Orwell - "the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”

Huxley - “the perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would be basically a prison without walls, in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essential be a system of slavery where, through consumption of entertainment, the slaves will live their servitude”

I would agree

1984 is obviously influenced by brave new world

😆

Animal Farm is the allegoric tale about communism in Russia.

1984 is more general about totalitarianism, still based on stuff that went on in Nazi Germany + Soviet union + wartime England, but it wasn't a full allegory of things that had already happened. It was more like a science-fiction prediction of the bad things that could happen in any nation if democracy and human rights were not protected.

Orwell was a leftist who wrote from a leftist perspective. 1984 is about Stalinism specifically and totalitarianism generally. It is not about communism, unless your definition of "communism" only includes the Soviet variety.

Imo what we are seeing is far closer to the slow collapse of an empire.

Which, in fairness, 1984 effectively documents.

But Orwell clings to the idea that this collapse (a collapse that his own country of England was already sliding down) was something that could carry on forever. You could keep cutting those chocolate rations year after year and keep throwing away your youngest generation in war after war and keep churning out revisionist history after revisionist history and nothing would ever really change.

Orwell could predict the fall in the States (because, again, England in the 1950s was in the thick of exactly this revanchist totalitarian Red Scare crisis) but he couldn't see where it all would end.

Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.

One could argue that the consolidation of power into an increasingly remote and schloratic aristocracy will inevitably produce incompetent leadership. As voting districts get larger and elected leaders become more insulated from their constituents, they stop responding to the material conditions in their domains.

And as residents grow more hostile to the fumbling, self-important bigots managing the territory, you see vigilante acts that cause the leadership to retreat further and imposing increasingly stringent loyalty tests on their deputies and bureaucrats.

The focus of effort becomes suppressing dissent rather than fixing underlying economic conditions. So more and more resources go into policing, spying, fencing, and propagandizing.

This isn't a single individual's failure (even of you could find a host of singularly foolish, craven, or incompetent individuals) but a function of an aristocracy consumed by paranoia in a society with a shrinking supply of economic goods to spread around.

Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.

That's the only thing that gives me hope about us coming out the other side of this as recognizably the same nation that went into it.

I get your other points, but (as I addressed elsewhere in the discussion) I find it "close enough" for my purposes.

Yeah, more like this guy was right.

Every day Huxley is proven more correct than Orwell because through the magic of SOMA (addictive phones hitting dopamine rushes), people can be surrounded with the truth and completely ignore it, and as you said, pay for the privilege of being lied to because it feels nice. (And oh man, that's a major industry on OnlyFans, being lied to because it feels nice)

Huxley understood our desires could break us more than our hate.

I can't find it, but I recall an interview with Zizek around when Snowden dropped his leaks, and it was about how it really changed nothing, and he was noting how the revelations of torture during the Iraq War had changed nothing either. He thought disclosure was a moot point now, society was checked out. He was right.

Brave New Wolrd and Farnheit 451 with Handmaid's Tale...I mean, even Zuckeberg with Meta is trying to be the villain ceo of Ready Play One.

Edit: https://lemm.ee/post/53222800 These post is relevant to this discussion.
Specially the comment from jagged_circle@feddit.nl

TikTok. Yet people are begging for someone to spy on them if it means feeding their addiction to short form content.

Honestly feels like we got the worst of both options. The petty censorship, puritanism and lies of 1984 mixed with the lesser and trivial entertainments of Brave New World.

I feel like especially in the last few years at least the part of the left that was so concerned with certain issues with problematic media and addressing issues with overly sexualizing women has joined in some unholy union with the prudish and moralists on the right to spawn a general censorship of a vast swath of concepts backed up by both the lefts moral high ground and the rights religious teachings.

Where before there was the nuance to recognize that women were too often presented as sexual objects in popular media, as well as the fact that we shouldn't kink shame consenting adults or the sex workers providing what should be seen as legitimate service. Now that nuance is lost in favor of simple discrimination and censorship, only disguised in the original movements language.

I don't think either were a perfect fit, but personally I don't think they need to be. V for Vendetta lines up great in some ways, much less so in others, but I think it scratches the same itch. They are all cautionary tales about the ways we allow or encourage or accept government use of power, and how those pressure points can be exploited to create various authoritarian and/or dystopian outcomes.

Been awhile since I've read any of those, but I definitely have always felt they resonate with each other, and IMO they resonate with current events also.