[mplanchard]

No spoilers, but I used to think, along the lines of Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984, despite being less well-known and referenced in cultural consciousness.

Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.

[kombine]

I haven't read Brave New World but "We" by Evgeny Zamyatin left a similar impression on me, it's more subtle than 1984. It came out earlier than both books by the Western authors - even though Zamyatin was inspired while working in England in early 20th century.

[detourdog]

The book "The Machine Stops" was posted here a a while back it's a 100 years old and just as prescient as "Brave New World" and "1984". https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/short-fiction/...

I will look up We.

[robin_reala]

I also produced We for Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/yevgeny-zamyatin/we/gregor...

[dspillett]

There was a good theatre adaption of The Machine Stops by a UK group called Pilot Theatre (I saw it at York). They performed it as a live Youtube broadcast during the faf of 2020, though I can't see it listed anywhere now. Worth having a look for if you have better sources than mine. I must have a scan of my media array later, to see if I downloaded a copy I can rewatch.

[detourdog]

Thank you I will look for it.

[EMIRELADERO]

Funnily enough, Orwell actually reviewed We in 1946: https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/zamyatin/english/e_zamy

[sonofhans]

Thank you, that was new to me. I always felt a connection between those three books — We, Brave New World, 1984 — but this review really is the missing piece. He opens the review by describing the similarities between We and Brave New World, closes the review contrasting them politically. I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head, it feels like this review is an early treatment for 1984.

[protocolture]

Yeah Orwell took a lot from "We". Its honestly a much better book.

[Caracas288]

mephi

[dimes]

1984 is a much better book. The writing is beautiful and the story is gripping. For that reason alone, it occupies a larger part of society’s psyche. I agree that many aspects of Brave New World were prescient, but 1984 isn’t entirely inaccurate either.

[ravenstine]

I agree. Brave New World has some very interesting and relevant ideas, but I just couldn't hold my attention with his writing style.

[JKCalhoun]

No spoilers, but I've come to think that "Brave New World" actually is Utopian—in the "give people what they want" department.

[customguy]

But they get conditioned to want to be cogs. At any rate, Huxley certainly did not intend it as utopian: https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/

About his ideas for utopia he wrote "Island": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)

[nephihaha]

His brother was Julian Huxley who was a prime mover in creating the UN. Julian had some curious views about the direction of the human race which may have found their way into Aldous' work.

[ahazred8ta]

Julian invented the tinfoil hat.

[nephihaha]

Before making such comments, why don't you read some actual quotations from Julian Huxley? The first Director of UNESCO was also in the British Eugenics Society where he argued for the "The virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types..."

Erm, yes, that does sound a bit like Aldous' "Brave New World". How about "long [term] unemployment should be a ground for sterilization..." (From "Man in the Modern World" 1947) i.e. get a job or be sterilised.

"Unless [we] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay ..." (From "Essays in Popular Science", 1926)

And read this, bearing in mind that Julian Huxley was upper class. That first quotation in context: "we must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following:... The lowest strata... less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive." (From "Man in the Modern World" 1947)

Aldous wasn't much better. Childhood conditioning for the masses: "Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." ( "Letters of Aldous Huxley" published in 1969)

[protocolture]

>Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984, despite being less well-known and referenced in cultural consciousness.

I encounter this exact thought in every comment thread that mentions 1984 without fail.

And usually 3 or so comments later I realise that they poster of this amazing idea hasnt read (or at least doesnt remember) 1984 anyway.

>Unfortunately, it seems like the former may be enabling the latter, so we may end up with a “porque no los dos” situation.

You mean some sort of situation where the masses (or "proles") are kept happy with puerile entertainment while those people with political impulses are kept under heavy surveillance? Kind of like the novel 1984?

[gobdovan]

Yep, there are the same tropes about 1984 in every discussion. And it's a shame, since 1984 presents something much stranger and more interesting than communism, surveillance dangers or dystopian universe in the abstract.

It shows what a system would evolve into without independent temporal continuity, and how truth can keep changing in a flow-like fashion while central power remains the only stable reference. Here, correspondence with reality is no longer treated as sacred, only useful. The Party does not need or want truth in any moral or objective sense. It only needs enough contact with reality to keep the machine running. Records still have to be managed, wars still have to be administered. Everything beyond that can be made fluid.

It also attacks the usual consolations: hope, love, that there's something human that remains untouchable. It shows how humanity is a fragile construct, and meticulously presents a procedure for how to break it

It shows precisely that no matter who you are or what you think you can do, a well-established system that seeks power for the sake of power will crush you just because it can. And if you're about to be crushed, they already declawed you systematically. Propaganda controls the present, manufactured records dissolved the past, Newspeak narrowed what you were able to think, manufactured dissent absorbed any idea of rebellion. And if the system wants you to love the act of being crushed, it has methods for that too. And why would it do that? Because power is an end in itself. And that's all you need to understand about unchecked power.

It also directly addresses that it's a new system and, unlike the Catholic Church during the Inquisition and unlike the communists, it is honest about its relentless accumulation of power, and doesn't need any kind of external legitimation from God or some placard of equality and prosperity for those who don't know better.

Let it also sink in that the book being ultra class-aware seemingly passes by almost everybody.

[wartywhoa23]

> Brave New World wound up being the more accurate picture of future society than 1984.

The current vector of the world has all the potential to end up in a blend of both.

[aaronbrethorst]

1984 was as much (or more) about Stalinism and totalitarian tendencies in 1948 as it was a cautionary tale about the future.

[nephihaha]

Also a lot of criticism of the UK at the time.