A key component of Brave New World, that this article barely touches on, is genetic engineering. In BNW people do not 'breed' naturally but are created en-masse in genetic factories. This creates the in-book caste system of alphas, betas, gammas etc. Low skill workers are deliberately bred to have low intelligence and conditioned to like their allotted jobs. There is a memorable scene in the book where a class of infants is conditioned by loud scary noises to not like bright flowers or natural scenes. They are being conditioned to be happy with grey drabness.
So the reason 1984 is mentioned a lot more at the moment compared to BNW is that we aren't really in the BNW zone yet. But perhaps there will be a time when BNW is even more relevant. Things somewhat like Gattacca and BNW might still come to pass.
Huxley got the mechanism wrong, but we are currently conditioning the children to be more interested in digital screens than in outdoor/natural activities. This isn't new - TV as a babysitter has moved to mobile device as a babysitter.
My understanding is that this doesn't require conditioning -- the brightness of screens, their changing contents, and the dopamine hits one gets from interacting with them makes them grab and hold attention regardless of previous exposure.
Also... Orwell's writing was a lot more closely linked to stuff Orwell observed. He was a journalist and colonial by trade.
Huxley put more abstract ideas about humans and science into his world. Human engineering, happiness pills and genetic predispositions (like Douglas Adams' cow that wants to be eaten). This makes it feel more like a parable, a world that exists to play with ideas, like discworld.
Orwell's grim world was just a lot closer to stuff that existed, and still exists.
In a recent vice documentary about Assad's Syria, a policeman confesses "I am Winston Smith" after taking a journalist on a tour of Orwellian lies. It's not a coincidence, Assad's regime is built on ideas from Nazism and Stalinism, the regimes 1984 was parodying.
One of the members of the British upper class who inserted themselves into ruling positions in the colonies.
Orwell was born in Bihar, India. His father worked in the Opium Department of the civil service, overseeing its export to China. He grew up in the English "public" (upperclass) schools. At 19 he went to be a policeman in Burma.
Yes, in a formal ideological sense. The practicalities of running a state were Soviet/Stalinist in practice, both formally (the SU was an ally) and informally (look up hitchens talking about Stalinist influence on the baath policies, especially Saddam's famous purge.
Nazism also had some (mostly earlier) influence. Some was informal. Some is formal. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party is still quite influential (also to an extent in Lebanon). It's part of Assad's coalition and one of the parties allowed to formally exist in Syrian politics.
Some people call it conditioning, others call it education. Societies seem to work better when people don't bash each others heads in all the time, so we try to teach our children that violence is not okay. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
It seems pretty reasonable to me too. Indeed, education is supposed to enlighten you to see others viewpoints. Why do we continue to have problems meeting eye to eye with others' ideas then?
Education is as much to create willing and accepting members of a society, however unjust that happens to be, as to educate. What else is a pledge of allegiance?
If you condition/educate away the social acceptance of demonstrations or even riot then one of the checks and balances of a society is removed. When the reaction comes it's likely to be a more extreme one, or if enough checks and balances are removed, straight to civil war or coup.
I am aware you feel these comments are abusive. But you are acting so cartoonishly evil in this instance – banning a 12-year member of HN for 3 months solely for asking why he was rate limited – that someone needs to stand up to you.
It’s true that I demanded an answer from you. But that was because your original decision to issue a rate limit was an overreaction. My comments in that thread were not significantly different from the various other discussions that people have on a daily basis about social issues.
You feel that it’s abusive to highlight this decision and continue to call attention to it. I feel it’s the only recourse left. I have tried for a very, very long time to come to some kind of understanding with you.
But the reason I’m doing this isn’t personal. It’s because I care about this community and am afraid of what you’re forcing it to become. From the recent “What do you hate about HN?” thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18184914):
I’ve been here for awhile (just about eight years), and the single biggest change I’ve noticed is the increasing presence of what I’ll call a “bourgeois tech monoculture.” This place used to be weirder, with more obscure links and discussions filled with academics and hackers. If you search the older archives, there are some really incredible conversations. Now it mostly seems to be nytimes articles commented on by upper-middle class engineers.
I miss Michael O. Church. Not that I always agreed with him, but he was really interesting, and his comments consistently made me think about my own biases and opinions in ways few others ever have.
I noticed when you referred pejoratively to yummyfajitas as “Socrates”. I didn’t know him, but I respected his writing. And he didn’t leave until you personally made him feel unwelcome. In fact, he left immediately after: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=yummyfajitas
You’ve become what pg calls a suit: image over substance; authority over reason.
But your actions go far deeper than most people know, or understand. People still do not understand that you personally flag (and therefore instantly kill) many comments per day. They believe users do this, not you acting alone. And anyone who dares disagree with you is silenced, one way or another.
