Huxley and Orwell: Two Views on Oblivion

I'll lay my cards on the table right at the start: I love both the books discussed in today's post.  A Brave New World and 1984 are both seminal, practically genre-defining works of dystopian futurism, that sub-family of science fiction that appraises the present and supposes what the world might look like after making a few pessimistic assumptions about our capacity as a species.  My appreciation for both books was deepened last year when I stumbled on this review of 1984, written as personal correspondence directly between Huxley and Orwell!

If you're the tl;dr type, Huxley's analysis of Orwell's book boils down to this: it's a great piece of literature with tremendous vision about the dangers of totalitarianism, but Huxley was pretty sure that he had the right answer when it came to the modes of control that the autocrats of tomorrow would employ to subdue the population.  The gist is captured in the following passage: Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis 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 and kicking them into obedience."

Brave New World came out in 1932.  Nineteen-Eighty-Four was released in 1949.  So now, with a respectable sixty years of buffer time since the publication of the more recent work, I think it's a fine moment to consider who was the more accurate predictor of today's modes of social control.

The Iron-fisted Master Narrative

First, let's consider Orwell's vision.  How is social control achieved in Oceania?  There are two principal means that intertwine: the crafting of an officially endorsed vision of the world (including both contemporary politics and historical events), and punitive force wielded against any that pose potential threats to the hegemonic worldview.  To what extent do these things exist in the world of today?

Any honest intellectual can accede to the reality of certain elements of Orwell's vision.  In fact, during America's Bush II years, when extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay were new parts of the American conversation, direct parallels were frequently drawn between many of Bush's anti-terror tactics (which have largely continued under Obama) and the politics of Big Brother.  After the Snowden revelations, it's more clear than ever that the United States government has an interest in monitoring more information about its citizens than it's comfortable disclosing in the light of day.

There are, however, a few crucial differences.  For instance, the metadata being culled by the NSA only exists because we willingly surrender that data to corporations in exchange for access to information technology.  Likewise, many of the violently normative expressions of anger against people that dared to question government policies in the mid 2000's didn't originate from government sources, but rather from attack dogs in the media and the social sphere intent on spearheading a self-policing policy for the American electorate.  These differences hint a a fundamental miscalculation present in both works, but more on that after we turn to Huxley.

Disappear into Sweet Oblivion

Huxley thought he was right about the future because he'd considered how to make people comfortable with surrendering their meaningful political engagement - control their perceptions about the world by conditioning them from an early age, and constantly push their pleasure buttons to distract them from more significant life ambitions.

Huxley was definitely right that government has been concerned for quite a while with proper socialization of the youth to ensure the continuity of the political system; When the second generation of founding fathers were debating the merits and design of a public education system, one of the most significant arguments in favor was to control the perceptions of huddled masses, so that they would understand that the decisions being made by the political elites were being made in everyone's best interest.

And I think he's also right that to a large extent, at least in the developed world, and particularly in America, political disengagement grows in tandem with our materialistic obsessions.  Our energies and our desires are almost entirely focused on accumulating and appreciating objects of consumption; they become totems for how we measure and compare our value as humans, and our principle avenue for entertainment.  But once again, I think Huxley was wrong to suppose that it would be some kind of central governing body that would be the delivery mechanism for the hedonistic cycle.

Dollar Dollar Bills, Y'all

That's right, the real issue is capitalism.  The modes of control to which we are all subjected in the status quo are largely decentralized and exist primarily because of our "voluntary" participation.  We surrender our data for analysis, and we certainly elect to participate in the consumerist rat race, but is it really fair to say that we make these decisions freely and without coercion?  The significant alignment between the political elite and the socioeconomic elite in America means that the rules and systems that govern practically every interaction in our everyday lives pushes us to conform to the expectations of assimilation into the workforce and pacification via consumption.  We're socialized from a young age to use these metrics to measure our progress through life.

Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty-Four are both make prescient guesses about the nature of the strings that are tied to us all now, but they misidentified who'd be yanking on the threads from the other end.