These are two people who agree with each other, using a supposed debate about Huxley and Orwell as a coat rack on which to hang their real arguments --- in Dreher's case, for a vision of society resembling what Orban's Fidesz is pursuing in Hungary, and in Winegard's, I assume something about cancel culture.<p>Doesn't mean you can't have a curious and thoughtful debate about Huxley and Orwell here, but I don't think the authors are really having one.
Although I understand its been critiqued, I always liked the visual depiction of "amusing ourselves to death" from Postman [1], by McMillen [2]<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webcomic-2/" rel="nofollow">https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...</a>
Elements of both exist in the modern world, but Huxley's is easier to overlook. Authorities need people to mostly not react to intolerable things that are happening, and it's best if you do it from placating people with drugs/toys/pacifiers rather than the whip, because people who are pacified will pressure other people into not rocking the boat, whereas people who are being whipped will complain about it to their friends and try to build up a resistance movement.<p>Of course when you do go for the whip, you want to newspeak it into something else, so that also works, in small doses. Your problem occurs if it escalates, then you can't hold it down with PR anymore.<p>So 1984 is metastable and such societies did in fact boil over. BNW is stable and invisible to a lot of people, though I suspect there is some failure mode we have yet to see. Maybe there's a line of thought where people just get sick of every damn thing being massaged to death by PR people, and they do something about it.
Orwell vs Huxley seems to be the lens of how people react to what is done to them. I'm more interested in why those in power do those things in the first place. The article points to the students as if they have power, I don't think they do, they're trapped in a system and reacting to it as pretty much any young human would do in the same position.<p>Possibly my favorite example of the powerful impressing a way of life on a huge number of people is the diplomatic sealed train the Germans used to send Lenin from Switzerland to Russia. i.e. the Russian Revolution was an intentional act done to it by cynical Germans who correctly expected the outcome would help them in the war. And the rest is history.
Huxley seems to be more right in the long term, since Orwellian oppression is very visible, people work to fix it and eventually do. Not so for Huxly-an dystopia.
Neither because they both plagiarized Yevgeny Zamyatin.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)</a>
A recent thread went around twitter discussing the need for artificial wombs to address the inequality between men and women. Huxley is the first place my mind went.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/molly0xfff/status/1483831201823703041?s=21" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/molly0xfff/status/1483831201823703041?s=...</a>
I don’t really see the either/or situation here. It seems like two ways in which states can control citizens, and with actors in the modern world taking lessons from both mixed with other sources.
Has anyone here looked into the claim that both iconic works were inspired by ideas from the very same book, Bertrand Russell's 1931 classic "The Scientific Outlook"? Russell himself covers certain aspects of this in his "Prefatory note to the second edition" of Scientific Outlook, where he actually mentions the direct influence of this book upon both Brave new world and upon Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution", a book which contained projections of the future which, as Orwell scholars agree, both horrified and fascinated him and, in turn, turned out to be the inspiration for much of "1984".
Fahrenheit 451 from Ray Bradbury gives the perfect mix in my opinion: being semi-/pseudo-happy with the drugs and entertainment and when you try to leave that path, you face oppression in increasing degree.
My experience is that 1984 is much more re-readable. That doesn't necessarily mean anything, except that perhaps Orwell created a world that is more mentally inhabitable despite its grim nature. The little room above the shop is a respite we can all dream of.<p>There's nothing like that in Brave New World, though I think it's the wiser book.
There is a good british movie from 1936 about future <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_to_Come" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_to_Come</a><p>It seems forgotten but i think it is still great and dusturbing.
We seem to fall into this interesting (and obvious) comparison about every 18months - 3 years. They both exist to some extent in different places today, but IMO Huxley has aged more accurately, especially if you squint a bit.
Neither because they're both fiction books marketed towards a popular audience for their entertainment. They are not substitutes for concrete analysis of historical facts.<p>"Who got it right, J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K. Rowling?"
Both, depending on country/time period.<p>I've lived in Orwell's country (communist dictatorship) when I was young, now I live in Brave New World.
I hate these either/or questions. A lot of societies have aspects of both. North Korea probably leans toward Orwell but the rest of the world more Huxley at the moment. But we shouldn’t create these dichotomies. Left vs right, socialism vs capitalism and so on. They stifle any reasonable discussion right before it can even begin. I guess that’s the purpose of offering only extreme alternatives.
Both these 2 were old Etonians and Oxbridge students - pillars of the establishment. They were from the upper classes - the classes that believe they rightfully rule the oi polloi (everyone else).<p>So, whatever they wrote about is framed by their experience and understanding of reality. As part of the class that believes it is right to manage us, do you think that they were trying to warn the proles about the future? Were they trying to help us live a more meaningful life?<p>They were not. Their works were <i>not</i> a service to mankind, they were <i>not</i> warning us about the future or that old trope. What they were doing is putting down in writing their best understanding of the plans that were in store for us. It was a mental exploration of how future management might pan out, what it might look like.<p>I suspect that this writing was partly as a tool to give to the upper/administrative classes so that they had a clearer goal in mind. I also suspect that these works were disseminated more widely, as a population that is aware of the ideas does not respond in shock and reject them - mentally they have acclimatised to the future horrors. (Aka Predictive Programming.)<p>If this sounds implausible, consider the fact that Aldous's brother Julian, created UNESCO. His grandfather Thomas played a role in establishing the theory of evolution (which in many ways provides a biological justification for the role of the elites as 'they are the fittest'). George Orwell's actual name was Eric Blair - and of course there is a famous British politician - Tony Blair. (It is claimed they are not relations, but it remains possible - how can we know?)<p>The books themselves are purported to be set in the future. However, it is possible to read them in a different light (as I suggest above) - as a sort of visionary guide for those administrators of the 30's and 40's. This is to say, that a lot of power was already in existence then. Eugenics (a feature in both books) was an overtly accepted ideology of the upper classes at the time. The nazis made the term unfashionable, but there is are reasons to think that this ideology is still popular amongst the self-proclaimed elite class.<p>In direct answer to the question, I think the elites would prefer us to self-select our future slavery along the lines of BNW - we can have moral degeneracy (its already here!) drugs (ditto) and just do our epsilon/delta jobs. However, Orwell was right about the talking screens, and ultimately if we won't self-select our slavery there is a harder form soon available - Chinese credit scores (aka bio-medical-ids/crypto-wallets) which thanks to the technocracy we have been working hard to achieve (esp in IT), will mean some of us will be locked out of life in the system. So, its a mix of both visions.
Newspeak in action in San Francisco.<p><a href="https://abc7.com/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-crime-language-criminal-justice/5488088/" rel="nofollow">https://abc7.com/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-crime-la...</a><p>Felon -> “justice-involved person”<p>Juvenile delinquent -> “young person impacted by the juvenile justice system”<p>Drug addicts -> “persons with substance abuse history”<p>Ex-cons > “formerly incarcerated”
1984 got it more correct. Take sometime to read or watch current China related stuff. It makes whatever we think oppressions done by western countries look pedantic. Huxley birth control might also play out in China if birth rate there still dropping way below what the state wants of 3 at the moment. Personally I feel, if the world was dominated by mainland Chinese and their influences or direct supremacy in some kind of marvel multiverse, then Huxley-Orwell fictions might be "unfictionized" there.