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Who Got It Right: Orwell or Huxley?
- mjfl 5y agoHuxley seems to be more right in the long term, since Orwellian oppression is very visible, people work to fix it and eventually do. Not so for Huxly-an dystopia.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago> Orwellian oppression is very visible 1984 makes a fairly strong point that this is not true. The proles do not conceive of the fact that they are oppressed. Only the outer party can even think this, and at best its a muted response. Newspeak is about making it impossible to see or conceptualize oppression or injustice.
- jancsika 5y ago> Newspeak is about making it impossible to see or conceptualize oppression or injustice. But were the proles forced to use Newspeak? I thought they were singing folks songs and stuff...
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoI dont think the proles were, since they were already in a state where they could not recognize they were under the Party's boot. "The proles are free" Newspeak was supposed to stamp out "bad" thoughts from members the party.
- robocat 5y agoNewspeak was primarily for the political classes, with the aim of absolute political control: ultimate authoritarianism of a system of thought (also see Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). By controlling language, all dissenting political opinions could be prevented, with the eventual goal that any thought that wasn’t the official line (such as liberty) could have only the single word ‘crimethink’ to describe it. Big brother and Emmanuel Goldstein (the revolutionary against the state) were fictions of the system, permanent idealised placeholders for the system. The system rules: people within the political system are trained by the system to be perfect cogs with zero independent thought, and the higher up in the hierarchy the less control and more mechanically thought-constricted the person became. Over time the system restricted thought, restricted language, and as the political class were replaced over the decades, the upcoming people were evermore controlled by the system. The only goal of the system was complete and total control. The proles made up the majority of the population, but are almost invisible in the book, which leads to some odd Internet comments. The proles have zero political thought, and they live short lives of poverty. The proles are programmed to be interested in meaningless songs (produced by the versificator machine), meaningless persuits (such as lotteries), and other diversions. The proles do not speak newspeak, because they are not political. They certainly didn’t sing traditional folk songs (English aka ‘oldspeak’ is slowly abridged, removing all political words and nuances, and old literature is destroyed by rewriting it to remove all political nuance). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-Four) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-F... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein
- native_samples 5y agoIronically, the article and this discussion seems like a good case in point! "Totalitarianism was Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the state controlled everyone through the infliction of pain and terror" That sounds far closer to our current existence than BNW. Where are my bread and circuses? Circuses were shut down for much of the last two years, because of the need to fight an ever-shifting war against a terrifying virus ... a danger that cannot be directly perceived because almost everyone who gets it has mild symptoms and recover after a few days, but which rather, can only be truly perceived through the telescreen in our living rooms and the pronouncements of the ruling classes. The parallels to 1984 are everywhere recent times, yet the majority cannot see them. Newspeak is in abundance. Policies change overnight and yet the Party claims that the policy was always the same, previously famous people get erased instantly the moment they object, and the population is trained to demand their own oppression, believing ultra-harsh conditions to be an expression of love.
- colecut 5y agoNearly everyone carries an internet connected camera microphone tracking device everywhere.
- Hnaomyiph 5y agoDoes a camera, microphone and tracking device detect a slowly boiled frog?
- time_to_smile 5y agoThe trouble is I'm perfectly fine with the Huxlian distopia. Ship me off to an island of intellectual dissidents and give me some good drugs, I'm down for that world. Kafka is the one who really got it right. I've never felt a more realistic depiction of my life than The Trial.
- cjbgkagh 5y agoI'd be down for 60 years of good health, I think of the amount of work that I could do. I think the problem is that they have to keep throwing the work away and the pointlessness of it all would kill me.
- WillPostForFood 5y agoOrwellian oppression is very visible, people work to fix it and eventually do. At least in 1984, oppression wins. It is a very bleak ending.
- mehlmao 5y agoIt wins over Winston, but not forever. The appendix on Newspeak is written in past tense, implying that at some time it came to an end.
