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.
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.
The question isn't which is better or more original, the question is which predicted the future better. If you say neither because they copied We, it stands to reason that We didn't get it right either, nothing about good or bad. There's plenty of great SF with terrible "predictions" and vice versa.
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 :)
It's almost the exact same plot as 1984 in a different sci-fi setting. But yeah sure, pedantically speaking it's not exactly plagiarism but it's not exactly original either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Newspeak was primarily for the political classes, with the aim of absolute political control: ultimate authoritarianism of a system of thought (also see Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). By controlling language, all dissenting political opinions could be prevented, with the eventual goal that any thought that wasn’t the official line (such as liberty) could have only the single word ‘crimethink’ to describe it. Big brother and Emmanuel Goldstein (the revolutionary against the state) were fictions of the system, permanent idealised placeholders for the system. The system rules: people within the political system are trained by the system to be perfect cogs with zero independent thought, and the higher up in the hierarchy the less control and more mechanically thought-constricted the person became. Over time the system restricted thought, restricted language, and as the political class were replaced over the decades, the upcoming people were evermore controlled by the system. The only goal of the system was complete and total control.
The proles made up the majority of the population, but are almost invisible in the book, which leads to some odd Internet comments. The proles have zero political thought, and they live short lives of poverty. The proles are programmed to be interested in meaningless songs (produced by the versificator machine), meaningless persuits (such as lotteries), and other diversions. The proles do not speak newspeak, because they are not political. They certainly didn’t sing traditional folk songs (English aka ‘oldspeak’ is slowly abridged, removing all political words and nuances, and old literature is destroyed by rewriting it to remove all political nuance).
Ironically, the article and this discussion seems like a good case in point!
"Totalitarianism was Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the state controlled everyone through the infliction of pain and terror"
That sounds far closer to our current existence than BNW. Where are my bread and circuses? Circuses were shut down for much of the last two years, because of the need to fight an ever-shifting war against a terrifying virus ... a danger that cannot be directly perceived because almost everyone who gets it has mild symptoms and recover after a few days, but which rather, can only be truly perceived through the telescreen in our living rooms and the pronouncements of the ruling classes.
The parallels to 1984 are everywhere recent times, yet the majority cannot see them. Newspeak is in abundance. Policies change overnight and yet the Party claims that the policy was always the same, previously famous people get erased instantly the moment they object, and the population is trained to demand their own oppression, believing ultra-harsh conditions to be an expression of love.
My understanding of Orwellian oppression is exactly that even though people are very aware that it exists, only a small minority of people care enough (or are personally harmed enough) to want to take actions change it.
Just look at modern day China. All but the most naive are aware of things like censorship and surveillance. Most have first-hand interactions with both. People joke about it all the time (being "invited for tea" or such and such news was "harmonized" a.k.a. censored). Some of the language has evolved to be almost not that different from what was envisioned in Newspeak.
And yet, the average person does not feel violated enough to actually do something about anything. It's much easier to just go with the flow and not do what the state doesn't like.
>And yet, the average person does not feel violated enough to actually do something about anything. It's much easier to just go with the flow and not do what the state doesn't like.
The problem is it requires a lot of people to make a difference. A single person or a small group protesting gets thrown into a reeducation camp for 20 years (if they are lucky). That's one of the reasons mass surveillance is so nefarious; you can't start to plan a mass assembly/protest to address grievances without being noticed beforehand and thrown into a reeducation camp for 20 years (if you are lucky). You can't even talk about grievances with more than a few other people in a dark closet somewhere.
It's even more insidious than that. Even if the masses see the dystopia for what it is, they can't come together to fight it, because surveillance will be watching their coordination efforts.
In North Korea I suspect most everyone knows the propaganda is bullshit, but even a whisper of dissent will send the police knocking at your door. We aren't as bad as North Korea of course, but it sure smells similar.
