5 ms·

> World War I was a significant turning point in the political, cultural, economic, and social climate of the world. Prior to WWI, Western Europeans saw themse

> World War I was a significant turning point in the political, cultural, economic, and social climate of the world. Prior to WWI, Western Europeans saw themselves as the God-ordained masters of the world. They carved up Asia(including China and Africa into zones of influence. They were typically the senior military partners in any alliance they entered into. After the horrors of WWI, it was over. WWII was just the final chapter of WWI. Now, Instead of being the senior military partners, they would be the junior partners (see NATO and the Warsaw Pact). They would lose their colonies. They would at best, be one region of the world among many in terms of global power.

blargmaster33 6y ago
WWI destroyed all the wealth created by the industrial revolution och tog be replaced by fiat currency and ever growing government power. It was an end to the Humanities golden age of freedom.
082349872349872 6y ago
I am always amazed that Brave New World is taught as dystopic. Maybe it's over the top in its anti-reactionary elements, but considering that everyone except for a single suicidal (not saying it's because he was viviparous, some of my best friends have been born viviparously...) misfit has a pleasant life, one would think utilitarians should be as fond of Huxley as others are of Rand.
- nxc18 6y ago
  I strongly agree with you. Brave New World is a utopian novel desperately trying to appear dystopic. With just a few small changes, to account for the existence of automation/robots/computers, the darker aspects (e.g. the population of deltas) stop being plausible within the universe. The TV show had to invent a lot of extra nonsense to introduce conflict. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Brave New World is that things are so stable, human needs are met so consistently, that life ceases to be a struggle; without a struggle, life becomes meaningless. That interpretation is alluded to in the TV show, but I won't spoil it. We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984.
  - Oricle 6y ago
    Should be removing the puppet masters off their perch is all so all gentiles can live free from their unempathetic evil ways. Judah as always been the enemy to gentiles
  - enriquto 6y ago
    > We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984. I never thought that this idea was even conceivable. Brave new world is orders of magnitude more terrifying than 1984. It describes a complete dead end, the last throes just before the thermal death of mankind. Heck, even the novel "Atomised", that describes the disappearance of homo sapiens, is not as grim as brave new world. How can you seriously read brave new world as utopian?
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Very easily. Taking utilitarianism to be maximisation of happiness and well-being, how many people in Brave New World are happy? unhappy? Is there any lack of well-being, outside of the savage reservations? As to "more terrifying", 1984 features actual repression (albeit mostly operative only for ~13% of the population). On the other hand, the Brave New World achieves stability voluntarily, via consumerism. What are three dead ends in the Brave New World?
      - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
        Stasis, loss of personal and collective initiative and creativity, and a dishonest mythology of consumerism as the limit of free choice. There are probably more, but those are the obvious ones.
        082349872349872 6y ago
        Stasis is interesting. First, it makes sense that if they are in a local utilitarian optimum, they won't be changing much. Secondly, IIRC, Mond states they have plenty of inventions they haven't deployed, based on A/B testing. Not only does that imply people doing creative work inventing, but also that the status quo is not a static quo, and they'll happily introduce, say, new technically-complex pasttimes, as long as they clearly improve the metrics they're measuring. (I'll reread the book later today or tomorrow to see if memory serves. I don't think I've read it in this century.) For personal and collective initiative and creativity, not only does someone have to write the feelies in the orthodox world, there are always the islands for people with too much initiative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002 (Island life sounds a bit like Dante's first circle. The savage deliberately chooses not to go there. I think it a poor choice, but then again, if I had been Zhivago, I would emigrated to Paris with Tonya, saving a good deal of trouble.) As far as consumerism goes, I will just remind you that we are discussing in the clear on an anglophone forum. Aren't we all supposed to line up behind the Washington Consensus that consumerism is the key to prosperity?
- msla 6y ago
  I like Adam Cadre's review of Brave New World because he broadly agrees with you: The book is by a grouchy reactionary trying to paint the great big social movements of the 1920s as being utterly horrible, and who never realizes that a good number of the things he's describing are desirable. http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html It's of some interest that both Nineteen Eighty-Four (the novel uses the spelled-out version) and Brave New World are fairly transparent takes on the USSR, just at different periods: Brave New World was the socially revolutionary USSR of the 1920s, whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four was the USSR of the 1930s and 1940s, once Stalin had consolidated power and begun the Terror. (Yes, Brave New World is also about the utter horrors of consumerism. Books can be about more than one thing, especially if the author has a lot to say and a whole novel's worth of didactic authorial mouthpieces to use to to beat it into your skull.)
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  Humans as soulless automatons, grown in test tubes, segmented into castes, given happy pills and sex0rz for social control was specifically meant as a parody of the "utopian" views of assclowns like HG Wells and the other 19th century socialist weirdos in the Bloomsbury group. It is, of course, the dystopia we most obviously inhabit in the West. Fear not; tiring of it, it appears we're going to try Orwell's dystopia next.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    From "War-time Diary, 1942" by Orwell: "[27 March] Crocuses now full out. One seems to catch glimpses of them dimly through a haze of war news. Abusive letter from H.G. Wells, who addresses me as 'you shit', among other things. The Vatican is exchanging diplomatic representatives with Tokyo. The Vatican now has diplomatic relations with all the Axis powers and - I think - with none of the Allies. A bad sign and yet in a sense a good one, in that this last step means they have now definitely decided that the Axis and not we stands for the more reactionary policy."

blargmaster33 6y ago

WWI destroyed all the wealth created by the industrial revolution och tog be replaced by fiat currency and ever growing government power. It was an end to the Humanities golden age of freedom.