I don’t know if you’ve been hunting trolls for so long that all you see are trolls, everywhere you look. All I know is that people are starting to notice.
I regret that mine might too. But my personal desire to participate in the site is overruled by the greater desire to see this community protected from your purge of unpopular opinion.
If you truly believe this is abusive, we’ll have to agree to disagree. History’s judgement will last longer than yours.
This article does a good job of drawing parallels between the book and reality in a short amount of time. I feel like the article is just scratching the surface though.
> Television was transforming the news into a rapid and proliferating series of images, a form of entertainment that prized ‘the unreal’ and the ‘more or less totally irrelevant’. You can contest facts, he said, but not images.
I don't remember how Manufacturing Consent referred to the facts vs images distinction, can you give a pointer to that?
I think the work by the Situationists is more relevant, particularly the concept of the Spectacle. But it was "in the air" at the time, arguably even the works of Hunter S. Thompson reflect it.
with the ubiquity of photo editing, and ai driven video manipulation, i'd argue one can contest images too(i):
>> Ghost in the Shell addressed this issue in 2005(o)
>> The Tachikoma units are debating how to stop a nuclear strike and one suggests that broadcasting a live feed of the nuclear sub would help, but the idea is reasoned against due to the technological capabilities to fake such a feed:
>> "Pictures don't prove anything anymore. It would just end up as a source of amusement for the uninvolved masses, an image from an unknown source that showed up at an all too convenient time."
>> beyond this inflection point one must now trust both the content and the source
Manufacturing Consent (and the accompanying documentary) were fairly groundbreaking at the time, but also obviously comes from an Ivory Tower. Chomsky seems to really believe the public would have adopted some of his platforms if they hadn't been drowned in distraction. You're not going to get the average American to care about the plight of the East Timorese until American soldiers are dying there....Vietnam demonstrated that.
In the early 90s though, the documentary played to packed houses of college students who suddenly claimed to have a longstanding concern for East Timor...then East Timor became unfashionable and they went back to not giving a hoot. If anything, Chomsky "manufactured" his own "consent", for a time.
The least prophetic and most distracting part of Brave New World is the presence of the World Controllers in the first place. The idea that there is even someone to argue with about the preferred state of society is off - the folks driving forward a culture of consumerism and sounds byte dialogue are as much desparate consumption addicts as the rest of us!
>The idea that there is even someone to argue with about the preferred state of society is off
I completely agree. The idea of someone, or a small group of someones, who control the world is another scapegoat, a kind of fantasy we sometimes revel in to explain why everything is going wrong. "At least someone's in control".
The fact is, we're all in this together. Certain people have more influence on the direction of certain societies, it's true, but the whole mass is some kind of undulating, chaotic consciousness constantly trying to adapt to itself. The people "not in control" compose most of the mass, influencing the people "in control" from the bottom-up, like how plate tectonics et al cause tsunamis, while those "in control" attempt to place restrictions on the crowd. There is not usually a state in which one body can contain the other, unless we do have a society akin to what we have in 1984, or unless we don't have class mobility (distributing influences).
Fortunately, in societies dominated by European and "western" philosophies, we have class mobility and we have sectors of the mass actively attempting to keep the upper influences manageable and the greater mass informed. Our focus on intellectualism, scientific thought, and individualism are, in my opinion, the biggest reasons why this is the case. We want to understand how the world works, we want to know where we fit as individuals and how our individual power contributes to the collective. We want to mark our place on the world, which means we generally strive to expand our individual influence radius as far as it can go, which means any top-of-the-pyramid actors do actually have much less control of anything that might shake the boat (since we tend to shake the boat very often).
Agreed, I don't think that BNW is more appropriate for the current world than 1984.
BNW has taken many things to the extreme, especially with regards to the cementing for a class system through destroying anything that's remotely human about our existence. 1984 on the other hand makes people freak out because the idea of truthless-ness and state surveillance and language controls are much more real and close than a forced societal divide.
I just meant that there are different perspectives for different people. If you look at countries like Russia and China there is more of a 1984 society, whereas in the US and Europe, at least here in the Netherlands, society resembles Brave New World more.
Brave New World captures many of the frustrations that I have with the indifference people exhibit when reacting to issues like privacy or trustworthiness of media or politics.
When you read historic novels like Ken Follett's 'Fall of Giants' you get more of a 1984 vibe with the Russian stories. Seeing China's surveillance system described in various place doesn't give off a 1984 vibe, it breathes 1984 to a scary degree. Add modern day technology to the mix and it is nothing short of horrific.
Valid points, I think both are great pieces though I will add that imo BNW nailed the cultural aspects of a dystopia. Mass indifference and "near infinite capacity for distraction".
I think BNW's mechanism of control is much more relevant than 1984's. In BNW the mechanism for control is the carrot, not the stick. In the west we are definitely using the carrot.
