[HN Gopher] Who Got It Right: Orwell or Huxley?
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Who Got It Right: Orwell or Huxley?
Author : steelstraw
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-01-27 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
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| umvi wrote:
| Depends on the country.
|
| China - Orwell
|
| USA/EU - Huxley
| wrnr wrote:
| kodah wrote:
| If you read Orwell's essays I don't think he paints the picture
| as clearly as 1984 does.
|
| Some papers with these themes off the top of my head:
|
| - Reflections on Gandhi
|
| - Politics and the English Language
|
| - My Country Right or Left
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Replying here because GP is flagged.... I do not agree with
| the GP opinion but I think people should be allowed to
| express 'bad' opinions.
| wrnr wrote:
| No there should be no place for bad opinions, otherwise
| people can LARP their favourite dystopian fiction.
| kodah wrote:
| I wasn't saying I agree with them either, just pointing out
| Orwell wasn't telling stories about "good and bad" in the
| way 1984 was written. A lot of his essays actually show
| there's a lot of grey, much less shades of it.
| [deleted]
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I hate these either/or questions. A lot of societies have aspects
| of both. North Korea probably leans toward Orwell but the rest of
| the world more Huxley at the moment. But we shouldn't create
| these dichotomies. Left vs right, socialism vs capitalism and so
| on. They stifle any reasonable discussion right before it can
| even begin. I guess that's the purpose of offering only extreme
| alternatives.
| unixhero wrote:
| Aldous wrote a utopia.
|
| Orwell wrote a dystopia.
| [deleted]
| madrox wrote:
| A recent thread went around twitter discussing the need for
| artificial wombs to address the inequality between men and women.
| Huxley is the first place my mind went.
|
| https://twitter.com/molly0xfff/status/1483831201823703041?s=...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Orwell is more oppression that is done to us. Huxley is more
| oppression that we go along with doing to ourselves. So far, it's
| more Huxley.
| nottorp wrote:
| Both, depending on country/time period.
|
| I've lived in Orwell's country (communist dictatorship) when I
| was young, now I live in Brave New World.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Brave New World had the Falklands. Where are the Falklands?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Elements of both exist in the modern world, but Huxley's is
| easier to overlook. Authorities need people to mostly not react
| to intolerable things that are happening, and it's best if you do
| it from placating people with drugs/toys/pacifiers rather than
| the whip, because people who are pacified will pressure other
| people into not rocking the boat, whereas people who are being
| whipped will complain about it to their friends and try to build
| up a resistance movement.
|
| Of course when you do go for the whip, you want to newspeak it
| into something else, so that also works, in small doses. Your
| problem occurs if it escalates, then you can't hold it down with
| PR anymore.
|
| So 1984 is metastable and such societies did in fact boil over.
| BNW is stable and invisible to a lot of people, though I suspect
| there is some failure mode we have yet to see. Maybe there's a
| line of thought where people just get sick of every damn thing
| being massaged to death by PR people, and they do something about
| it.
| Jansen312 wrote:
| 1984 got it more correct. Take sometime to read or watch
| current China related stuff. It makes whatever we think
| oppressions done by western countries look pedantic. Huxley
| birth control might also play out in China if birth rate there
| still dropping way below what the state wants of 3 at the
| moment. Personally I feel, if the world was dominated by
| mainland Chinese and their influences or direct supremacy in
| some kind of marvel multiverse, then Huxley-Orwell fictions
| might be "unfictionized" there.
| pram wrote:
| I've always thought the achilles heel of Oceania's government
| was the economy. Pretty much the one thing they couldn't really
| place into their 'subjective reality' philosophical framework.
|
| The way information passed through the Outer Party technicians
| was extremely compartmentalized. It was a command economy, did
| anyone actually know how things were going? The statistics were
| basically all lies. Eventually the gin and cigarettes would
| stop flowing.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Related, there are stories of the USSR turning its own spy
| satellites on itself to estimate correct crop yields because
| of the culture of lying and exaggeration internally.
| Basically nobody at the top really knew what was going on,
| because everyone below them constantly lied to avoid getting
| in trouble.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Both. They are fictional explorations of human nature. Not
| prophecies about what the future will actually look like.
| mjfl wrote:
| Huxley seems to be more right in the long term, since Orwellian
| oppression is very visible, people work to fix it and eventually
| do. Not so for Huxly-an dystopia.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| > Orwellian oppression is very visible
|
| 1984 makes a fairly strong point that this is not true.
|
| The proles do not conceive of the fact that they are oppressed.
| Only the outer party can even think this, and at best its a
| muted response. Newspeak is about making it impossible to see
| or conceptualize oppression or injustice.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _Orwellian oppression is very visible, people work to fix it
| and eventually do._
|
| At least in 1984, oppression wins. It is a very bleak ending.
