
Aldous Huxley: the prophet of our brave new digital dystopia - happyman
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/22/aldous-huxley-prophet-dystopia-cs-lewis
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terhechte
I'm usually not a big fan of infographics, but there's been an infographic
that displays the differences between the future that Huxley depicted and the
future that Orwells depicted surprisingly well [1].

I always found the world in 'A brave new world' to be better _designed_ than
the world in 1984. Orwell installed Big Brother and had tight control
structures organize society. I.e. people are forced to not misbehave. Huxley,
on the other hand, (at least that's how it felt to me) found solutions to all
the small issues that make people misbehave, and just implemented a society
around it. In his dystopian future, people don't _want_ to misbehave, they're
not interested in it. I think both societies have equal chances of survival,
but the Huxley society has a higher chance of coming into existence because it
installs itself in line with peoples desires, instead of confronting their
desires.

[1]
[http://thesleepymoose.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/huxvor-2.p...](http://thesleepymoose.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/huxvor-2.png?w=604)

~~~
smutticus
'Amusing Ourselves to Death' is actually the name of a great book by Neil
Postman. I'm a little bothered by the author of that infographic stealing it
for his title. It's a great book and if you like thinking about this kind of
thing you should check it out.

~~~
terhechte
Yeah, I've read the book many a years ago. Another good read in this vein is
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception" [1]:

"they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing
standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc. — that
are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy
pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media,
renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic
circumstances."

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry)

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PhasmaFelis
_Brave New World_ is a nasty reactionary's idea of dystopia. There are genuine
horrors there--conditioning, eugenics, erasure of independent thought--but the
central themes that it keeps coming back to are that everybody's employed,
everybody's happy, nobody's hungry or sick or miserable, there's safe,
consequence-free, recreational sex and drugs for everyone, and _these are
portrayed as bad things._

 _BNW_ is fucked up in some serious ways, but--taken as an average across all
levels of society--I think it's actually better than the world we live in now.

Huxley, to his credit, eventually came around to the idea that sex, drugs, and
communal living could be used for good as well as evil, and actually wrote a
utopian response to his own earlier dystopian work. It's telling that _Brave
New World_ remains in every high school curriculum, but no one's ever heard of
_Island_.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_\(Huxley_novel\))

~~~
dntrkv
It's not that those things are bad, it's the way they are used by the society.

The drugs are used to avoid confrontation, emotional hurt, and to keep people
content with the status quo.

Everybody is employed... Yes, but they are conditioned to be content with
their class and job in society. You can't move up or down in class, you are
born into your job.

Nobody is hungry because everyone gets enough to survive, but only because
everybody is conditioned to enjoy their jobs and be content with their place
in society.

Sex is treated in the exact opposite manner of what we have now, sex is only
used for recreation and encouraged (even forced) from a young age.

I don't see how you can view any of these ideas as being "good." I would trade
our fucked up world over what they have in Brave New World any time.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _I would trade our fucked up world over what they have in Brave New World
> any time._

That's certainly a valid opinion. Still, I suspect it's easier to see BNW as
an utter horrorshow if you've never known real hunger or oppression or torture
or watched loved ones die of treatable diseases. I'm in the same boat myself.
But there are many millions of people in our world who would be genuinely much
better off in the Brave New World. It's hard to know what to think about that.

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kazagistar
I find it particularly telling that, however much this author rages against
"the machine", he still is a willing participant; facebook, twitter, google
and linkedin all have neat little javascript "links" at the bottom of his page
which are tracking all the blog's readers.

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stormbrew
I've always been really interested in a claim made in the foreword of Brave
New World by Huxley that sexual freedom is inversely correlated with economic
and political freedom:

> As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends
> compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder
> and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do
> well to encourage that freedom.

I'm not aware of what historical (as of 1946, when it was written) examples
this was premised on, and I've never seen it expanded on anywhere else (though
I have looked).

I'm curious if anyone who cares to defend Huxley's dystopia has any actual
rational basis for this claim, since it forms a core component of the world he
builds.

More generally, I am not terribly sympathetic to the overall world built in
Brave New World as a possible future. It definitely seems to me as if the 1984
predictions are much closer to reality than BNW's.

We live in a constant state of readiness for wars that have unclear purposes
and the governments we have seem much more interested in tearing down ideas
like full employment or sexual or narcotic freedoms. So it's surprising to see
people think that Huxley got it right and Orwell didn't.

~~~
emn13
It's not really an either or: they both identified bad habits modern society
is falling into. But whereas Orwell may have more recognizable details, the in
the broader strokes it's Huxley that seems more apropos: people are _choosing_
for this life. In Orwell's world dissent and choice were suppressed; in
Huxleys they were voluntarily discarded.

