I'm usually not a big fan of infographics, but there's been an infographic that displays the differences between the future that Huxley depicted and the future that Orwells depicted surprisingly well [1].<p>I always found the world in 'A brave new world' to be better <i>designed</i> than the world in 1984. Orwell installed Big Brother and had tight control structures organize society. I.e. people are forced to not misbehave. Huxley, on the other hand, (at least that's how it felt to me) found solutions to all the small issues that make people misbehave, and just implemented a society around it. In his dystopian future, people don't <i>want</i> to misbehave, they're not interested in it. I think both societies have equal chances of survival, but the Huxley society has a higher chance of coming into existence because it installs itself in line with peoples desires, instead of confronting their desires.<p>[1] <a href="http://thesleepymoose.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/huxvor-2.png?w=604" rel="nofollow">http://thesleepymoose.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/huxvor-2.p...</a>
<i>Brave New World</i> is a nasty reactionary's idea of dystopia. There are genuine horrors there--conditioning, eugenics, erasure of independent thought--but the central themes that it keeps coming back to are that everybody's employed, everybody's happy, nobody's hungry or sick or miserable, there's safe, consequence-free, recreational sex and drugs for everyone, and <i>these are portrayed as bad things.</i><p><i>BNW</i> is fucked up in some serious ways, but--taken as an average across all levels of society--I think it's actually better than the world we live in now.<p>Huxley, to his credit, eventually came around to the idea that sex, drugs, and communal living could be used for good as well as evil, and actually wrote a utopian response to his own earlier dystopian work. It's telling that <i>Brave New World</i> remains in every high school curriculum, but no one's ever heard of <i>Island</i>. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)</a>
I find it particularly telling that, however much this author rages against "the machine", he still is a willing participant; facebook, twitter, google and linkedin all have neat little javascript "links" at the bottom of his page which are tracking all the blog's readers.
I've always been really interested in a claim made in the foreword of Brave New World by Huxley that sexual freedom is inversely correlated with economic and political freedom:<p>> As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom.<p>I'm not aware of what historical (as of 1946, when it was written) examples this was premised on, and I've never seen it expanded on anywhere else (though I have looked).<p>I'm curious if anyone who cares to defend Huxley's dystopia has any actual rational basis for this claim, since it forms a core component of the world he builds.<p>More generally, I am not terribly sympathetic to the overall world built in Brave New World as a possible future. It definitely seems to me as if the 1984 predictions are much closer to reality than BNW's.<p>We live in a constant state of readiness for wars that have unclear purposes and the governments we have seem much more interested in tearing down ideas like full employment or sexual or narcotic freedoms. So it's surprising to see people think that Huxley got it right and Orwell didn't.
Every time I read or hear about the dystopian futures laid out by Huxley, Orwell and in fact, many others, I can't help but think of the future imagined by Banks. In the Culture, people are free to do pretty much whatever they want, which eventually brings crime within the Culture to a near-zero. Even the most atrocious crimes, albeit rare, are punished (if ever) by a slap on the wrist. What I find particularly interesting about this is that Culture people being free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, they in fact end up in a state of lassitude and ultimately, a form of self-servitude and meaninglessness (hence the expansion of the Culture and so on).<p>This shares Huxley's view of servitude through content, but it brings the interesting point of whether the Culture could be qualified as a Dystopia or a Utopia. It's funny to see that the majority of Culture people (as written by Banks) think of the Culture as the closest thing to a Utopia, yet Banks himself has pointed out on a number of occasions that he would not like living in such a society. It also brings up the question of whether a Utopia is really defined by (at least near-) complete freedom, or by individual comfort.<p>I very much enjoy my freedom (or whatever it is I think I have) and I do have a tendency to reject (or rather circumvent) authority, but the more I think about it the more I realize this view isn't shared by everybody. A lot of people don't want to have to make decisions, question things and whatnot, their comfort lies in the absence of having to do so, a view I can understand (though do not share). I don't know if it's right, or wrong, and I'm certainly not in a place to decide for others, but it does show the subjectivity and flimsiness of the concepts of u/dys-topian societies.
Aldous Huxley gave a speech at Berkeley "The Ultimate Revolution" which can be found online in many places, not least at <a href="http://archive.org/details/AldousHuxley-TheUltimateRevolution" rel="nofollow">http://archive.org/details/AldousHuxley-TheUltimateRevolutio...</a><p>In the talk he discusses how the most likely scenario relative to 1984 is that people will come to "love their servitude".<p>Well worth a listen.
In my opinion we are to close to this picture for comfort. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/rTXSQ.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/rTXSQ.jpg</a>
Anyone who appreciates Brave New World and 1984 should really take a look at Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel, We.<p>It was the first book banned after the Russian revolution and according to Orwell it was his inspiration for 1984. I found it a lot more amusing and poetic than 1984 however.
Brave new world is a surprisingly benign place. You could do whatever you like there if only you had the idea to. Compare that to 1984 or "We".<p>I can totally see them accepted into galactic equivalent of EU having only to replace lower castes with robots (what they totally could). Not so fast with the current messy state of Earth.