Aldous Huxley was correct not George Orwell

Originally posted by RRokkyy
reply to post by Alaskan Man

 

It was bread, and circuses for the masses and crucifixion for enemies of the state in Rome.
But it was also alien slavery (1/3 the population) and warfare.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Welcome to the fall,
again.

Can I steal the phrase "Bread and Circuses" from you? I want to work it into my next conversation

It is presumptuous to suppose that one author's view should be preferred over another. Orwell and Huxley have views that could arguably represent different ends of the same spectrum, and those ends need not necessary carry the labels "Right" and "Wrong."

Awsome thread, great illustration. I have been saying the same thing for a long time now. The government doesn't have to force oppression on us, we are basically begging for that oppression and will gladly do it to ourselves, after being manipulated of course. The government won't round us all up to stick us into FEMA Camps, we will gladly go ourselves and even bitch that they aren't more convenient to locate. In fact, the FEMA Camp is your own neighborhood and you don't even realize it.

We are so affraid of tyranny taking hold here in America that we don't even realize that tyranny is exactly what we have, it just snuck up from a different direction. In the yesteryear, TPTB needed to manipulate the people through physical force to oppress their populations but in this day in age, they simply manipulate our minds and we oppress ourselves. Same end result, different tactic.

--airspoon

My lord this is about the most enlightening thing I've read on here yet. Great job, S&F for you... and I've got some reading to do.

Seriously... I'm kind of taken aback.....

reply to post by Alaskan Man


FANTASTIC! What a great cartoon. I see brave new world all around me. Lady GaGa is called high-art. My college courses are increasingly about how I feel and less about learning. Endless media makes fun or virgins and anyone with any true convictions. We have truly become the culture of 'who gives a sh*t." I'd fear for my children if they'd know any different.

reply to post by HiramSpiral


I think by right and wrong he's referring to who was the better predictor of the future, not who most accurately warns about different ends of the political spectrum. Orwell's vision will always be a relevant one, as it pertains to authoritarian governments. However, As the real 1984 came and went it became increasingly clear that autocratic and authoritarian states are unlikely to be the future of things and that an endless consumer culture and decadence would rule the day. Had hitler won WWII or the ussr won the cold war this same argument would be made about how orwell was really correct. Both saw into the future and both writer's are extremely relevant. But for a stagnant western world seeking some good social commentary through Sci-fi (which is always the greatest sci-fi) its clear that Huxley's has become more relevant with time as orwell has become less relevant. That's not to say that in the far off future we might swing to the other end. But there really is little doubt that Huxley proved to be the greater prophet.

Great post op, I think it also speaks to the dumbing down of society whereby intelligence and ethical behaviour are depicted as being somehow strange and bad. Reality tv, game shows, obsession with sports, and overmedication are all signs of a society being systematically dumbed down. The superstar celebrities of ancient Greece were Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, etc, etc. I doubt that the Kardashians, Paris Hilton or Justin Beiber would even know who any of these people are.

We are in smiley face land right now, it's gonna turn ugly and people won't like it sadly =]

Good stuff, indeed.

I don't think there was any other way we could have gone except one or the other. There would never be an "in between". And I can't think of any alternatives that couldn't come about, with out having to live one of these ways, or the other.

That circus melody keeps cycling in my head when I think about it.

You know, this one?

reply to post by snusfanatic


All excellent points, but I wasn't referring to the spectrum purely in a political sense. The cartoon showed interesting perspective with regards to the works of Huxley and Orwell--I simply found (and still find) it presumptuous to assign barriers of right and wrong with respect to the manner in which two different authors interpret the course of humanity and its collective future. So Huxley may be "right" at the moment; what about the future?

reply to post by Alaskan Man


Why does Huxley have to be more 'correct' than Orwell?

They both had relevant concerns for their time and expressed it in different ways. It's not like comparing Marxism vs. Capitalism.

I think both are very much in play right now. All those who are asleep, Huxley's vision is being used or slowly being implemented upon them. For those of us who are awake, Orwell's vision is being implemented upon us for we will not give into this fake pleasure. Take the banning of books, didn't the Pentagon recently purchase books so a certain story wouldn't come out for us to read? So we are given sensory overload through TV, music, and video games while those very programs are censored by the FCC.

