What do you think about these two famous novels and their authors: Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell.
What were the purpose, main motivations, events leading to their writing?
Are they prophecies (or self-fulfilling prophecies) in the same sense as we may think about Biblical prophets?
Did authors observe the contemporaneous trends and extrapolated them? Did they get inspiration from above?
Or did they know something (especially Huxley, who was a member of the ruling elite) and decided to warn the masses,
becoming famous for that? Like Edward Snowden.
Or was it a psyop done by the ruling elite? Like Tavistock Institute's projects.
Hi there!! Well, you have mentioned two of my very favourites books, so, let`s analyze a bit them.
In the first place, George Orwell did had a really nice inside of what a dictatorial state meant. He described how, by manipulating the people by fear, a totalitarian government might be able to even destroy the people`s spirit. To me, "1984" is a book related to how the fear and the destruction of the minds of the people, through starvation, by having them in a continuous state of stress, even at the point of being able to destroy the capacity of falling in love. If you continuously keep the people under a thread, then the stress levels will be so high, then you can even manipulate their more profounds feelings, as O`Brien clarify while torturing Winston. Now, Orwell`s life was quite interesting: he was involved in the Spanish Civil War, where he realized how the press could absolutely cheat the people by fake news with the only goal of manipulating the masses into a whole new mindset. That horrified Orwell, like he stated on "Homage to Catalonia" (1938). Well, given the baggage of the writer, the characters of 1984 are based on historical ones, like the "Big Brother", an interpretation of Stalin, or Goldstein, the dramatic representation of Trotsky. So, from my perspective, George Orwell was describing, in a hyperbolic way, his own experience.
We must n`t forget that Huxley wrote "A brave new world" 17 years before Orwell`s "1984". In fact, Orwell sent a copy of his "1984" in 1949 to his master, Huxley, and they even had a debate about which one did have the better approximation. There is an interesting letter Huxley sent to Orwell:
Wrightwood. Cal.
21 October, 1949
Dear Mr. Orwell,
It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals --- the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution --- the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual's psychology and physiology --- are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.
Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud's inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.
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. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large-scale biological and atomic war --- in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
Thank you once again for the book.
Yours sincerely,
Aldous Huxley
(source:http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/1984-v-brave-new-world.html )
This is an amazing letter, and, even when it is quite long, I think this is one of the better analysis we can read about both authors mindset...
Now, their lives were really different. Huxley used to live in a high-society world and see how the nepotism, the classism and the appearances will lead humanity into a nightmare of entertainment. Orwell, on the contrary, was in the war and experienced in his own flesh horrors that Huxley could only imagine.
However they have true two different lives, I think both were absolutely right. We can see the Orwell´s nightmare having a place in undeveloped countries: fear, orchestrated wars, hunger, surveillance... And, also, Huxley`s nightmare is already happening also in a global state: cellphones, Facebook, Youtube, Healthy lifestyles, selfies, Instagram, "likes" as the new concept of "soma"...
Why do I think both were right? Well, precisely because they have two different approximations to the same problem. It can be mixed, it can happen at the same time, in the same place. Look at the US society, for instance: their government is always scaring their people with a new menace, as terrorism, as war, and, at the same time, they have TV programmes like "American Got Talent", they have to buy their very next app so one day they will be able to be thin and fit, etcetera.
Yes, that`s why both are so important. Because, due to their experiences, they were able to analyce, structured their present so well that they even were able to describe the future.
