Huxley Vs. Orwell: Infinite Distraction Or Government Oppression?

We got Huxley, China got Orwell.

They are not meant to serve as predictions. Dystopia novels are meant to serve as warnings.

Saying Huxley was right and Orwell was wrong is false in my opinion.

We live in a mixture of both, when you interfere too much you get the stick, if your presence is bareable you sink into the illusion of happines that is being fed to you via any tube possible.

See: Radio(songs commercials E.t.c),Tv(shows, commercials E.t.c.),The News (in news papers radio and TV), Alcohol,Drugs (legal or not), The Computer (video games, certain things on the internet) And Films.

When comparisons like this are made (and you hear them often), it seems like what is focused on the most are the details of each world and how they track against our own, rather than the ideology that supports the world described in each novel, and how much we accept or reject them. In some ways, I feel wallowing in those details often misses the larger point.

I’ll only speak to 1984 here, b/c it’s been many years since I’ve last read BNR. I most certainly plan on reading it again soon, though.

The details of how society lived in 1984, I believe was less Orwell’s own predictions for how people would come to live under future totalitarianism, but were mostly just future versions of the totalitarian governments of his day (quite similar to the allegory of Animal Farm), and what the world might look like if such governments where able to continue wielding power into the future. It’s worth remembering that the period which Orwell wrote this was still one fraught with fear of the world could tumble back into the rule of regimes like the one just defeated, and the other one which at that point was seemed stronger than ever. Orwell wondered openly about a politically unstable Britain’s capacity to going down those same roads….”1984″ being the result.

Censorship, Newspeak, Two Minutes Hate….that was all just the framework. And though they evoked their own powerful images, it’s worth remembering that they were just the practical applications of Ingsoc within Oceania. Orwell dedicates the last third of the book to basically de-constructing Ingsoc and identifying the type of (double)thinking that informs such an ideology. In radically simple terms it is a examination of how you can create a stable institutions on a foundation of hatred, how the mind can be molded to accept two contradictory pieces of information and accept them both as true, and even how expressive language (and the lack therof), informs the type thoughts we are able to fomulate.

Orwell’s novel is less a warning about the deterioration of our physical condition brought about by outside forces, but rather a warning about the mental deterioration necessary for such ideas to become acceptable.

It’s interesting to now that Huxley was Orwell’s high school French teacher.

That’s what she said.

It seems that from generation to generation the same paradigm repeats itself, this fascination to read and be amazed by the latest sophism generating what people should think of rather that how exactly each one is forming his own ideas; following and understanding the steps of forming individual ideas could be more liberating than merely walking in the steps of others.

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/huxley_aldous_t.html
to watch the video hit the link under the short bio.

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” is the title of a book by the late Neil Postman, describing the effect of media on politics and religion, amongst other things.
Written in late 1960s, it is prophetic with backup citations and peer reviewed writing.

for myself i have found three stages: altruism, egotism, and lastly, egoism.

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Great artistic representation. The debate can rage on until one learns that Huxley and Orwell promote the same progressive-leftist predictions and aspirations. Both methods of control share the same end and can be described as a sheep in wolf’s clothing. See; Fabian Society. They both had access to the same insider information.

Simply amazing!
Just for funny sense, I recall my grandmother saying “we reach an apse every seventy years, and it oscillates up and down. All the way down to depravation pleasure and then starts coming back all the way up for extreme shame prejudice”.