Aldous Huxley versus George Orwell

[patrick t. cakes]

time for some soma


<http://www.egodialogues.com/words-language/huxley-orwell.php>

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Orwell may have been right for the 19th and 20th Century...but after that Huxley got it 110%

[orwell]

3. I'm still here...

...and I like the 21st century :hi:

[BrklynLiberal]

17. Nothing personal....LOLOLOL

:thumbsup: :hi:

[patrick t. cakes]

5. I remember 'Brave New World'

was required reading in high school

wonder if it still is.

Huxley did nail it.

[Goblinmonger]

10. I gave my Brit Lit kids the option to read one of the two last year.

Some read both. They leaned to Huxley. They liked Orwell's point, but thought it was too tough of a journey to get there.

I appreciate both.

[Fumesucker]

2. The revolution will not be televised..

Because it won't happen until the cable TV is shut off.

Thanks for posting.. Recced.

[pnorman]

4. Just don't shut off my internet tubes!

n/t

[izzybeans]

6. Pretty common teacher student dialectic

They were both right in their own way.

Soma is all around (it obviously comes in pill form but also through the telescreen), but so is the erasure of historical memory, torture, and perpetual war machine. "We have always been happy because of soma, it will always be our friend. Eurasia? Now that's a different story. We had to bomb it. No choice. Now give me some soma!"

[izzybeans]

7. In other words, the scary thing is they were and are both correct.

Pleasure and Pain used to suppress simultaneously.

[patrick t. cakes]

15. pleasure to suppress the sheep

pain to suppress the free thinkers

[catzies]

8. Thanks, because I like where that originally came from. Neal Postman nailed it.

RIP Mr. Postman. His was a voice we would have needed to hear the past decade. He was prescient.

:thumbsup:

[asdjrocky]

9. This is really cool, thanks!

[Marr]

11. It always seemed to me that Orwell was describing what he'd already seen.

Huxley was trying to describe the future. Both were pretty damned accurate.

[G_j]

12. seems we got the best of both

and of course our 'overlords' probably read the books in school too.

makes you wonder.. or me anyway

[Scatterheart]

13. I had to read both in high school. *SPOILERS*

1984 floored me. The part where the two protagonists are caught in their little rented room was the most tense, frightening thing I had ever read (my best friend had the same reaction). Then came BRAVE NEW WORLD. Compared to Orwell's gritty, nightmarish masterpiece, it seemed silly and incredibly OTT. The ending, where the brainwashed masses get all whipped up into some orgiastic frenzy and the white Savage kills himself, just made me roll eyes. It was sort of like the book equivalent of seeing Haneke's CACHE for the first time and realizing what a completely overpraised turkey it is. Orwell wins, hands down.

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. I don't think you should approach Huxley in the same manner as Orwell

Yes, '1984' is dramatic and gripping, and Orwell wrote it so you identify with Smith. And he wrote it just after the Second World War, as an illustration of what that world controlled by totalitarian states could be like. The real politics and war of the years just before that were central to the book.

'Brave New World' was written pre-war, and isn't meant to be dramatic. It's a satire, in many ways. It looks at the developments of marketing, technology, and a central state that forces people to be happy, at the cost of their freedom.

I would say that '1984' is actually the more 'OTT' book. It posits that the people in charge will continue hurting people just for sadism's sake - the 'boot stamping on a human face forever' image Orwell uses. But in BNW, the people in charge genuinely want everyone to get pleasure. They are believable as characters; but the psychopaths in charge in 1984 do not seem like the kind of people who can maintain power for a long time, because genuinely mad rulers, like Hitler, end up doing 'mad' things which lose them power.

And the ending of BNW is not "the brainwashed masses get all whipped up into some orgiastic frenzy"; it's a media scrum when they find the savage and invade his privacy, taunting him to hurt himself for pictures they can publish and broadcast. It's very, very believable, more so now than in the 1930s.

[Ramulux]

14. Alduos Huxley

is one of the greatest human beings to ever walk the planet. If you havent read The Doors of Perception, Island, or Brave New world do it now.

[Enthusiast]

19. +1 nt

[LWolf]

20. Have you read "The Crows of Pearblossom?"

It's a children's picture book he wrote about the area I lived in for 30 years.

Not political, but it was my first introduction to his work.

[JVS]

16. Orwell's time is past, Huxley's time has not come. Currently Vonnegut's Player Piano is the...

closest to the development we are having except for 4 details.

1. It is not mechanization that is making the people obsolete, it's simply moving their jobs to foreign lands where they get paid dirt.

2. Vonnegut over-estimated the generosity of the American welfare state, and reeks and wrecks isn't true.

3. "The company" never quite has unified, although with "too big to fail" banks in charge of capital holdings, it's arguable that they are a permanent controller of the company.

4. Pittsburgh never became the pre-eminent city of the US.

Even with these differences, it is much closer to current reality than the advanced Brave New World.

[ThomWV]

18. The cartoons grossly misrepresent Orwell's message

The assessment of Orwell's work was inaccurate in almost every frame.