quite effective (very few people dominated millions). Orwell is writing from personal experience here.
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But neither East Germany nor the British treatment of the Burmese lasted. The whole point of 1984 was a permanent society.
 
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