- jabbany 5y ago> Orwellian oppression is very visible Yes. > people work to fix it and eventually do. No? My understanding of Orwellian oppression is exactly that even though people are very aware that it exists, only a small minority of people care enough (or are personally harmed enough) to want to take actions change it. Just look at modern day China. All but the most naive are aware of things like censorship and surveillance. Most have first-hand interactions with both. People joke about it all the time (being "invited for tea" or such and such news was "harmonized" a.k.a. censored). Some of the language has evolved to be almost not that different from what was envisioned in Newspeak. And yet, the average person does not feel violated enough to actually do something about anything. It's much easier to just go with the flow and not do what the state doesn't like.
- Clubber 5y ago>And yet, the average person does not feel violated enough to actually do something about anything. It's much easier to just go with the flow and not do what the state doesn't like. The problem is it requires a lot of people to make a difference. A single person or a small group protesting gets thrown into a reeducation camp for 20 years (if they are lucky). That's one of the reasons mass surveillance is so nefarious; you can't start to plan a mass assembly/protest to address grievances without being noticed beforehand and thrown into a reeducation camp for 20 years (if you are lucky). You can't even talk about grievances with more than a few other people in a dark closet somewhere.
- jabbany 5y agoRight, and that was the point of the Orwellian dystopia. Even if a single person sees the dystopia for what it is, they cannot get the masses to act.
- Clubber 5y agoIt's even more insidious than that. Even if the masses see the dystopia for what it is, they can't come together to fight it, because surveillance will be watching their coordination efforts. In North Korea I suspect most everyone knows the propaganda is bullshit, but even a whisper of dissent will send the police knocking at your door. We aren't as bad as North Korea of course, but it sure smells similar.
- 62951413 5y agoHow about Huxley is for 1st world rich countries like the US and Orwell for poor ones like the Soviet/Putin's Russia?
- mrjangles 5y agoThere is a related thread on the problems Argentina is currently facing. It is worth reading through to see just how wrong you are. The problems Argentina is facing are well known and obvious and no one is doing anything about it, those problems have existed for decades. The newspeak is so strong in Argentina that even in that thread no one will say the real reasons out loud. Even when I was there 20 years ago, people had to hush whisper and look around to see who was listening when talking about the problems they were facing.
- bhelkey 5y ago> The newspeak is so strong in Argentina that even in that thread no one will say the real reasons out loud. What's stopping you from saying what you think are the real reasons?
- mrjangles 5y agoDon't want to bother getting into a fight strangers on the internet. The reasons are obvious and well know. Just look at any country in South America that is suffering and it is always the same reason - socialism.
- TheDudeMan 5y agoI'm here to collect my free sex and drugs.
- chadcmulligan 5y agoI always have to throw Brunner in - Stand on Zanzibar is the closest imho
- after_care 5y agoI don’t really see the either/or situation here. It seems like two ways in which states can control citizens, and with actors in the modern world taking lessons from both mixed with other sources.
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- wrnr 5y ago
- kodah 5y agoIf you read Orwell's essays I don't think he paints the picture as clearly as 1984 does. Some papers with these themes off the top of my head: - Reflections on Gandhi - Politics and the English Language - My Country Right or Left
- cjbgkagh 5y agoReplying here because GP is flagged.... I do not agree with the GP opinion but I think people should be allowed to express 'bad' opinions.
- kodah 5y agoI wasn't saying I agree with them either, just pointing out Orwell wasn't telling stories about "good and bad" in the way 1984 was written. A lot of his essays actually show there's a lot of grey, much less shades of it.
- freedomben 5y agoI don't think cjbgkagh was responding to your comment at all. He just couldn't put it right underneath the parent because that comment is dead.
- wrnr 5y agoNo there should be no place for bad opinions, otherwise people can LARP their favourite dystopian fiction.
- wrnr 5y agofahrenheit 451
- jameskilton 5y agoYes.
- 5cott0 5y agoNeither because they both plagiarized Yevgeny Zamyatin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
- cookie_monsta 5y agoMeaning that Zamyatin got it wrong, too?
- 5cott0 5y agoYeah, We is actually pretty bad.
- cookie_monsta 5y agoThe question isn't which is better or more original, the question is which predicted the future better. If you say neither because they copied We, it stands to reason that We didn't get it right either, nothing about good or bad. There's plenty of great SF with terrible "predictions" and vice versa.
