Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell

http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html

by dotcoma • 16 years ago

240 81 16 years ago

dbz2• 16 years ago

A cute cartoon, but seeing as I just ([imo]unfortunately) read "Brave New World" in a very in depth literature class (apologize for the fallacy call to authority) , I don't find the Cartoon to be accurate at all.

For example, books were banned in "Brave New World" -remember all that Shakespeare drama? Huxley was saying people are going to be controlled by the government because in the Brave New World, the government breeds humans for different purposes, and all those humans know are pleasures which are completely dependent on the government, like daily rations of soma, a drug which prevents aging and sadness.

SamAtt• 16 years ago

But there's a difference between the banning in Brave New World and what we consider the term to mean today (or what it meant in 1984). Most World State citizens couldn't read at all so banning books was done so they wouldn't be tempted to learn. The government wasn't taking something away as much as they were simply not giving the population access to it.

Books were essentially like illegal drugs in our society. The Government had decided they were harmful to the citizenry and attempted to restrict them from coming in. But it's clearly a fairly minor thing (again equivalent to our drug policy where most personal use offenders get drug treatment rather than punishment).

For example, John the Savage is allowed both to quote Shakespeare and to interact with those who come to the reservation. Yet there's no Government repression and it's certainly not like in 1984 where you get a lobotomy. So the banning of books really reinforces the cartoon's point because what the government has done is to convince the population that books are bad for them and then offered the ban as a way to keep the population from being harmed by them.

dbz2• 16 years ago

imho, you have a very misleading point where the government is just not providing access akin to drugs; however, books contain knowledge, and drugs do not. The government in the Brave New World isn't just "not providing a service," it's actively attempting to make a dumb citizen through not only the means of censorship, but injecting fetuses with alcohol to lower the intelligence of the individual. Our government has a ban on drugs to protect us citizens(theoretically), whereas the Brave New World has a ban on books to protect itself.

I'd also like to note:

Most personal offenders in our government get treatment instead of punishment (drugs). Most personal offenders in the Brave New World get banished (reading).

iaskwhy• 16 years ago

Yap, Brave New World is much more interesting to those who want to understand what might be our future than 1984. I believe that's common sense to those who read both novels.

Also interesting is Brave New World Revisited, a book written 30 years after he's other book where he compares it with 1984 by Orwell. He also makes some guesses about the future[1].

I love dystopias and Brave New World is the best.

spoiler

[1] The most important one being about soma and how it's so similar to lsd.

jraines• 16 years ago

A really smart person I know read Brave New World and thought it was a Utopian novel. At least, so they said.

amalcon• 16 years ago

It is a utopian novel, in one interpretation. That interpretation views it as about how utopia isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.

matwood• 16 years ago

It's utopia in the since that pleasure is used to control people instead of pain. The basis of both novels is control. The people in power always want to control those who are not in power, and that is what the individual must always be on guard against.

I look at TV as a type of soma. Imagine if tomorrow TV* was gone. What would people do? No longer could they easily escape from the things they don't want to think about. I'm guessing some would turn to drugs, but many others (I hope anyway) would wake up and realize their own reality and thoughts instead just what has been spoon fed to them over the years.

* Like a lot of other 'drugs' TV has many good uses for information and entertainment. The problem arises when large parts of the population watch so many hours/day.

iterationx• 16 years ago

No one ever mentions We http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)

igravious3• 16 years ago

Have read it! Deserves a read. Because it's not by an Anglo-American writer I'd say it gets ignored somewhat. Besides, it's not very famous unless you like dystopian fiction and seek out a lot of it. Also, author's name: Yevgeny Zamyatin is a stonking name.

zzzmarcus• 16 years ago

We is great, and remarkably similar to Brave New World. I like the mini-controversy surrounding it, here it is as summarized on Wikipedia:

"...in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World as a reaction to H.G. Wells' utopias long before he had heard of We. According to We translator Natasha Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was lying. Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952) he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.""[1]

If Huxley hadn't read We he was def. channeling Zamyatin's aura somehow or another.