The thing about Brave New World is, it's awful in a bunch of obvious ways, but it's distinctly not awful in many more ways that we've all learned to ignore. Outside the reservations, no one goes hungry, no one is lonely, no one needs fear violence, no one is homeless or jobless or denied basic medical care. There are millions of people in the world today who would give anything to live as well as the lowest Epsilon in BNW.
It's a bad place. But I think the world we live in today might actually be worse.
I honestly don't see how the world of BNW is really a bad place at all. There's huge advantages to it: as you said, no one is homeless or jobless or denied medical care, there's no violence, etc. Even better, kids are raised better: instead of having children raised by complete amateurs as we do today, which causes all kinds of horrible problems (abuse, neglect, teaching poor values or insane belief systems), children in BNW are raised by trained and experienced professionals.
Really, I don't see what the real problem with BNW's world is, aside from deliberately creating idiots to do boring jobs. But that's one thing Huxley missed: in our future, we're going to automate away all or most of those jobs, so we won't need a bunch of idiot Deltas to do them. The main problem is that we won't have much to struggle for, since that's when humans seem to do well, but along with that struggle always comes a lot of horrors, so is it really worth it?
As presented in the novel by the "savage" outsider, the problems are essentially ones of meaninglessness. It's comfortable, but not free, and has no real room for individuality, creativity, or higher purpose.
The novel also claims that they tried an Alpha-only society, but it was inherently unstable. The most important job of the Deltas is to be there for the Alphas to look down on.
One thing to remember here is that BNW was a book written by one guy; it's not a reliable look into a possible future timeline, it's just one person's idea of it. I'm pretty sure there have been primitive societies (small villages, etc.) in the past that lived collectively and didn't require having a whole class of citizens to "look down on" to stay stable, so I don't accept this as a necessary component of a stable society. It does seem that some people feel better this way when they're in a bad position, which is why we have a lot of racism (e.g. poor white people want to be able to look down on black people) but it's a non-sequitur that a society requires this.
As for a "higher purpose", what kind of higher purpose do we have in our current society? Perhaps trying to make it better somehow (by various measures of "better"), with better technology, medical science, etc.? I'm not sure why a BNW society wouldn't have these as well. There's always room for improvement. BNW's society did seem overly stifling as far as creativity and such, but I don't really see why that's necessary in that society either.
Neil Postman covers this in amusing ourselves to death, which is a gomreat book and heavily refers to BNW, but the idea that there is even a thing as a “professional” child-raising “expert” is what is wrong. There are many people who show up in the media as “experts” where there is no possibility of expertise.
Oh please. Child psychology is a real field, and the idea that someone who has a low IQ, no education, and doesn't understand child psychology at all would somehow raise children better than someone with such educational background and training is laughable.
I think there's some of both. Teaching is not the same as doing, or coaches would be players. A person doesn't need to be well-educated or have a high IQ to be level-headed, patient, tolerant, and loving. But child psychology is absolutely a real field, and even the best parents can learn something from it. I wouldn't dismiss either one.
>Teaching is not the same as doing, or coaches would be players.
I think that's a terrible example that doesn't support your point as well. Coaches aren't players because they physically don't have the aptitude for it. I was in high school: the coaches can't be players there for the simple reason that they're not teenagers and students any more, they're too old. Same goes for college. In pro sports, the coaches are generally older, and never have the physical traits the pro players have. The coaches get into it because they love the sport and are good at the coaching part, not because they don't want to play.
>A person doesn't need to be well-educated or have a high IQ to be level-headed, patient, tolerant, and loving.
You don't need a high IQ to be well-educated in a particular field. Most college-educated people have average intelligence. And being patient, tolerant, and loving aren't sufficient for being a good parent, though they help a lot. Conversely, lots of parents these days are definitely NOT patient, tolerant, or loving. So why do we allow them to be parents? They're scarring their children, and the effects of that traumatic experience continue for generations.
Another "revisitation" is contained in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" by Neil Postman, an essay written in 1985 which extends the thesis that media are the main force which are creating a BNW kind of world (in particular TV, being written before the digital revolution).
I can’t recommend this book enough. Although it was written in 1985, it feels like it could have been written yesterday. It’s amazing how he predicted the actual effects computers would have on western society as opposed to the utopian dreams present at that time (and still parroted about).
Orwell's dystopia is more palatable than Huxley's we are to blame in Huxley's version.
We become Brave New World by getting exactly what we ask for: entertainment, leisure, sex, escape/drugs, distraction.
Compare that to 1984, where the dystopia is imposed on society from above, by a bureaucratic Party.
People (en masse) are not introspective or forward-thinking. Of course we prefer to believe we're living in a dystopia forced upon us unwillingly, rather than one of our own making, brought on by our own inability to see the consequences of our own mass desires taken to their current extreme. We have no one to blame except ourselves.
