Thread by @TomLondon6

Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell's 1984?

Charles McGrath: -
"Huxley believed that his version of dystopia was the more plausible one. In a 1949 letter, thanking Orwell for sending him a copy of “1984,” he wrote that he really didn’t think all that torture and jackbooting

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was necessary to subdue a population, and that he believed his own book offered a better solution. All you need to do, he said, is teach people to love their servitude. The totalitarian rulers in Huxley’s book do this not by oppressing their citizens but by giving them

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exactly what they want, or what they think they want — which is basically sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll — and lulling them into complacency. The system entails a certain Trump-like suspicion of science and dismissal of history, but that’s a price the inhabitants

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of Huxley’s world happily pay. They don’t mourn their lost liberty, the way Orwell’s Winston Smith does; they don’t even know it’s gone"

(Yes. COMPLACENCY and DISTRACTION are enough for Fascism to come to the UK, without most people even noticing)

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Huxley or Orwell?
This is Neil Postman:-
"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t...Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision
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there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their

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autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for
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there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared
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the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
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As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain
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In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

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(APATHY, COMPLACENCY, DISTRACTION may be allowing any meaningful democracy in the UK to be lost RIGHT NOW)

Spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one exuding suspicion & hate. In Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There's no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth
- Postman

“It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions"
- Neil Postman