Vonnegut is too hard on himself saying Player Piano was a rip off of Brave New World. It is great in it's own right.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)

akkartik• 16 years ago

Another book I just finished: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Perfect_Day by the author of Rosemary's Baby.

TGJ• 16 years ago

It seems that they both are right in a sense. Overindulgence of the self (Huxley) leads to destruction while overindulgence of Others (Orwell) does the same. Indulging in the personal pleasures leads people to forget about everything else while trying to take care of others too much leads to trying to run their lives when they don't listen to you even though you think you are right.

dotcoma• 16 years ago

Orwell wrote about overindulgence of others? How so?

arethuza3• 16 years ago

The only example I can think of is the way the Party controls the Proles - by making sure they have plenty gin, beer, porn, trashy novels and gambling. Which was presumably based on the observations of working class life he did for "The Road to Wigan Pier".

pope52• 16 years ago

Original Source (2009): http://www.recombinantrecords.net/2009/05/24/amusing-ourselv...

aardvark• 16 years ago

The cartoon notes that the comparison was taken from Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

Postman wrote this 25 years ago. If anything, his observation is even more true today.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

RIP Neil Postman. His keen intellect and warm humanity are missed.

JoachimSchipper• 16 years ago

[Note that there's a ton of Brave New World that's not in the comic, as pointed out by dbz. I'm reacting to the comic's version.]

Note that, unlike Orwell's dystopia, Huxley's doesn't require squashing every voice of dissent - as long as the majority of people don't care, there is little danger in allowing some dissidents.

Some would say that this, in fact, has already happened - Berlusconi controls a sufficiently large part of the population via the media that he's effectively untouchable. In the American situation, there's Fox News and its competitors.

ckuehne• 16 years ago

Neil Postman made the same observation already in 1984: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

EDIT: Just read aardvark's comment. So never mind.

dflock• 16 years ago

This is a false dichotomy. It's quite possible - and indeed, probably much more likely - that aspects of both are becoming bigger parts of our lives at the same time. These two aspects of human culture - authoritarianism and dissipation have always been with us, this isn't new; 'dictatorship' & 'bread and circuses' would both be familiar concepts to citizens of ancient Rome.

arethuza3• 16 years ago

So are there any novels that portray such a "hybrid" dystopia?

starkfist2• 16 years ago

Wouldn't any novel set in contemporary times be portraying the hybrid dystopia that we all currently inhabit?

seanalltogether• 16 years ago

The problem with that is sci-fi and dystopian novels need clear black and white issues to discuss, otherwise it loses it's bite. In order to dissect and understand societies flaws, you really have to isolate the behaviour and then take it to it's logical extreme.

paylesworth• 16 years ago

I'm kinda shocked that no one in this discussion has mentioned Fahrenheit 451.

It's a very close approximation of the of the two realties depicted in the comic strip. Definitely worth picking and it's beautifully vivid and short, about a novella in length.

Jd2• 16 years ago

I disagree. An ineffective totalitarian system is not totalitarian. A totalitarian system is only totalitarian insofar as it can effect fear on the part of those subjected to it. If the US government (or any other government) were able to suppress the output of media that criticized it by its intelligence services such that ordinary people would not dare reporting what was happening in their communities, this indeed would be totalitarian. The trend, however, is mostly to ignore problematic areas in favor of ones that make one happy. For instance, focusing on the bright side rather than the dark side of mass immigration with a few selected pieces of anecdotal evidence. One can almost always spot this selective highlighting at the expense of the larger dataset by the departure from math and "feel good" (or, conversely, "shock") stories. Since in general people prefer to feel good about themselves, they are either drawn to news which invalidates other parties (other races, members of other political parties) or to fluffy Hollywood productions (there is immense feel good value in watching things blow up on screen, esp. when the other side is ascribed to be "evil").

