[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.