There is a related thread on the problems Argentina is currently facing. It is worth reading through to see just how wrong you are. The problems Argentina is facing are well known and obvious and no one is doing anything about it, those problems have existed for decades. The newspeak is so strong in Argentina that even in that thread no one will say the real reasons out loud.
Even when I was there 20 years ago, people had to hush whisper and look around to see who was listening when talking about the problems they were facing.
Don't want to bother getting into a fight strangers on the internet. The reasons are obvious and well know. Just look at any country in South America that is suffering and it is always the same reason - socialism.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
The emergent behavior in this example includes big brother and those who perpetuate it. Just because something is costly doesn’t mean it can’t ensure it’s continued existence.
> 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.
No such claim, it was over 30 exiles, and I suspect were also given large amounts of money and weapons. It’s a murky area of history, I haven’t dug deep enough to be able to authenticate supposed forgeries etc. but prima facie it would make sense.
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.
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?"
Obviously the two books are a worse case scenario dystopia played out in a fictional world as a sandbox.
Orwell takes communism to the extreme of totalitarianism [1] to shows us what it might look like.
Huxley takes late stage capitalism to the extreme of authoritarian capitalism [3] to show what powerful elites running the world might look like in the far future.
"Totalitarianism" is as real as Goblins [1] and Orcs [2]; it is a Cold War propaganda term to smear enemy political systems. No person or government identifies as "totalitarian".
1984 and Brave New World are fiction books designed to be popular and have good sales, earning the authors a living. They are not accurate representations of reality and anyone who bases their understanding of modern domestic and international politics & power on them is just as deeply unserious as someone who compares China to Mordor or Putin to Voldemort.
> are fiction books designed to be popular and have good sales
i believe your cynicism is unwarranted for 1984. That might have been true of a couple of Orwell’s novels, but as he became more political, he spent his life on his socialist ideals. He fought in the trenches fighting against the fascists in Spain. He lived in the north of England for a bit, trying to understand poverty from the inside (although Orwell himself came from an ‘English upper class’ family, a family that lacked the money to keep up their social appearances). Orwell lived socialism, he wasn’t primarily a novelist, which is why his writing is so real. 1984 is written as a political book, using the novel format as the foundation for exposition, similar to many good fantasy or sci-fi novels. Much of his writing is political non-fiction, although 1984 is his most famous work. 1984 was published when he was ~46, near the time of his death.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am not sure about all this: they did have a very competent secret service after all.
So the director of the agrar kolchose might lie and so on, but why should the secret informants who are installed in that company, lie about it?
So I am pretty sure, the information was avaiable. It was probably a matter of not wanting to believe the information as that would mean, the glorious sovjet union was maybe not so glorious after all - and thinking that, would make you a traitor. So lets just continue to wave and smile.
This is pretty historically documented, and kind of something that still exists as a holdover in ex-Soviet countries. The lying became so pervasive that it was impossible to tell what the actual output of industry was
The spies lied too and, perhaps worse, the analysis back at the Center was motivated by politics and the usual careerism. The Mitrokhin archives provide an excellent look at how the played out in foreign intelligence, domestic spying was fairly similar.
> ...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.
Yes please! A Brontitallian Revolution!
All we need is a mass vision of Arthur Dent Throwing The Nutrimatic Cup.
The failure mode for BNW is when the gravy train runs out and the authorities can no longer afford to keep the public pacified. The much older concept than Huxley's story that Huxley's story is drawing from is "bread and circuses."
That's one of the reason that mullification through the carrot works so well in the United States... It's a very wealthy nation with vast reserves of resources to draw upon to keep people happy.
Sure, but part of how it keeps itself alive is it recruits all these mullified people to work for it, and throwing off some reward to them. This can sustain itself for a long while, as it seems to be doing.
Perhaps the thing that happens is people see it's all BS and just decide they don't need all the toys, and once they don't need the toys, they don't need to work either. Plus they'll get more critical of the system.
The toys are one dimension of perceived and artificially created desires for the hoi polloi.