- 5cott0 5y agowhatever
- pharmakom 5y agoPlagiarised is totally the wrong word here. Besides, We is satirical so quite different in tone. I greatly enjoyed all three novels though, and encourage people to read them all :)
- 5cott0 5y agoIt's almost the exact same plot as 1984 in a different sci-fi setting. But yeah sure, pedantically speaking it's not exactly plagiarism but it's not exactly original either.
- nottorp 5y agoBoth, depending on country/time period. I've lived in Orwell's country (communist dictatorship) when I was young, now I live in Brave New World.
- HarryHirsch 5y agoBrave New World had the Falklands. Where are the Falklands?
- nottorp 5y agoIn fiction :)
- uvdn7 5y agoThey are not mutually exclusive? If you look at China, both are sort of happening at the same place in the same place.
- scoofy 5y agoThe books are using "the future" to describe their present times.
- cjbgkagh 5y agoOrwell vs Huxley seems to be the lens of how people react to what is done to them. I'm more interested in why those in power do those things in the first place. The article points to the students as if they have power, I don't think they do, they're trapped in a system and reacting to it as pretty much any young human would do in the same position. Possibly my favorite example of the powerful impressing a way of life on a huge number of people is the diplomatic sealed train the Germans used to send Lenin from Switzerland to Russia. i.e. the Russian Revolution was an intentional act done to it by cynical Germans who correctly expected the outcome would help them in the war. And the rest is history.
- pydry 5y agoPower is a hell of a drug.
- madrox 5y agoAfter reading Dune and also being an engineering leader, I’ve come to view power as multivariate. In some ways you have less power when you’re in charge. To go with your example, many other countries didn’t see a choice in getting involved in WW1.
- cjbgkagh 5y agoOne of my takeaways from 1984 is that those who are supposedly in charge are slaves to a self perpetuating emergent behavior. It often feels like it is never a choice. How much of politics is decided by Henry Kissinger and his disciples (e.g. Klaus Schwab - Davos) carrying on the tradition of realpolitik.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago“those who are supposedly in charge are slaves to a self perpetuating emergent behavior” That describes most of society and for sure a lot of companies. A lot of people realize that something is not right but they still stay confined within that framework.
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- pphysch 5y agoNeither because they're both fiction books marketed towards a popular audience for their entertainment. They are not substitutes for concrete analysis of historical facts. "Who got it right, J.R.R. Tolkien or J.K. Rowling?"
- rapnie 5y agoWell, fiction with such clear warnings in them are more like parables.
- pphysch 5y agoNeither of these fictional novels are succinct nor simple, like a parable.
- TrispusAttucks 5y agoYes, they're fiction but... Obviously the two books are a worse case scenario dystopia played out in a fictional world as a sandbox. Orwell takes communism to the extreme of totalitarianism [1] to shows us what it might look like. Huxley takes late stage capitalism to the extreme of authoritarian capitalism [3] to show what powerful elites running the world might look like in the far future. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_capitalism
- pphysch 5y ago"Totalitarianism" is as real as Goblins [1] and Orcs [2]; it is a Cold War propaganda term to smear enemy political systems. No person or government identifies as "totalitarian". 1984 and Brave New World are fiction books designed to be popular and have good sales, earning the authors a living. They are not accurate representations of reality and anyone who bases their understanding of modern domestic and international politics & power on them is just as deeply unserious as someone who compares China to Mordor or Putin to Voldemort. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc
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- madrox 5y agoA recent thread went around twitter discussing the need for artificial wombs to address the inequality between men and women. Huxley is the first place my mind went. https://twitter.com/molly0xfff/status/1483831201823703041?s=21 https://twitter.com/molly0xfff/status/1483831201823703041?s=...
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoOrwell is more oppression that is done to us. Huxley is more oppression that we go along with doing to ourselves. So far, it's more Huxley.
