Huxley vs. Orwell: Which Dystopian Author Got It Right?

Think Tank #102

This post is inspired by a comment on my project, Breaking Big Brother, which asserts the argument that George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four should be viewed as a work of political satire rather than prophecy.

Jeff Einstein

commented with a great point: that the same can be said of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Jeff linked to a brilliant article he wrote titled “The Rise of Huxwell,” in which he examines how elements of both novels have manifested themselves in today’s world: the “state-sponsored addiction” of Brave New World and the “24/7 surveillance, linguistic thought control, the wholesale manufacture of abject hatred, and jackboot-enforced fear” of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Rise of Huxwell

I highly recommend that you read Jeff’s article before you continue reading this one—I’ll be referencing it, and it provides a fantastic overview of what’s going on in the world today as it relates to these two novels.

Since Nineteen Eighty-Four came out in the year 1949, there’s been a kind of silent feud between Orwell and Huxley. After Orwell’s novel came out, Huxley actually wrote to Orwell saying that his own dystopia was the superior one, since it describes a version of the future in which people are ruled by their desires rather than their fears.¹

As

Jeff Einstein

rightly points out, this isn’t exactly true.

These two novels, which at first glance appear to be polar opposites, are actually two sides of the same coin—illustrations of completely separate methods of control which exist simultaneously, and, in fact, blend into one another seamlessly today.

In his letter, Huxley claimed that the “boot-on-the-face” policy of constant terror that Orwell described would never play out in the real world. He’s not wrong. A system of government would have a very difficult time persisting indefinitely if its people were constantly miserable.

However, as Jeff points out in “The Rise of Huxwell,” we are living in a type of Orwellian nightmare all its own. Sure, we aren’t fearing for our lives (not that I know of, anyway), but we are scared into silence regarding certain ‘controversial’ issues lest we lose our livelihoods or our social standing, and we are suspended in a state of perpetual war designed to line the pockets of the people who organize these conflicts.

The “two minutes hate” is, in fact, a much bigger problem than even Orwell anticipated—people spend hours each day tuning in to hateful propaganda designed to enrage them against the group that they’ve learned to hate (whether that’s Donald Trump or ‘the liberals’ or a racial group or anything else which keeps the population divided). These objects of hate are our Emmanuel Goldstein—we’ve been given the illusion of choice, but the issues that we argue about are all fabricated.

Our populace is not mad about this, though. This is where Aldous Huxley provides the missing link to all this—our world isn’t just brainwashed, it’s actually addicted to its own brainwashing.

Huxley was well-connected. He knew what the puppeteers were doing behind the scenes. In 1958, he wrote the book Brave New World Revisited, in which he talked about how the methods of control that he’d foreseen in his 1932 dystopia were being implemented much quicker than he had ever imagined.

In Brave New World, Huxley writes about ‘Soma,’ a drug with zero consequences (except total compliance and euphoria) which every member of the population is hopelessly addicted to.

In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley documents researchers searching for such a drug: “The ideal stimulant, powerful but innocuous,” which will “temporarily alter the chemistry of the brain and the associated state of the mind without doing any permanent damage to the organism as a whole.”

In 1958, it appears they were still searching for a chemical. Today, they’ve accomplished their aim using other means.

This is where

Jeff Einstein

hits the nail on the head. They have found their perfect drug—only it isn’t a drug at all. It’s media, distilled into tiny little dopamine hits so that the populace can, in effect, be addicted to the very thing that is keeping them enslaved.

Examine this quote from Brave New World Revisited:

“That a dictator could, if he so desired, make use of these drugs for political purposes is obvious. He could ensure himself against political unrest by changing the chemistry of his subjects' brains and so making them content with their servile condition. He could use tranquillizers to calm the excited, stimulants to arouse enthusiasm in the indifferent, halluciants to distract the attention of the wretched from their miseries.”

Doesn’t social media accomplish this aim perfectly? Smartphones are the perfect drug. They alter the structure of our brains, keep us distracted and placated without destroying our bodies in the way that chemicals do. Of course, we love our chemical addictions, too, but even this is nowhere near as pervasive as the smartphone addiction that has become the norm rather than the exception for young people today.

It’s ingenious. Instead of choosing between one or the other, we can have a population that is governed by hate and addiction at the same time.

Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited pack too many shocking revelations for one quick Substack post. I highly recommend that you read them.

Also, read “The Rise of Huxwell.” It explains all this in much greater detail than I have.

Thank you,

Jeff Einstein

, for inspiring this thought.

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1. You can read Huxley’s letter here:

Aldous Huxley's Letter to George Orwell