Is It 1984 or a Brave New World?

One of my internet browsing sessions lead to a comic based on Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", which is a comparison of the types of authoritarian control seen in the works of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.  Stuart McMillan, the comic artist, no longer hosts it on his site, saying he felt it was not welcomed by the holders of the source material, but a google search of Orwell versus Huxley finds it plastered across many other pages.  When I first read the comic, I was alarmed at how...familiar what was said about Huxley's version of control was, with the constant distraction and the superficial freedom of choice.  It was also on my mind because of a discussion in another group, in which a woman professed to be sure there was no conspiracy of authority possible, because we are allowed to use the internet and find "the truth".  She is much less cynical than I am, apparently.  We know that some countries can and do censor internet searches, and in fact, how do we know that our own access is not censored?  If we have never been able to access the censored information, how would we even know it exists?  Moreover, just having access to the information is not enough for changes to be made, people have to demand that change happen.  We have to realize what is going wrong and be able to find solutions.  This requires some effort on our part that most people, frankly, are not interested in making.

We seem to live in a world of choices, but it is observable that too much choice reduces us to immobility and apathy, leaving us prey to those who will make the "best" choices for us.  We receive mountains of information everyday, dulling our interest so that we do not have the energy to focus on important information when it comes along.  We all know about the "evils" of totalitarian states and dictators, but who wants to resist control by pleasure?  We get want we want, we get more than we need, we are comfortable and entertained.  Anybody who wants to take that away from us is more likely to be painted as the villain than those who distract us with shiny, sweet objects.

However, some people seem to think grim repression is overtly present, as evidenced by this message left on Arturo Soria street:

"Orwell was right"

So we have at least one vote for Orwell's view of control

Our Doctor was pleased with the topic, probably well aware of the many places open to attack it has.  Like our article writers, he pointed out the differing dates of writing and publication as basic to the tones of the different stories.  He said he would not want to be Huxley's friend, based on his writing - although he would be Nietzsche's.  In spite of the Great Depression rearing its head, Huxley wrote in a somewhat frivolous time, while Orwell wrote after the Second World War.  Daily life left its coloring on their writing.  Our Doctor reminded us that the object of philosophy is to question and seek truth, although possibly not to find it.  Philosophy is not literature, yet the topic of this discussion is literature, fiction.  Being a doctor, he spoke from a medical perspective, that is, a practical one.  Being Spanish and of a certain age, he had some experience with a repressive government and said that Franco did bring suffering to the country, but he did not bring hell.  As for the control by the authority, we ask for control.  We ask for protection from chaos and instability, and the purpose of government or leadership is to provide that protection.  He later expounded on what we believe to be true about our world, warning us that what we believe is not what is true.  The universe does not exist; we only interpret our reality.  He mentioned patients with neurological problems who do not know that they have physical handicaps; their brains refuse to recognize the problems.  The implication is that many people live happily in a corrupt or problematic system, but due to lack of knowledge and experience or the way the brain can trick itself into seeing what is not true and not seeing what is, they do not recognize the problems.  They may even believe that the bugs are features, so to speak.  The Doctor ended with a description of believers, of any type, saying they had a certain dose of romanticism in them, but reminding us that belief is not the same as knowledge, or philosophy, for that matter.

An Irregular Participant called the books science fiction rather than just fiction, and commented on the exaggerated organizational structures present in them.  While she did not think those books accurate descriptions of society, she did wonder how real life had evolved since they were written.

The True Philosopher dug into the empiricist versus rationalist part of the question.  He gave quick summaries of both novels and pointed out the differences in the way control over society is achieved, but was clear that control is the end goal of both systems.  The question is where power is concentrated, in the individual or in the state?  When the books were being written, the world of science was examining the possibility of free will or the lack thereof in behaviorism and psychological conditioning.  The Communist Bloc is the obvious real-world stand-in for Orwell's 1984, but the True Philosopher does not see any society as controlling with pleasure and positive feelings as Huxley's Brave New World, although it might happen in the future.  In fact, transhumanism picks up from Huxley's novel.

The Leader was focused on the role of government or authority in society, and to some extent whether the "dystopian" worlds portrayed in the novels were warped or deviant models at all.  Before the Second World War, the government had no responsibility to individual citizens, and not even much to the populace as a whole, at least in the UK.  The danger of control by the government is the lack of guarantee that the information we receive is uncorrupted and factual.  We develop a fear of consequences of our actions and the actions of others, but sometimes those consequences or exaggerated or even removed from reality, keeping people in a mental trap of fear of taking action.  The Leader asked if the hierarchical system we maintain is really right for a moral society.  Would we be better off with more flexibility and less reverence for those higher up the ladder?

An Uncommon Visitor flatly stated that there was no philosophy in the books, but they did predict political manipulation in the past century through use and limitation of language, principally Newspeak in 1984, although the appropriation of religious phrasing for secular leaders in "Brave New World" is also evident.  The interesting thing about the rigorous strangling of language, limiting words to one clear meaning each, is that some participants in the meeting show a certain longing for that limitation in natural language, bleating and whining when nuance and wordplay appear, demanding that dictionary definitions be followed to the letter.  These people hilariously promote themselves as lovers of freedom and intellectualism, but talk is cheap, I guess.

The Educator commented on the prescience of Orwell's book for the dictatorships of the 20th century, in which people saw their neighbors demonized and were encouraged to report doubts and unpatriotic activity even from their own families.  She saw many parallels between the world of 1984 and the 20th century history of many countries, Argentina in particular.  She remembered television messages telling people to report "suspicious" activity in people they knew, and the search for external enemies and violence that led to the Falklands War, as well as conflicts with neighboring countries.  Sometimes she even thinks there was an agreement between the leaders of all those countries to manufacture these international incidents in an attempt to distract people.  She spoke less about "Brave New World", mostly commenting on the similarities rather than the differences.  The most visible one for her is the lack of privacy people in the two societies suffered.  In both cases, people are aware of their constant responsibility to society and to the state, which supercedes any private desires or needs.  It plays on the animal part of social animal, denying any agency to the human.

The Seeker of Happiness arrived a bit late, and so missed the introductory explanations, but he had about 40 minutes to listen to other contributions and comments.  For that reason, his insistence on not understanding the topic was particularly aggravating.  "What is 'it'?" he demanded, going on to complain that the books are novels, not truth.  He also dismissed Orwell's prediction of totalitarianism, saying the Soviet Union ended up disappearing, apparently unable to apply the metaphor to any other government or government activity.  He agreed with the Doctor on the subject of reality, saying that we invent what we want to see, but also said that what we think is best is not what will happen.  He spent quite a bit of time going over and over the structure of the topic question, which might not be surprising in a non-native speaker.  However, the structure is perfectly normal and not especially uncommon, not to mention the topic was clearly stated by several participants, and the two essays were also free of opacity.  What it seems to be to my mind is a distraction technique, by somebody with little to say but a lot of need to speak.  He took over 10 minutes to complain, and end talking about throwing food away so we can feel superior to the hungry, with the Uncommon Visitor leaving in the middle and other participants rolling their eyes with boredom by the end.  He must have had some difficulty finding his happiness that day.