082349872349872 6y ago

I am always amazed that Brave New World is taught as dystopic. Maybe it's over the top in its anti-reactionary elements, but considering that everyone except for a single suicidal (not saying it's because he was viviparous, some of my best friends have been born viviparously...) misfit has a pleasant life, one would think utilitarians should be as fond of Huxley as others are of Rand.

nxc18 6y ago
I strongly agree with you. Brave New World is a utopian novel desperately trying to appear dystopic. With just a few small changes, to account for the existence of automation/robots/computers, the darker aspects (e.g. the population of deltas) stop being plausible within the universe. The TV show had to invent a lot of extra nonsense to introduce conflict. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Brave New World is that things are so stable, human needs are met so consistently, that life ceases to be a struggle; without a struggle, life becomes meaningless. That interpretation is alluded to in the TV show, but I won't spoil it. We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984.
- Oricle 6y ago
  Should be removing the puppet masters off their perch is all so all gentiles can live free from their unempathetic evil ways. Judah as always been the enemy to gentiles
- enriquto 6y ago
  > We should be working as hard as possible to move society closer to brave new world and further from 1984. I never thought that this idea was even conceivable. Brave new world is orders of magnitude more terrifying than 1984. It describes a complete dead end, the last throes just before the thermal death of mankind. Heck, even the novel "Atomised", that describes the disappearance of homo sapiens, is not as grim as brave new world. How can you seriously read brave new world as utopian?
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Very easily. Taking utilitarianism to be maximisation of happiness and well-being, how many people in Brave New World are happy? unhappy? Is there any lack of well-being, outside of the savage reservations? As to "more terrifying", 1984 features actual repression (albeit mostly operative only for ~13% of the population). On the other hand, the Brave New World achieves stability voluntarily, via consumerism. What are three dead ends in the Brave New World?
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      Stasis, loss of personal and collective initiative and creativity, and a dishonest mythology of consumerism as the limit of free choice. There are probably more, but those are the obvious ones.
      - 082349872349872 6y ago
        Stasis is interesting. First, it makes sense that if they are in a local utilitarian optimum, they won't be changing much. Secondly, IIRC, Mond states they have plenty of inventions they haven't deployed, based on A/B testing. Not only does that imply people doing creative work inventing, but also that the status quo is not a static quo, and they'll happily introduce, say, new technically-complex pasttimes, as long as they clearly improve the metrics they're measuring. (I'll reread the book later today or tomorrow to see if memory serves. I don't think I've read it in this century.) For personal and collective initiative and creativity, not only does someone have to write the feelies in the orthodox world, there are always the islands for people with too much initiative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23513002 (Island life sounds a bit like Dante's first circle. The savage deliberately chooses not to go there. I think it a poor choice, but then again, if I had been Zhivago, I would emigrated to Paris with Tonya, saving a good deal of trouble.) As far as consumerism goes, I will just remind you that we are discussing in the clear on an anglophone forum. Aren't we all supposed to line up behind the Washington Consensus that consumerism is the key to prosperity?
msla 6y ago
I like Adam Cadre's review of Brave New World because he broadly agrees with you: The book is by a grouchy reactionary trying to paint the great big social movements of the 1920s as being utterly horrible, and who never realizes that a good number of the things he's describing are desirable. http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html It's of some interest that both Nineteen Eighty-Four (the novel uses the spelled-out version) and Brave New World are fairly transparent takes on the USSR, just at different periods: Brave New World was the socially revolutionary USSR of the 1920s, whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four was the USSR of the 1930s and 1940s, once Stalin had consolidated power and begun the Terror. (Yes, Brave New World is also about the utter horrors of consumerism. Books can be about more than one thing, especially if the author has a lot to say and a whole novel's worth of didactic authorial mouthpieces to use to to beat it into your skull.)
scottlocklin 6y ago
Humans as soulless automatons, grown in test tubes, segmented into castes, given happy pills and sex0rz for social control was specifically meant as a parody of the "utopian" views of assclowns like HG Wells and the other 19th century socialist weirdos in the Bloomsbury group. It is, of course, the dystopia we most obviously inhabit in the West. Fear not; tiring of it, it appears we're going to try Orwell's dystopia next.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  From "War-time Diary, 1942" by Orwell: "[27 March] Crocuses now full out. One seems to catch glimpses of them dimly through a haze of war news. Abusive letter from H.G. Wells, who addresses me as 'you shit', among other things. The Vatican is exchanging diplomatic representatives with Tokyo. The Vatican now has diplomatic relations with all the Axis powers and - I think - with none of the Allies. A bad sign and yet in a sense a good one, in that this last step means they have now definitely decided that the Axis and not we stands for the more reactionary policy."