That said, I have no doubt that there are many who would wish to see the United States (or other places) become more totalitiarian than in fact they are. The free market system we are in has reduced virtually everything to economic motives, which are good about preserving certain information channels at the expense of others.

mikecane• 16 years ago

>>>A totalitarian system is only totalitarian insofar as it can effect fear on the part of those subjected to it.

Not being snarky, but have you ever had a run in with a cop lately? Especially when the issue is legal and the cop is ignorant or thinks it's illegal? You'll know the imposition of state-sanctioned fear then.

igravious3• 16 years ago

Francis Fukayama made this very same assertion years ago in an essay in The Times Literary Supplement or The New York Review of Books. I remember reading this maybe six, seven years ago and his assertion was that the Huxlean(?) view of the future and not the Orwellian view of the future was coming to pass. I thought that it gelled with his capitalistic view of the world in general. It's a futile debate because clearly our present world exhibits traits from both of Huxley's and Orwell's imaginings. Arguably Orwell was by far the superior craftsman and wordsmith which is why I think his images carry more weight and are more current. Their visions are both culturally very important and this kind of "who's better?" malarky is ... um, malarky! Like I said before Eric Blair to Tony Blair in < 50 years ftw!

absconditus• 16 years ago

I am not disagreeing with anything you wrote or trying to be argumentative, but I wanted to mention that Amusing Ourselves to Death is 25 years old.

igravious3• 16 years ago

I'll check it out

hjkl• 16 years ago

This comic rings mostly true for me, but I disagree a bit with the claim that information in 1984 was restricted; Good information was hard to find, but if I recall correctly, bad information was abundant.

For example, even when Winston begins to realize that he's being fed B.S. information by the government, the book he reads for "real" information is also (probably) filled with lies. I find this point to be especially poignant today as some niche alternative news outlets (such as conspiracy theory web sites) are as inaccurate as the outlets they seek to criticize.

GiraffeNecktie• 16 years ago

Orwell was specifically warning about the dangers of a communist totalitarian state. He was one of the few left-leaning writers that spoke out against Stalinism. North Korea has become, in every sense, a '1984' state. China and the former Soviet Union seem to be in transition from '1984' to 'Brave New World'.

dublinclontarf• 16 years ago

Actually China found that a "pure" 1984 state isn't sustainable, so they're using the BNW model to paste over the cracks.

orblivion2• 16 years ago

I was thinking about this. If NK spread around the world, it would be curtains. 1984 would be realized, there would be no escape. However NK receives aid from the UN (that it denies). I'm guessing (hoping) it wouldn't be sustainable otherwise.

JustinSeriously• 16 years ago

Funny, I was just reading about this.

"A young man Demick interviewed read 1984 after he escaped to [South Korea]. He was startled to learn that George Orwell, back in the 1940s, had perfectly understood the thinking of modern North Koreans."

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/07/24/robert-fulfor...

orblivion2• 16 years ago

My dad, who grew up in the Soviet Union, was similarly impressed.

narrator2• 16 years ago

Orwell was just predicting what the future would be like if Stalinism took over the world in 1984. He had plenty of experience with it while fighting in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the anarchists POUM and often in conflict with the Stalinist backed factions.

The government of North Korea was founded by Kim Il Sung who was hand picked by Stalin to run the country, so it's only natural that they would try to implement the model Orwell was talking about.

miked• 16 years ago

"A kindergarten teacher reports that the hardest part of her job was watching her pupils die of starvation. A pediatrician says much the same about her patients."

As it happens, my brother-in-law came into town today. At dinner, he asked my wife what it was like growing up in China during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (she was born in 1951). She told him the hardest part was the hunger. Once she was caught digging up and eating a sweet potato from a field. Her teacher punished her by putting here on an even more reduced ration. This was only supposed to be for a few days, but the teacher forgot and she had reduced rations for the rest of the semester. It was only because a staff member asked about the punishment at the beginning of the next semester that the standard ration was reinstated.

