Orwell, Huxley and Versions of Dystopia
The clock struck 4 and as I was strolling from shelf to shelf in a bookstore in Bangalore, a shiny new cover of George Orwell’s 1984 caught my eye. I had seen 1984 in three different cover designs but this one with small eyes arranged in an endless spiral all the way down against a backdrop of bright red was a new discovery. Being an Orwell fan, I picked up the book and almost as a ritual, read the famous first line, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
But just then I had an epiphany. I had explored three floors of this famous bookstore but Brave New World by Aldous Huxley was nowhere to be found. This was similar to the bookstore I visited in Mall Road of Shimla - they too had 1984 but not Brave New World. But why is that? How come 1984 is more famous than Brave New World even though both warn us about a draconian society? How come Orwell’s vision of dystopia is more widely accepted than Huxley’s?
When we compare two versions of dystopia, one is not better than the other. Both are worse but somehow we have come to accept that a more “hard” version of dystopia, like Orwell’s 1984, is the one to be feared, whereas the “soft” form of dystopia as described by Huxley in Brave New World is not. This is where, I believe, Huxley was more accurate in his prediction. A futuristic dystopian society won’t be one where the government will deploy strict draconian measures to control you but you will live in comfort and happiness all the time and get unused to sadness. As such, you will do everything to be happy all the time, even trade your freedom and thoughts.
Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. 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 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.
The Continent of 1984 has posters of Big Brother all over the place with the infamous words “Big Brother is watching you”, all the nooks of the cities are under constant surveillance, IGNSOC propaganda banners are everywhere, the media is under government control and police are arresting people left and right. Even expressing your thoughts to your peers or even to yourself is punishable under the policies of Ministry of Truth, where our protagonist Winston Smith works.
In Brave New World, Huxley never described a dystopian society. He describes a utopia - a world where there is no disease, where human beings are efficient in their work, a world where there is no sadness and only happiness. You can’t suffer because when you are suffering, there is Soma, a drug that makes suffering disappear. Humans are genetically designed to be efficient, the physical world is highly developed and advance. Surely this sounds like a world to live in.
For those who haven’t read it, Brave New World is the description of a nightmare society where everybody is perfectly happy all the time. This is assured through destroying the free will of most of the population using genetic engineering and Pavlovian conditioning, keeping everybody entertained continuously with endless distractions, and offering a plentiful supply of the wonder drug Soma to keep people happy if all else fails. Even the characters who are smart enough to know what is going on (and why they should be concerned) are instead content with everything that is happening. Perhaps more terrifying than other dystopian novels, in Brave New World there is truly no hope for change.
The dystopian aspects don't come from the lives people live, but the internal freedoms that are taken away from them before they are even born. They are not allowed to think what they want, learn what they like, or have the capacity to understand why the inability to do things is a bad thing. We think that 1984 is a real dystopia for us, but there are excellent parallels between the two. 1984's dystopia focuses on a more obvious shortcoming in the society- the world is falling apart both materially and philosophically. In Brave New World, the physical world is much better, but in terms of philosophy, both worlds are about the loss of freedom to extend, as a human being, your capacity for thought, be it by scientific procedure, or through government propaganda.
When we dissect the our current society, we can easily identify an Orwellian society - some famous examples of this being USSR under Stalin and current North Korea. The evidences are on the surface. There are also many historical parallels that we can draw. Orwell used to a Bolshevik and an ardent follower of Stalin’s USSR but it all came crumbling down after Gareth Jones’ reports on Holodomor, the infamous Ukraine famine in early 1930s. Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Nazi Germany were similar in many aspects - both had high surveillance and people of dissenting opinions were executed and as such true state of these two countries did not come out until they collapsed.
We can find similar parallels of Huxley’s vision with the current society but they are subtle and we are not ready to accept them. Nowadays, we are so used to happiness that we have forgotten what it is like to suffer. Suffering is essential in our development but now we believe it is to be avoided at all cost and we blame onset of suffering on the society, takes drugs to kill our boredom, keep on scrolling through social media 24x7 because we are not used to being ourselves. We think that we have freedom of opinion what when we express our dissenting views we are immediately cancelled from all platforms. I recall Jordan Peterson’s words “In order to think you have to risk being offensive”. You might hurt someone with some harsh truths but it is never intentional. Rather nowadays our choices as to what to think are impressed upon on by the society. And these “truths” are structured in such a way that they tend to prefer not hurting people rather than exposing the truths. But we have forgotten that facts don’t have feelings. In Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess said “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” We have, just as Huxley predicted, made it possible to abolish boredom and time for spare thoughts no matter where you are. This is already having measurable effects on our mental health and our brain structure.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for 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 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. 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, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
Both men were writing warnings: “The message of the book”, said Huxley, “was this is possible: for heaven’s sake be careful about it.” In his vision, humanity was facing a future world tranquilised by pleasure and drugs and the voluntary distractions of “civilised infantilisation”. For Orwell, humanity was facing a permanent state of war and totalitarian mind-control, summed up by the image of “a boot stamping on a human face, for ever”. For all the overlap, though, they are usually seen as contradictory, conflicting versions of the future.
The two dystopias have many details in common. Both writers saw a future shaped by weapons of mass destruction — biological and chemical weapons in Huxley’s case, nuclear war in Orwell’s. They agreed about the danger of permanent social stratification, with humanity divided into categories determined by biological engineering and psychological conditioning (Huxley) or traditional class combined with totalitarian loyalty systems (Orwell). Both men imagined future societies completely obsessed with sex, though in diametrically opposite ways: state-enforced repression and celibacy in the case of Orwell; deliberate, narcotising promiscuity in the case of Huxley.
1984 and Brave New World are the two sides of the same coin. Both books are against totalitarianism and evinces a life in two different types of totalitarian society where personal values have no existence. Therefore, as such, the existence of these two books without each other is futile. If only when you read 1984 and Brave New World you can paint a complete picture about totalitarianism in your mind.
But perhaps, the most important thing is to ask ourselves a question - “Am we willing to relinquish our free will to live happily in a perfect utopian world?” Majority of us will answer “yes” and that’s where the subtle dystopia of Brave New World begins.