| colecut wrote:
| Nearly everyone carries an internet connected camera microphone
| tracking device everywhere.
| Hnaomyiph wrote:
| Does a camera, microphone and tracking device detect a slowly
| boiled frog?
| time_to_smile wrote:
| The trouble is I'm perfectly fine with the Huxlian distopia.
| Ship me off to an island of intellectual dissidents and give me
| some good drugs, I'm down for that world.
|
| Kafka is the one who really got it right. I've never felt a
| more realistic depiction of my life than _The Trial_.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I'd be down for 60 years of good health, I think of the
| amount of work that I could do. I think the problem is that
| they have to keep throwing the work away and the
| pointlessness of it all would kill me.
| jameskilton wrote:
| Yes.
| scandox wrote:
| My experience is that 1984 is much more re-readable. That doesn't
| necessarily mean anything, except that perhaps Orwell created a
| world that is more mentally inhabitable despite its grim nature.
| The little room above the shop is a respite we can all dream of.
|
| There's nothing like that in Brave New World, though I think it's
| the wiser book.
| 5cott0 wrote:
| Neither because they both plagiarized Yevgeny Zamyatin.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
| pharmakom wrote:
| Plagiarised is totally the wrong word here. Besides, We is
| satirical so quite different in tone. I greatly enjoyed all
| three novels though, and encourage people to read them all :)
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Meaning that Zamyatin got it wrong, too?
| uvdn7 wrote:
| They are not mutually exclusive? If you look at China, both are
| sort of happening at the same place in the same place.
| scoofy wrote:
| The books are using "the future" to describe their present times.
| nix23 wrote:
| Both, it's the mix that makes the perfect society, but 1984 is
| the better book ;)
| after_care wrote:
| I don't really see the either/or situation here. It seems like
| two ways in which states can control citizens, and with actors in
| the modern world taking lessons from both mixed with other
| sources.
| js2 wrote:
| Neither. The dystopia I fear is Terry Gilliam's _Brazil_ , though
| on some days, I think we're headed toward _Idiocracy_.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Orwell vs Huxley seems to be the lens of how people react to what
| is done to them. I'm more interested in why those in power do
| those things in the first place. The article points to the
| students as if they have power, I don't think they do, they're
| trapped in a system and reacting to it as pretty much any young
| human would do in the same position.
|
| Possibly my favorite example of the powerful impressing a way of
| life on a huge number of people is the diplomatic sealed train
| the Germans used to send Lenin from Switzerland to Russia. i.e.
| the Russian Revolution was an intentional act done to it by
| cynical Germans who correctly expected the outcome would help
| them in the war. And the rest is history.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| > i.e. the Russian Revolution was an intentional act done to it
| by cynical Germans who correctly expected the outcome would
| help them in the war.
|
| Claiming that Germany caused the Russian Revolution via the
| sole act of sending him back to Russia is not true.
|
| While it is true that Lenin ultimately led the Bolsheviks to
| power, the reason Germany even thought about sending Lenin back
| was that Russia was already on the brink of collapse due to
| reasons a mile long and Germany was throwing shit against the
| wall to hasten Russian collapse.
|
| Claiming a revolution of an entire country was caused by a
| single person is a bit much.
| pydry wrote:
| Power is a hell of a drug.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Sending Lenin to Russia wasn't about causing a revolution, that
| had actually already happened, but it was about trying to
| affect who would win the following fight for power.
| madrox wrote:
| After reading Dune and also being an engineering leader, I've
| come to view power as multivariate. In some ways you have less
| power when you're in charge. To go with your example, many
| other countries didn't see a choice in getting involved in WW1.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| One of my takeaways from 1984 is that those who are
| supposedly in charge are slaves to a self perpetuating
| emergent behavior. It often feels like it is never a choice.
| How much of politics is decided by Henry Kissinger and his
| disciples (e.g. Klaus Schwab - Davos) carrying on the
| tradition of realpolitik.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "those who are supposedly in charge are slaves to a self
| perpetuating emergent behavior"
|
| That describes most of society and for sure a lot of
| companies. A lot of people realize that something is not
| right but they still stay confined within that framework.
| pphysch wrote:
| Neither because they're both fiction books marketed towards a
| popular audience for their entertainment. They are not
| substitutes for concrete analysis of historical facts.
|
| "Who got it right, J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K. Rowling?"
| rapnie wrote:
| Well, fiction with such clear warnings in them are more like
| parables.
| pphysch wrote:
| Neither of these fictional novels are succinct nor simple,
| like a parable.
| maurits wrote:
| Although I understand its been critiqued, I always liked the
| visual depiction of "amusing ourselves to death" from Postman
| [1], by McMillen [2]
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
|
| [2]: https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-
| webc...
| voidfunc wrote:
| Am I the only one who read Brave New World and thought "That
| doesn't seem all that bad?"
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| I'm here to collect my free sex and drugs.
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