She was just a small girl with ponytails.

jdminhbg• 16 years ago

The elitism in this comic has rubbed me the wrong way every time I've read it, as has the historical tone deafness. You have to basically assume the premise to Idiocracy for it to be valid.

harscoat• 16 years ago

Orwell predicted the 20th Century, Huxley predicts the 21st

startuprules3• 16 years ago

I would propose that there currently exist a third reality: a combination of the two scenarios described in the comics. An authoritarian state which restricts materials that are hazardous to the state's health, but also encourages huge debt taking/mindless consumption that zombifies the majority of the population.

Case in point: US. It restricts information that would undermine its authority as the world's dominant power, such as BP spill, bankruptcy of its banks/cities/states, ineffectiveness at resolution in afghanistan, etc. The government offers discounts/low rates for large home mortgages, expensive cars, and big student loans that would shackle the majority of the population in debt chains. It also condones mindless consumption such as reality TV, sports, celebrity news, and facebook games by not taxing them as addictive hazards.

Case in point: China. It restricts, well, pretty much anything it doesn't want the people to know with the great internet firewall and state news programs. It also encourages huge risk taking in mortgages, which recently has seen home prices go up to 30X average income. It encourages its citizens to forget about the abysmal living condition by allowing internet game cafes to spread like wildfire and trapping the players in pointless alternative realities. So they don't realize they are doing slave labor at $1/day to make ipads.

I further propose that this will continue as long as these governments worldwide can keep feeding its citizens at a minimum (food stamps, unemployment benefits, carb/sugar loaded cheap food), while offering cheap, mind-numbing entertainments to keep people at home, so they don't go out and riot on the streets. They can then keep on taxing/raising the retirement age on the productive workers

Until oil is at $150/middle class is wiped out/Iran is attacked/North Korea attacks/US defaults on SS and medicare/Japan defaults on its bonds/food prices double/Israel is attacked/automation renders most of population useless, anyways.

sabat• 16 years ago

You're right. The author may have been better to argue that Huxley is scoring higher than Orwell, but not by much. Our problem is that both of them are scoring as high as they are. Apparently, there are powerful people in the world who have taken these novels not as warnings but as textbooks.

kiba2• 16 years ago

Apparently, there are powerful people in the world who have taken these novels not as warnings but as textbooks.

More like these people have taken on these Orwellian characteristics on their own rather than read about how to do EVIL.

There are human beings who are very good at manipulating people, but it doesn't mean that they know the science of manipulating people.

mxavier• 16 years ago

I think you might have misplaced blame on some of those points. I was not aware that the US government sponsored reality TV, celebrity news, facebook simply by the virtue of not making people pay for them. The government not taxing something does not equate to the government condoning it.

Part of that blame has to come down on capitalism. There exists a market for these things and if the market demands it, is it the government's job in matters of entertainment and nutrition to step in and decide what we can indulge in?

kiba2• 16 years ago

There's also a growing market for people who engaged in making thing entertainment and electronics hacking entertainment.

There's markets for low-brows, which everyone use. Then there are "high-brows" market in which people can engage in their perspective curiosity/sophistication.

For every mindless entertainment, there are niche hobbies which people engage in and put enormous amount of energy into.

For example, my hobby is to speculate on currencies. The side effect is that I learn about money emerge naturally in a free market economy, security schemes, and P2P networks. (Yes, I actually do that.)

andolanra• 16 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree with the overall gist of your comment, but I am curious as to what the US did to restrict information about the BP spill, and how it would have undermined US authority if the information got out that a London-based petroleum company caused a spill along the US coast.

startuprules3• 16 years ago

Check my submissions. They'll have the details you want.

narrator2• 16 years ago

The important stuff in the U.S is controlled by creating false dichotomies between different alternatives that both assume a uniform underlying reality and are different in practically meaningless ways. Anything that's different from these false alternatives is assumed to be one of the false alternatives, will be viewed as kook material or will take several hours to explain. There is also plenty of genuine kook material mixed in to all of this that makes it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The only thing that can really knock the average American out of this is long term exposure to alternatives that exist in other cultures. Ever notice how people who are well traveled often have a more nuanced understanding of most contemporary topics?