- lordnacho 5y agoElements of both exist in the modern world, but Huxley's is easier to overlook. Authorities need people to mostly not react to intolerable things that are happening, and it's best if you do it from placating people with drugs/toys/pacifiers rather than the whip, because people who are pacified will pressure other people into not rocking the boat, whereas people who are being whipped will complain about it to their friends and try to build up a resistance movement. Of course when you do go for the whip, you want to newspeak it into something else, so that also works, in small doses. Your problem occurs if it escalates, then you can't hold it down with PR anymore. So 1984 is metastable and such societies did in fact boil over. BNW is stable and invisible to a lot of people, though I suspect there is some failure mode we have yet to see. Maybe there's a line of thought where people just get sick of every damn thing being massaged to death by PR people, and they do something about it.
- pram 5y agoI've always thought the achilles heel of Oceania's government was the economy. Pretty much the one thing they couldn't really place into their 'subjective reality' philosophical framework. The way information passed through the Outer Party technicians was extremely compartmentalized. It was a command economy, did anyone actually know how things were going? The statistics were basically all lies. Eventually the gin and cigarettes would stop flowing.
- ashtonkem 5y agoRelated, there are stories of the USSR turning its own spy satellites on itself to estimate correct crop yields because of the culture of lying and exaggeration internally. Basically nobody at the top really knew what was going on, because everyone below them constantly lied to avoid getting in trouble.
- hutzlibu 5y agoI am not sure about all this: they did have a very competent secret service after all. So the director of the agrar kolchose might lie and so on, but why should the secret informants who are installed in that company, lie about it? So I am pretty sure, the information was avaiable. It was probably a matter of not wanting to believe the information as that would mean, the glorious sovjet union was maybe not so glorious after all - and thinking that, would make you a traitor. So lets just continue to wave and smile.
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoBoth. They are fictional explorations of human nature. Not prophecies about what the future will actually look like.
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- scandox 5y agoMy experience is that 1984 is much more re-readable. That doesn't necessarily mean anything, except that perhaps Orwell created a world that is more mentally inhabitable despite its grim nature. The little room above the shop is a respite we can all dream of. There's nothing like that in Brave New World, though I think it's the wiser book.
- nix23 5y agoBoth, it's the mix that makes the perfect society, but 1984 is the better book ;)
- js2 5y agoNeither. The dystopia I fear is Terry Gilliam's Brazil, though on some days, I think we're headed toward Idiocracy.
- smackeyacky 5y agoIdiocracy is already here, just not evenly distributed.
- lapetitejort 5y agoWe need to update Robert de Niro's character Harry Tuttle. In Brazil he's a rogue plumber who will sweep in and illegally fix pipes that would take the bureaucratic system months to fix. In the end he's literally consumed by paper(work). In the modern era there's no visible plumbing to fix. Harry's only way to help the everyperson with their locked account is to tweet at the company's help handle. He's built up quite the celebrity doing just that and companies are forced to act on his demands. In the end, people are impatient, mention him too often, and his phone is DDoSed by a flood of tweets coming his way. He's never seen or heard of again.
- js2 5y agoI don't know. Within my company I feel like Harry Tuttle a lot of the time.
- maurits 5y agoAlthough I understand its been critiqued, I always liked the visual depiction of "amusing ourselves to death" from Postman [1], by McMillen [2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death [2]: https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webcomic-2/ https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...
- voidfunc 5y agoAm I the only one who read Brave New World and thought "That doesn't seem all that bad?"
- umvi 5y agoPros: you are high all the time Cons: you don't have parents or a family, you never experience real human relationships or love, in all likelihood your fetus will have been intentionally handicapped before birth, and if you did win the lottery and were born with your intellect in tact you'll get sent to an island to die if you start thinking too much.
- newsbinator 5y agoIt doesn't seem all that bad for the Alphas and Betas
- msla 5y agoHere's an interesting review which makes something similar to that case: http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html The main thrust: > More broadly, though, Huxley is arguing for people to continue leading the sorts of lives that make for high art rather than those that make people content. His chief complaint about the Brave New World is that people have taken the dizzying highs and terrifying lows that lend "nobility" and "heroism" to life and traded them in for the creamy middles of happiness. For that argument I have less sympathy. By which I mean fuck that noise. The notion that suffering is ennobling is a particularly destructive piece of social engineering, and the suggestion that other people should suffer because Aldous Huxley enjoys the "over-compensations for misery" that the artists among them produce is pretty vile.