No matter how nasty the scandals surrounding the NSA are or how overblown the
rhetoric in the neverending "war on terror", I don't think anybody (sane) is
suggesting we _cannot_ end them. Sure, some dissent is punished harshly
(manning, snowden), but for society at large the current state of affairs is
entirely by choice.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>No matter how nasty the scandals surrounding the NSA are or how overblown the
rhetoric in the neverending "war on terror", I don't think anybody (sane) is
suggesting we cannot end them.

Yes we are. There are large mass movements calling for revolution precisely
because we don't want neverending war, don't want a surveillance state, and
don't want neoliberalism.

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grownseed
Every time I read or hear about the dystopian futures laid out by Huxley,
Orwell and in fact, many others, I can't help but think of the future imagined
by Banks. In the Culture, people are free to do pretty much whatever they
want, which eventually brings crime within the Culture to a near-zero. Even
the most atrocious crimes, albeit rare, are punished (if ever) by a slap on
the wrist. What I find particularly interesting about this is that Culture
people being free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, they in fact
end up in a state of lassitude and ultimately, a form of self-servitude and
meaninglessness (hence the expansion of the Culture and so on).

This shares Huxley's view of servitude through content, but it brings the
interesting point of whether the Culture could be qualified as a Dystopia or a
Utopia. It's funny to see that the majority of Culture people (as written by
Banks) think of the Culture as the closest thing to a Utopia, yet Banks
himself has pointed out on a number of occasions that he would not like living
in such a society. It also brings up the question of whether a Utopia is
really defined by (at least near-) complete freedom, or by individual comfort.

I very much enjoy my freedom (or whatever it is I think I have) and I do have
a tendency to reject (or rather circumvent) authority, but the more I think
about it the more I realize this view isn't shared by everybody. A lot of
people don't want to have to make decisions, question things and whatnot,
their comfort lies in the absence of having to do so, a view I can understand
(though do not share). I don't know if it's right, or wrong, and I'm certainly
not in a place to decide for others, but it does show the subjectivity and
flimsiness of the concepts of u/dys-topian societies.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
The problem is that the definition of _freedom_ has some assumptions most of
Enlightenment philosophy (being so bizarrely focused around thought
experiments dealing with yeoman farmers on homesteads) has direly neglected,
namely: relationships with other people.

What is freedom? Freedom, we're told, is when you can make decisions for
yourself. Therefore, are we in servitude to the laws of physics? Well no,
those are impersonal. Yet are we told that we can be in servitude by force, by
deprivation, or even by manipulation of our own desires? Yes.

So what's freedom? Freedom _really_ means having our own actions unconstrained
by the values or goals of other people (for a _large_ value of "people",
including institutions, the State, and in the limit God Himself). There the
problem emerges: the only way to be _completely_ unconstrained by other
people, to be _totally_ free, is to have no actual relations with other people
whatsoever.

Total freedom, therefore, is total isolation, but this fact is never
acknowledged because so much of our philosophical tradition assumes that
freedom proceeds from the individual alone and precedes social relationships
entirely. It assumes that everyone is a yeoman farmer on a plot of land who
should always be able to retreat to his property and do exactly as he pleases
-- which never happens in real life.

Then, are people really so stupid for choosing "less freedom", or are they
just finding more meaning in the presence of voluntary relationships than the
absence of compulsory ones?

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gentlegiant
Aldous Huxley gave a speech at Berkeley "The Ultimate Revolution" which can be
found online in many places, not least at
[http://archive.org/details/AldousHuxley-
TheUltimateRevolutio...](http://archive.org/details/AldousHuxley-
TheUltimateRevolution)

In the talk he discusses how the most likely scenario relative to 1984 is that
people will come to "love their servitude".

Well worth a listen.

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im3w1l
In my opinion we are to close to this picture for comfort.
[http://i.imgur.com/rTXSQ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/rTXSQ.jpg)

~~~
PavlovsCat
Speaking of uncomfortable pictures:
[http://eranfolio.deviantart.com/art/Reality-1440x900-7886180...](http://eranfolio.deviantart.com/art/Reality-1440x900-78861805)

:/

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moocowduckquack
Anyone who appreciates Brave New World and 1984 should really take a look at
Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel, We.

It was the first book banned after the Russian revolution and according to
Orwell it was his inspiration for 1984. I found it a lot more amusing and
poetic than 1984 however.

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guard-of-terra
Brave new world is a surprisingly benign place. You could do whatever you like
there if only you had the idea to. Compare that to 1984 or "We".

I can totally see them accepted into galactic equivalent of EU having only to
replace lower castes with robots (what they totally could). Not so fast with
the current messy state of Earth.