Britain had a referendum. With a narrow margin, it came out in favour of leaving a supranational union which the country had joined by stages in 1973 without the people being asked.
Why do all sorts of presumably intelligent and grown up people from all sorts of countries keep on touting this as an omen of the coming of the end of the world?
Does noone - in an article on Brave New World, no less - pause for a moment to consider the irony?
> Why do all sorts of presumably intelligent and grown up people from all sorts of countries keep on touting this as an omen of the coming of the end of the world?
You might conclude that everyone has been brainwashed .. or maybe all these people have looked at the issues themselves and are becoming increasingly worried about what the answers might be?
Brexit plans fall apart when confronted with questions like "how is this going to work, exactly?" and "why would they agree to that?"
And that's fine if Britain doesn't want to be part of a larger union. Large political entities naturally have more power, as they control more resources (natural resources, people, economy, etc.). So Britain can turn into a country similar in economic power to Argentina, while China becomes the new world superpower. I'm sure China is all in favor of Brexit.
“But why do we look to Orwell’s vision when Huxley’s rings truer?“
Simpler explanations aren’t as entertaining but I think they tend to be the correct ones.
First, 1984 was received by many as anti-communist into the height of the Red Scare. This greatly amplified its influence ever since beyond what Brave New World could ever achieve.
Second, and fortunately for us, Orwell is a much superior writer to Huxley.
1984 and BNW remain the two real standouts of dystopian fiction. 1984 always felt the more powerful of the two to me: it's starker, more overtly shocking. BNW is subtler, but for probably most cultures it rings more true to real life as it's turned out this far.
Today we see aspects of both novels in play: echoes of 1984's Two Minutes Hate when politicians rail against immigrants, the rise of "Fake News" and anti-vax calling into question to a scary extent of the population what's real, and the fact we do seem to have always been at war with Eastasia; and from BNW, the electorate largely subdued by TV, social media, fashion and being obedient consumers - and with legalisation of cannabis increasingly a thing the comparison to SOMA isn't too big a stretch.
What to do about this, of course, is plainly way above my pay grade, and probably involves educating the electorate (UK and US probably both going backwards in this regard, given Brexit and Trump) - but suffice it to say both novels remain a must-read even 70 - 80 years after they were written. They're very accessible, readable books too FWIW if anyone is hesitating, intimidated by their rep.
>with legalisation of cannabis increasingly a thing the comparison to SOMA isn't too big a stretch.
I'd go further and relate it directly to MDMA, LSD, and other drugs. The government knowns about Burning Man, music festivals, etc. If they really didn't want people doing these drugs do you think these events would be allowed to happen?
Glasgow lost its legendary Arches venue very recently, arguably the single best clubbing venue in Scotland, due specifically to these kinds of concerns.
I think a certain amount of "youthful exuberance" is indeed tolerated - but go too far and Thou Shalt Often Be Shut Down.
>I think a certain amount of "youthful exuberance" is indeed tolerated - but go too far and Thou Shalt Often Be Shut Down.
Living in Boston I see the revolving music venue scene. It seems like about every ~5 years or so the well known venues close down for whatever reason (mismanagement, fallout from harassment/drug use, etc) and another one pops up to fill the void. It seems like getting shut down is a power check from the government to keep us complacent, as the next scene will appear and be just as much as a Time and Place as the one before it.
>What to do about this, of course, is plainly way above my pay grade, and probably involves educating the electorate (UK and US probably both going backwards in this regard, given Brexit and Trump)
There's nothing that can be done about it. You can't just magically educate an electorate; that's a change that takes a generation or three.
True. And honestly I'd say it's even worse than that, people are somehow finding ways to travel backwards in terms of knowledge, and other - truly despicable - people are profiting from pushing them in that direction.
Movements like anti-vax, flat earthers, birthers from the Obama time: politicized backwards trajectory. Terrifying.
Well, history shows us that this kind of thing happens from time to time. No society continues upward indefinitely; they all collapse at some point, or at least regress while other societies overtake them. This happened famously to the Romans, where they lost specialization of labor and technology and turned into feudal serfs. It happened to the Hittites, whose culture we have little left from. China turned inward for centuries until around WWII. Later, under Mao, they oppressed educated people, putting them to work in the fields instead of using their talents; only recently have they recovered from that stupidity.
Britain used to be the world's most powerful empire and look what happened there.
And you're absolutely right about truly despicable people profiting from this. I think Alex Jones is a prime example of this. I know someone who's a big fan of his; it's really discouraging how even a reasonably intelligent (but fairly gullible) person can be taken by a con-artist like him and even people close to them can't sway their opinion.
So the reason 1984 is mentioned a lot more at the moment compared to BNW is that we aren't really in the BNW zone yet. But perhaps there will be a time when BNW is even more relevant. Things somewhat like Gattacca and BNW might still come to pass.