Please take into account that most of us humans are bound by various obligations. Be it the financial type, i.e. paying off your house for 30+ years or, even more captivating, creating substitutes for natural needs. Compare with the fact that most of us live isolated, especially in these times, without real world communication beyond chats, mail, telephone and, well, Hacker News. The lack of face to face opportunities to speak and do nonverbal communication is one of the causes for rising psychological diseases, drug abuse and antisocial behaviours in the last decade.
Our post Neolithic Revolution society is based on the concept of the ruler and the ruled. Why? Because having power is also a desire which may be the most destructive one for humanity in general.
We may be living on a punishment planet or simulation.
Interesting that in a discussion of totalitarian regimes you would bring up the the "we are only wealthy because we steal wealth from the ground" thing. This whole idea was actually invented by Lenin in the 1920s to justify his totalitarian regime. There is no connection between it and reality, it was just propaganda to explain why Capitalism was still working and had not collapsed like Marx had predicted.
"Resources" exist in people's minds, not in the ground. Rocks and toxic sludge have no intrinsic value.
I think you'll need to clarify your meaning... I didn't mention the ground. I mostly mean that the United States has multiple industries dedicated to figuring out what makes people happy (or at least keeps their joy buttons pushed) and arranges the whole chain of operations to push them and to convince people to do work to make sure they get pushed.
That wealth takes the form of things in the ground, but also influence and the capacity to satisfy the desires of other countries and the people in them. Some of that is powered by processes that use raw materials that are non-renewable and dragged from the ground, but in the United States a lot of it is based on a hugely robust import export economy... Most of the things that push the joy buttons come from China.
> 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 […]
Some modern autocracies don't go after enemies but more protect friends:
> The transition [in Hungary] has been nonviolent, often not even very dramatic. Opponents of the regime are not murdered or imprisoned, although many are harassed with building inspections and tax audits. […] The courts are packed, and forgiving of the regime’s allies. Friends of the government win state contracts at high prices and borrow on easy terms from the central bank. Those on the inside grow rich by favoritism; those on the outside suffer from the general deterioration of the economy. As one shrewd observer told me on a recent visit, “The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.”
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.
We need to update Robert de Niro's character Harry Tuttle. In Brazil he's a rogue plumber who will sweep in and illegally fix pipes that would take the bureaucratic system months to fix. In the end he's literally consumed by paper(work).
In the modern era there's no visible plumbing to fix. Harry's only way to help the everyperson with their locked account is to tweet at the company's help handle. He's built up quite the celebrity doing just that and companies are forced to act on his demands. In the end, people are impatient, mention him too often, and his phone is DDoSed by a flood of tweets coming his way. He's never seen or heard of again.
Cons: you don't have parents or a family, you never experience real human relationships or love, in all likelihood your fetus will have been intentionally handicapped before birth, and if you did win the lottery and were born with your intellect in tact you'll get sent to an island to die if you start thinking too much.
> More broadly, though, Huxley is arguing for people to continue leading the sorts of lives that make for high art rather than those that make people content. His chief complaint about the Brave New World is that people have taken the dizzying highs and terrifying lows that lend "nobility" and "heroism" to life and traded them in for the creamy middles of happiness. For that argument I have less sympathy. By which I mean fuck that noise. The notion that suffering is ennobling is a particularly destructive piece of social engineering, and the suggestion that other people should suffer because Aldous Huxley enjoys the "over-compensations for misery" that the artists among them produce is pretty vile.
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.
119 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadSome papers with these themes off the top of my head:
- Reflections on Gandhi
- Politics and the English Language
- My Country Right or Left
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
I've lived in Orwell's country (communist dictatorship) when I was young, now I live in Brave New World.
Kafka is the one who really got it right. I've never felt a more realistic depiction of my life than The Trial.
At least in 1984, oppression wins. It is a very bleak ending.
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.
But were the proles forced to use Newspeak? I thought they were singing folks songs and stuff...
"The proles are free"
Newspeak was supposed to stamp out "bad" thoughts from members the party.