- umvi 5y agoDepends on the country. China - Orwell USA/EU - Huxley
- spaetzleesser 5y agoI hate these either/or questions. A lot of societies have aspects of both. North Korea probably leans toward Orwell but the rest of the world more Huxley at the moment. But we shouldn’t create these dichotomies. Left vs right, socialism vs capitalism and so on. They stifle any reasonable discussion right before it can even begin. I guess that’s the purpose of offering only extreme alternatives.
- unixhero 5y agoAldous wrote a utopia. Orwell wrote a dystopia.
- Jansen312 5y ago1984 got it more correct. Take sometime to read or watch current China related stuff. It makes whatever we think oppressions done by western countries look pedantic. Huxley birth control might also play out in China if birth rate there still dropping way below what the state wants of 3 at the moment. Personally I feel, if the world was dominated by mainland Chinese and their influences or direct supremacy in some kind of marvel multiverse, then Huxley-Orwell fictions might be "unfictionized" there.
- aschearer 5y agoPaging Epic Rap Battles of History.
- hbarka 5y agoNewspeak in action in San Francisco. https://abc7.com/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-crime-language-criminal-justice/5488088/ https://abc7.com/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-crime-la... Felon -> “justice-involved person” Juvenile delinquent -> “young person impacted by the juvenile justice system” Drug addicts -> “persons with substance abuse history” Ex-cons > “formerly incarcerated”
- BEEdwards 5y agoThat's not newspeak, the aim of which was to obviate and dumb down words. This is more precise speak, it gives the actual definition instead of a broad term.
- wrnr 5y agoOh come-on man, try to think at least one layer deep with the conspiracy stuff, obviously the lizards in control of the media want you to care about this stuff instead of geometric algebra.
- jpollock 5y agoWithout getting into the validity of the rephrasing, the terms refer to different size groups. There might be better ways of defining the groups, but I assume the goal is to better reflect the target populations. If you don't define the sets properly, you end up with a tonne of special cases. "convicted felon" is a smaller subset than a "justice-involved person". Felon implies "felony", which isn't the only type of individual they want to talk about (probably involving things like misdemeanors, diversions). Same with "drug addicts". The new wording states that the person is seen to be using multiple times, but doesn't make a statement about whether or not they are addicted. They could just like drugs, without meeting the definition of addiction. "ex-con"... you can be incarcerated without conviction (pre-trial, contempt). With "Juvenile Delinquent", it's the other direction. Delinquent is a larger set than the new wording, the previous term includes miscreants who aren't in contact with the justice system.
- IIAOPSW 5y agoThat's not newspeak because the quantity of vocabulary on the right is higher than it is on the left. The ability to express concepts with the words on the right is larger than on the left, whereas the point of newspeak is for it to be smaller.
- phront 5y agoThere is a good british movie from 1936 about future https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_to_Come https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_to_Come It seems forgotten but i think it is still great and dusturbing.
- tptacek 5y agoThese are two people who agree with each other, using a supposed debate about Huxley and Orwell as a coat rack on which to hang their real arguments --- in Dreher's case, for a vision of society resembling what Orban's Fidesz is pursuing in Hungary, and in Winegard's, I assume something about cancel culture. Doesn't mean you can't have a curious and thoughtful debate about Huxley and Orwell here, but I don't think the authors are really having one.
- skeeter2020 5y agoWe seem to fall into this interesting (and obvious) comparison about every 18months - 3 years. They both exist to some extent in different places today, but IMO Huxley has aged more accurately, especially if you squint a bit.
- Klasiaster 5y agoFahrenheit 451 from Ray Bradbury gives the perfect mix in my opinion: being semi-/pseudo-happy with the drugs and entertainment and when you try to leave that path, you face oppression in increasing degree.
- aniijbod 5y agoHas anyone here looked into the claim that both iconic works were inspired by ideas from the very same book, Bertrand Russell's 1931 classic "The Scientific Outlook"? Russell himself covers certain aspects of this in his "Prefatory note to the second edition" of Scientific Outlook, where he actually mentions the direct influence of this book upon both Brave new world and upon Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution", a book which contained projections of the future which, as Orwell scholars agree, both horrified and fascinated him and, in turn, turned out to be the inspiration for much of "1984".
