This article is about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. If you haven’t read them, you might want not to read the article now, for there may be spoilers. If the last books you read were the Harry Potter series and The Da Vinci Code, though, carry on – you’re never reading them anyway.
In dystopian literature, there is one book which is widely considered to be the seminal work in the area, the most famous, most influential book in the genre: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A claustrophobic, stifling tale of a mad dictatorship which tries to, and even succeeds at, controlling the people’s thoughts. Abolishing all notion of intellectualism, individuality, and critical thought, it’s a visceral, it’s claustrophobic, and is hopeless. It shows a world no one would like to live in, other than the brainwashed people in it.
And it’s this very thought that may bring a completely different dystopia to light.
Despite being written decades earlier than Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World almost feels like a response the Orwell’s masterpiece. It also tells a frightening tale of a future dystopia, but rather than one run by fear, misinformation and violence, it’s one of free sex, free drugs, and free entertainment, where no one can be unhappy. No one would ever wish to live under the oppressive thumb of Orwell’s sick dictatorship. Can you say the same about Huxley’s?
Go back to that line, ‘other than the brainwashed people in it’.
Orwell’s idea of a dystopia has come to be the stereotype of the genre. All of our modern-day V for Vendettas are about governments doing away with people’s liberties. That’s the meaning of freedom. What about the Brave New World style dystopia, its opposite? Its promiscuity, its liberated drug use, its endless search for one’s own pleasure? There are a few works about hedonist hells, but they are more exceptions than rules. I, for one, find it amazing that the early 20th century society is the one being criticized in Huxley’s book; it definitively looks a lot more like the early 21st century one.
It’s not my intent to attempt to bring these works up to speed and face them against what has become, or even merely compare each other. Better writers have already done so, including Huxley himself, in Brave New World Revisited. But it’s certainly an interesting angle of vision to look at the first story as a reply to the second – to see the ‘anti-utopia’ as a response to the ‘dystopia’, the deceiptly good as an alternative to the evil in denial. I believe most people will read Nineteen Eighty-Four first anyway.
Can the normal individual even grasp how Huxley’s story is supposed to be about a bad thing? Big Brother asks his followers to spy on those who don’t worship here, but in the Brave New World no one asks anything and the order is carried out even more effectively. Dissenters of Engsoc disappear overnight and everyone must forget about them; those who disagree with how World’s society is set up are ostracized and ignored, without any input from any government-resembling body. In the first, revolution can never happen because everyone is being too well watched, but one slip in the system and it’s gone; in the latter, it can never happen because no one wants it. In the first, the prolesare left out; the dictatorship is political and self-imposed. In the latter, the lower end of the population may be doomed to perform menial jobs, but they are just as doomed to enjoy them and be happy about them. The first rely on idealism and xenophobia to exist, only one of which can keep fires lit in people’s hearts for long enough. The latter employs a simple panem et circences – rather than telling people what they should want, they just give them what they really want.
Perhaps the best way to see the difference between what the two societies do to those in them is examining the main characters in each book: Wilson Smith vs. Bernard Marx. World’smain character may be considered by some to be actually John Savage, but my point in here is that those two characters represent a man from our society living in the dystopia, failing to adapt to it. Neither character actually is an outsider, but they both behave accordingly to a different line of thought and moral compass, although no definitive reason is given (just Wilson’s ‘ancestral memory’ and the rumors of alcohol in Bernard’s pseudoblood). Wilson Smith is not an idealist; but the world oppress him so much that he sees no choice other than to act against it. Bernard Marx is; but he acts because “criticizing the world made him feel better about himself”, not out of a true desire to change it. Wilson wishes nothing more than to escape; Bernard wishes nothing more than to fit in. They are both us – they are both reflections of ourselves imprinted into these unlikely futures, and both fail – but Wilson’s failure is an epic one, the result of a battle, of torture, of a finely crafted machine designed to break one’s spirit, while Bernard digs his own grave, trips on his own shoelaces, and his failure is just a self-imposed humiliation.
(Another interesting fact is how both societies seek to destroy the love between man and woman, but one does it by outlawing sex while other does it by banalizing it. And in truth, Wilson’s love for Julia resisted more than anything else; even after his spirit is broken and his mind has conformed, only when he’s brought to the deepest hole in the Ministry of Love, and exposed to his deepest fears, and scarred in the deepest part of his psyche do they succeed in destroying it. All it took to make Bernard stop thinking about Lenina was to throw some easy pussy in front of him.)
And yet, it’s strange to say this. One might say that the world is not, indeed, going towards Huxley’s nightmare, and cite the Homeland Security Act in the US, the overlooked atrocities in China, and the many dictatorships that plague so many countries most people can’t find in a map. But those are not the direction the world is heading towards. They are the exception to the rule – and that’s why they sound so odd. People expect the evil dictators to begin stripping them of their right by the small liberties – but they could strip them of everything but and they wouldn’t complain. Their right to vote, to protest, to think freely is trumped by their little rights to watch TV, to have sex, to surf the web. There is no need to burn books – no one will read them, and even those who do won’t understand. The dictator’s subjects can be free to do what they want if it’s obvious they’ll never bother to question him.
And this is a call to do – what? There’s nothing we can do. It’ll take each one all of his energy to break free of our own prisons, let alone drag anyone else along with us. It’s better – and easier – to just sit back and enjoy our soma.
by André “The Random One” Colabelli