The proles made up the majority of the population, but are almost invisible in the book, which leads to some odd Internet comments. The proles have zero political thought, and they live short lives of poverty. The proles are programmed to be interested in meaningless songs (produced by the versificator machine), meaningless persuits (such as lotteries), and other diversions. The proles do not speak newspeak, because they are not political. They certainly didn’t sing traditional folk songs (English aka ‘oldspeak’ is slowly abridged, removing all political words and nuances, and old literature is destroyed by rewriting it to remove all political nuance).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-F...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein
"Totalitarianism was Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the state controlled everyone through the infliction of pain and terror"
That sounds far closer to our current existence than BNW. Where are my bread and circuses? Circuses were shut down for much of the last two years, because of the need to fight an ever-shifting war against a terrifying virus ... a danger that cannot be directly perceived because almost everyone who gets it has mild symptoms and recover after a few days, but which rather, can only be truly perceived through the telescreen in our living rooms and the pronouncements of the ruling classes.
The parallels to 1984 are everywhere recent times, yet the majority cannot see them. Newspeak is in abundance. Policies change overnight and yet the Party claims that the policy was always the same, previously famous people get erased instantly the moment they object, and the population is trained to demand their own oppression, believing ultra-harsh conditions to be an expression of love.
Yes.
> people work to fix it and eventually do.
No?
My understanding of Orwellian oppression is exactly that even though people are very aware that it exists, only a small minority of people care enough (or are personally harmed enough) to want to take actions change it.
Just look at modern day China. All but the most naive are aware of things like censorship and surveillance. Most have first-hand interactions with both. People joke about it all the time (being "invited for tea" or such and such news was "harmonized" a.k.a. censored). Some of the language has evolved to be almost not that different from what was envisioned in Newspeak.
And yet, the average person does not feel violated enough to actually do something about anything. It's much easier to just go with the flow and not do what the state doesn't like.
The problem is it requires a lot of people to make a difference. A single person or a small group protesting gets thrown into a reeducation camp for 20 years (if they are lucky). That's one of the reasons mass surveillance is so nefarious; you can't start to plan a mass assembly/protest to address grievances without being noticed beforehand and thrown into a reeducation camp for 20 years (if you are lucky). You can't even talk about grievances with more than a few other people in a dark closet somewhere.
In North Korea I suspect most everyone knows the propaganda is bullshit, but even a whisper of dissent will send the police knocking at your door. We aren't as bad as North Korea of course, but it sure smells similar.
Even when I was there 20 years ago, people had to hush whisper and look around to see who was listening when talking about the problems they were facing.
What's stopping you from saying what you think are the real reasons?
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.
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.
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.
"Who got it right, J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K. Rowling?"
Obviously the two books are a worse case scenario dystopia played out in a fictional world as a sandbox.
Orwell takes communism to the extreme of totalitarianism [1] to shows us what it might look like.
Huxley takes late stage capitalism to the extreme of authoritarian capitalism [3] to show what powerful elites running the world might look like in the far future.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_capitalism
1984 and Brave New World are fiction books designed to be popular and have good sales, earning the authors a living. They are not accurate representations of reality and anyone who bases their understanding of modern domestic and international politics & power on them is just as deeply unserious as someone who compares China to Mordor or Putin to Voldemort.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblin
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc
i believe your cynicism is unwarranted for 1984. That might have been true of a couple of Orwell’s novels, but as he became more political, he spent his life on his socialist ideals. He fought in the trenches fighting against the fascists in Spain. He lived in the north of England for a bit, trying to understand poverty from the inside (although Orwell himself came from an ‘English upper class’ family, a family that lacked the money to keep up their social appearances). Orwell lived socialism, he wasn’t primarily a novelist, which is why his writing is so real. 1984 is written as a political book, using the novel format as the foundation for exposition, similar to many good fantasy or sci-fi novels. Much of his writing is political non-fiction, although 1984 is his most famous work. 1984 was published when he was ~46, near the time of his death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
https://twitter.com/molly0xfff/status/1483831201823703041?s=...