LaPingvino• 16 years ago

true; anything I see from the US is seen as one point or exactly the contrary, never as the way more complex reality it really is...

alsomike• 16 years ago

Possibly not the third reality, but the only reality. What if pleasure and control are always two sides of the fascist coin? The totalitarian master isn't only saying "Sacrifice yourself for the good of the Nation, discipline yourself, follow the rules and give up your pleasures." He also says "We will break all the rules, no restrictions, all pleasures are permitted - we can kill some Jews, rape some slaves, lynchings and torture are OK!" The obscene underside of the control and discipline in the KKK and Nazism is the orgy of violence, throwing off the normal repressive rules of society that control our impulses.

Why is fascism so closely associated with control and discipline? The purpose is to conceal the totalitarianism inherent in our own society, like how we were taught that American society is free because individuals can enjoy their consumer pleasures, while people in the Soviet Union are subjected to discipline and control.

byw• 16 years ago

"It also encourages huge risk taking in mortgages, which recently has seen home prices go up to 30X average income."

I don't know if the government encourages it, but recently they "banned" third mortgages to cool the market down. House-flipping isn't really a Chinese phenomenon.

"It encourages its citizens to forget about the abysmal living condition by allowing internet game cafes to spread like wildfire and trapping the players in pointless alternative realities. So they don't realize they are doing slave labor at $1/day to make ipads."

Wrong demographics. Factories consist of mostly poor migrant workers from the countrysides, they probably don't have the time/money for gaming. Internet cafes cater to urban middle-class kids who can afford to spend all their free time in LAN parties.

startuprules3• 16 years ago

You're correct; middle class don't do slave labor at $1/day. (I had rambled on a bit) They make $20/day in dead end jobs.

jackfoxy• 16 years ago

Don't forget in the third reality: the state taxes interest at each tax payer's top marginal rate, making it impossible for ordinary people to build wealth through low-risk investments like simple bank accounts.

mattmaroon2• 16 years ago

The reason is that Aldous Huxley's vision was far easier to implement. It didn't require a massive conspiracy, which is extremely difficult. Anyone who has ever been a checkout supervisor at Wal-Mart will tell you how hard it is to coordinate a large number of people with individual personalities, desires, etc. even if the end goal is something as simple as everyone taking a 15 minute break without having too few cashiers at once.

Huxley's vision just required a bunch of people independently trying to make money and becoming good at it, which is pretty much what people do best.

JanezStupar• 16 years ago

It doesn't take conspiracy to implement 1984. All it takes is bureaucrats doing their jobs and letting bureaucrats to tweak their job description.

mattmaroon2• 16 years ago

I don't think that's true. Bureaucrats are mostly well-intentioned. They're not working toward 1984, they're working toward what they see as a well-run government. When it comes to government people easily fail to see the forest for the trees, and view it as a living, breathing, single organism hell-bent on power. It's not though, it's a collection of people who are for the most part competent and well-meaning and who are simply facing a monumental task.

The entire first world routinely asks our politicians to provide us more services and more securities for less money, and then gets upset when they fail to deliver the impossible. They're not working toward 1984, they're just trying to stay in office and leave their offices a little better than when they found it.

william42• 16 years ago

People seem to assume it's a choice between Huxley, Orwell, or the combination of the two. They miss a very big option, which is that humanity is in fact better off than it used to be. Marx was dead wrong about the future(remember, he thought that global communist revolution was inevitable) but he was dead right about the time that he lived in. Up until the 1950s or 60s or so, a good half of the population wasn't able to hold any but a rare few jobs. During the early days of the Industrial Revolution up until about the decade of the 1900s, you would be considered lucky if you were paid in money rather than company scrip that would be useless outside of the company town you lived in, meaning that if you wanted to change jobs you pretty much lost all your money. In the Middle Ages, ...if I have to explain to you why the Middle Ages sucked compared to today, you're already a lost cause. I could go on.