Now Huxley is a little more correct with the "too much information part" especially involving the internet BUT that dang fairness doctrine is pushing for the Orwell style censorship. It will target sites like this one, those sites that are designed to wake people up.

The holding back of truth, I feel, is very relevant with the 9/11 event and many others like Global Climate Disruption, the Kennedy assassination along with what's going on within the Fed and even with Roswell. So in turn we are overloaded with disinformation. We have agencies who deal in secrets, so of course they're going to lie and give us disinformation all in the name of "National Security."

We are definitely becoming a more captive culture distracted by the trivial junk fed to us. Check out this video game control system being pushed: Skinner Box

Again with the final part to these two stories, if the awakened do not take the pleasure, you will take it through force. I truly believe both are absolutely correct and are just implemented for the different kinds of people. Love the surveillance or we'll force you to love it with our x-ray van. have a nice day

Huxley covered a lot of this in "Brave New World Revisited." It's definitely worth a read, if you'd like to hear his personal comparisons of "Brave New World" and "1984."

www.huxley.net...


-TheAssoc.

What is the alternative? What would you all rather be doing? People are happy to live in this world when they can keep themselves busy.Some things are bad some are good but what is the alternative.Even if you lived in a world without your invisible prison you would find something else to bitch and moan about.

Originally posted by die_another_day
We are in smiley face land right now, it's gonna turn ugly and people won't like it sadly =]

Every year for the last 50 years people have said its going to get kick off, but it never does.

Both are equally valid. Orwell's vision is exactly what the UK has become. A citizen cannot take one step in public without their actions being recorded on CCTV. The US is moving toward that direction everyday. The internet and television's advertisements are a great example for Huxley's vision. It is almost impossible to tell fact from fiction anymore. There are millions of choices for information, so much so, that people can no longer adequately determine what is truth anymore. To not see the visions of both authors actuating themselves now is ignorance of both the author and their works.

reply to post by Kandinsky



reply to post by Alaskan Man

You make your point well (star for the OP and flag for the thread) but what Kandinsky says needed saying, if only for the record. Aldous Huxley was a fine writer, but Orwell was a great one--one of the all-time masters of English prose and a novelist and essayist whose work was far deeper and more understanding of the human condition than Huxley's ever was.

By the way, Kandinsky, did you know that Orwell made propaganda broadcasts to India over the BBC during the Second World War? Oddly enough, a lot of the stuff he mentioned about the Soviet Union got censored. Orwell was well and truly disenchanted with Communism and Stalinism by the mid 1940s, and this came through. Some of what he said grated with Labour members of the British War Cabinet, who saw the Soviets as comrades in the great proletarian struggle. And of course, the USSR was an ally in the war against the Axis.

Very interesting. I was about to say: "but more of Orwell's terms have been adopted into the mainstream - Big Brother, doublespeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime, newspeak, thought police, room 101 etc"

...but then I realised, maybe that just goes to show how TPTB are aware of the prescience of 1984 and Brave New World and have chosen to throw us off scent by pushing 1984 terminology upon us whilst actually implementing more of a Brave New World style of oppression.

Star and flag to the op!

THIS kind of thread is why I love ATS. I love Orwell and Huxley alike. But Huxley had very good predictions in his novel. Remember how the children would be taught to "fool around" and have sexual relations at age 6 and 7? That aspect is definitely taking place. The fact that kids are having sex for the first time younger and younger these days. Give it a Google search or something. I remember hearing in my area of Virginia, that two kids had sex in FIFTH GRADE.....Also, remember how he taught them to be promiscuous, not monogamous? Look at how many single people we have and how many divorcees we have....It's unreal!

These are scary times indeed, and I often wonder if we're too far down the path to turn back or create a new one...

Thanks again for this post. Just what I need after 8 grueling hours at work from 10pm - 6am.

haven't read oswald spengler's DECLINE OF THE WEST, but anyway.... have the idea that spengler examined the youth,maturity, and decline of several cultures in history. the behavior of the people and the quality of what they produced at various stages in the lifecycles of the several cultures had remarkable(?) similarities. huxley and orwell, which i have read, both produced valuable fictional snapshots of cultures, but at two different points of cultural evolution. as government(gang) gains power, huxleys vision evolves into orwells vision. ???? looking forward to living in ayn rands vision in ATLAS SHRUGGED.