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.
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.
So the director of the agrar kolchose might lie and so on, but why should the secret informants who are installed in that company, lie about it?
So I am pretty sure, the information was avaiable. It was probably a matter of not wanting to believe the information as that would mean, the glorious sovjet union was maybe not so glorious after all - and thinking that, would make you a traitor. So lets just continue to wave and smile.
You could describe the dystopian part of our condition as a blend of various dystopian tropes: https://i.imgur.com/kDo2NNr.jpg
Which of these is most dominant depends on where you live.
Yes please! A Brontitallian Revolution!
All we need is a mass vision of Arthur Dent Throwing The Nutrimatic Cup.
That's one of the reason that mullification through the carrot works so well in the United States... It's a very wealthy nation with vast reserves of resources to draw upon to keep people happy.
Perhaps the thing that happens is people see it's all BS and just decide they don't need all the toys, and once they don't need the toys, they don't need to work either. Plus they'll get more critical of the system.
Please take into account that most of us humans are bound by various obligations. Be it the financial type, i.e. paying off your house for 30+ years or, even more captivating, creating substitutes for natural needs. Compare with the fact that most of us live isolated, especially in these times, without real world communication beyond chats, mail, telephone and, well, Hacker News. The lack of face to face opportunities to speak and do nonverbal communication is one of the causes for rising psychological diseases, drug abuse and antisocial behaviours in the last decade.
Our post Neolithic Revolution society is based on the concept of the ruler and the ruled. Why? Because having power is also a desire which may be the most destructive one for humanity in general.
We may be living on a punishment planet or simulation.
"Resources" exist in people's minds, not in the ground. Rocks and toxic sludge have no intrinsic value.
That wealth takes the form of things in the ground, but also influence and the capacity to satisfy the desires of other countries and the people in them. Some of that is powered by processes that use raw materials that are non-renewable and dragged from the ground, but in the United States a lot of it is based on a hugely robust import export economy... Most of the things that push the joy buttons come from China.
Some modern autocracies don't go after enemies but more protect friends:
> The transition [in Hungary] has been nonviolent, often not even very dramatic. Opponents of the regime are not murdered or imprisoned, although many are harassed with building inspections and tax audits. […] The courts are packed, and forgiving of the regime’s allies. Friends of the government win state contracts at high prices and borrow on easy terms from the central bank. Those on the inside grow rich by favoritism; those on the outside suffer from the general deterioration of the economy. As one shrewd observer told me on a recent visit, “The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.”
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-...
* https://archive.fo/ZIzCm
There's nothing like that in Brave New World, though I think it's the wiser book.
In the modern era there's no visible plumbing to fix. Harry's only way to help the everyperson with their locked account is to tweet at the company's help handle. He's built up quite the celebrity doing just that and companies are forced to act on his demands. In the end, people are impatient, mention him too often, and his phone is DDoSed by a flood of tweets coming his way. He's never seen or heard of again.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
[2]: https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...
Cons: you don't have parents or a family, you never experience real human relationships or love, in all likelihood your fetus will have been intentionally handicapped before birth, and if you did win the lottery and were born with your intellect in tact you'll get sent to an island to die if you start thinking too much.
http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html
The main thrust:
> More broadly, though, Huxley is arguing for people to continue leading the sorts of lives that make for high art rather than those that make people content. His chief complaint about the Brave New World is that people have taken the dizzying highs and terrifying lows that lend "nobility" and "heroism" to life and traded them in for the creamy middles of happiness. For that argument I have less sympathy. By which I mean fuck that noise. The notion that suffering is ennobling is a particularly destructive piece of social engineering, and the suggestion that other people should suffer because Aldous Huxley enjoys the "over-compensations for misery" that the artists among them produce is pretty vile.
China - Orwell
USA/EU - Huxley
Orwell wrote a dystopia.