Want a real dystopia? Read a history book.

dstorrs• 16 years ago

You're absolutely right -- things are much better now than any time in history, for a majority of the world's population.

But "better" really means "more choices are available." We should try to make sure that we make the best choices, and that's what posts like these are trying to help us do.

jbooth• 16 years ago

Yeah, but most of the reforms moving us past that point (OSHA, non-discrimination, overtime pay, etc) were actually the work of bonafide socialists.

That was good enough for a while. Now we're starting to see worker's discontent again, it's focused on boogeymen, immigrants and liberals for now, but it'll make it's way back to employers eventually.

StavrosK• 16 years ago

The world in Brave New World was portrayed in a very negative light, but I found it to be a utopia where everyone is happy. I don't see why a future where people have everything they may want and are happy all the time without fear is a bad world to be in...

lincolnq• 16 years ago

Well, I would rather live in a world that is making technological progress than a world where everyone was happy all the time. I think people need to be at least a little unhappy to drive progress.

Semiapies2• 16 years ago

Beyond just that the cartoonist misses (or outright distorts) the points of Brave New World, ey makes the truly bizarre (and yet oddly common) assumption that at some golden age in the past, "the people" were less distracted by their own lives and what entertained them and were more civic and more aware.

They weren't. Before they were playing video games, they were playing ping pong, board games, cards, or catch. Before they were watching YouTube, they were watching TV or listening to radio shows. Despite the journalistic myth-making about their own industry, the news has always been cluttered with trivialities and partisanship in every medium.

And there have always been people complaining how everyone but they has descended into terrible trogolodytes who only care about their own lives and interests - and not what smart people like themselves find important.

starkfist2• 16 years ago

A bit pedantic, but: the cartoonist didn't really write anything, he just illustrated text Neil Postman wrote in "Amusing Ourselves to Death."

Semiapies2• 16 years ago

Yes, that's pedantic.

wheels• 16 years ago

Blog spam, the original is here: http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...

And the original discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627476

Edit: (article link was changed by moderator)

pedalpete• 16 years ago

Let us not forget about the great skill our minds have at making connections between things which many not actually be true.

Just as startuprules points out that while many in the US are thinking that they have big brother looking over them, when they are compared to China they realize that it is mostly just their imagination.

What I find most interesting is how many of us would say we are part of the problem? So if it affects everybody, but we're not a part of it, does it really affect everybody.

Also, lets not forget about the drop in things like tv ratings, where a big show in the 80's was 10s of millions of people, and a big show today has a much smaller viewership.

We still think everybody is watching American Idol (or whatever) because it's everwhere, but in reality, it seems very few are actually watching or even taking an interest.

Tichy• 16 years ago

I am not convinced. Somehow the 1984s still seem to be just around the corner all the time. Any kind of incident, and politicians try to make a case for 1984 laws and censorship.

At least if my neighbors amuse themselves to death, I am not forced to participate. I also don't think average people of all ages (as in centuries, eons) were usually preoccupied with highly intellectual endeavors. So the lament of us all becoming more stupid is probably also an old one.

Ardit202• 16 years ago

And of course intelligence has been rising as measured by IQ.

I think the books are a warning and contain some truth. I have not read BNW, but 1984 can be used as Machiavelli's Prince, as a prescription, rather than description, of how it could be.

So the book is a warning.

Also, I wanted to say, although it might have been written to describe communism, I think unless you take it literally, much of it resonates with democratic societies also. For example, how the three states keep being at war one day and friends another and how everyone forgets this and how they always are at war. That is quite a good description of the west in some ways.

geden• 16 years ago

Huxley, of course, wasn't all doom and gloom. His last, wonderful, novel 'Island' describes a very sensible, somewhat libertarian utopia, the antidote to BNW.

His utopia is based on a very open education and a love and understanding for the natural world. It reminds me of Iain Bank's 'Culture', sans the technology.

It's relatively overlooked as a work. My guess is the same factors that make doom and gloom sell newspapers make BNW the more popular novel.

I'd recommend it as a read to anyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(novel)

Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell

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