- robocat 5y ago“Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was written in four months and published in 1932, a year after the first appearance of The Scientific Outlook. Huxley's book mirrored Russell's prognostications on a number of points, from the divison of the population into Alphas, Betas and Epsilons, to the removal of sexual restrictions. There is no evidence that Huxley borrowed directly from Russell, but the two figures moved in overlapping circles, and one can imagine these conceits going the rounds of Bloomsbury dinner parties.”. “[James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution] was published in 1941 and is a rather more sober work of political analysis. Burnham, writing early in the Second World War, argued that the world would soon divide into two or three superstates. Within each a self-elected oligarchy would gain power and maintain a permanent readiness for war, using scientific techniques of surveillance and propaganda to keep the rest of the populace under control. It is unclear whether Russell really inspired Burnham, but Burnham certainly influenced a yet futher dystopic vision. George Orwell not only read Burnham's book, but commented on it through the 1940s in a series of articles and pamphlets.”, and “As Russell himself observes, in the Prefatory Note to the second edition of The Scientific Outlook in 1949 ‘The material of the last few chapters may now seem more familiar that at the time of the first edition, since it has been popularised in two widely read books, Huxley's Brave New World and Burnham's Managerial Revolution. I do not suggest that my book had any influence on either of these, but the parallels are interesting, and will, I hope, persuade my readers that my fears are more than an individual phantasy.’” - from an introduction of a further reprint of The Scientific Outlook by Bertrand Russell. “But Huxley clearly plundered Chapter 15 of Russell’s book, ‘Education in a Scientific Age’. Russell here departs from his expository mode (he was an incorrigible pontificator) to try his arm at a satirical prophecy about the socially engineered and class stratified society of the scientifically managed future. Children, he predicts, will be conditioned ‘some time before birth’ (by ‘thermal treatment of the embryo’) for their station in life. Manual workers (like Huxley’s Epsilons) ‘will be discouraged from serious thought and in general will be bred for patience and muscle rather than brain’. The society of the scientific future will be tranquillized by ‘new forms of drunkenness’ (i.e. ‘Soma’ in Brave New World). The only problem in this perfect world state will be ‘the psychology of the governors’ (i.e. disruptive Alpha-pluses, like Bernard Marx in Brave New World). If there were patent-protection in fictional scenarios any lawyer would have taken Russell’s case. The whole framework of Brave New World is to be found in the fifteenth chapter of The Scientific Outlook.” - from the Editorial Review below the fold at: https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldoux-Huxley-ebook/dp/B00VKD5QP0 https://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldoux-Huxley-ebook/d...
- verisimi 5y agoBoth these 2 were old Etonians and Oxbridge students - pillars of the establishment. They were from the upper classes - the classes that believe they rightfully rule the oi polloi (everyone else). So, whatever they wrote about is framed by their experience and understanding of reality. As part of the class that believes it is right to manage us, do you think that they were trying to warn the proles about the future? Were they trying to help us live a more meaningful life? They were not. Their works were not a service to mankind, they were not warning us about the future or that old trope. What they were doing is putting down in writing their best understanding of the plans that were in store for us. It was a mental exploration of how future management might pan out, what it might look like. I suspect that this writing was partly as a tool to give to the upper/administrative classes so that they had a clearer goal in mind. I also suspect that these works were disseminated more widely, as a population that is aware of the ideas does not respond in shock and reject them - mentally they have acclimatised to the future horrors. (Aka Predictive Programming.) If this sounds implausible, consider the fact that Aldous's brother Julian, created UNESCO. His grandfather Thomas played a role in establishing the theory of evolution (which in many ways provides a biological justification for the role of the elites as 'they are the fittest'). George Orwell's actual name was Eric Blair - and of course there is a famous British politician - Tony Blair. (It is claimed they are not relations, but it remains possible - how can we know?) The books themselves are purported to be set in the future. However, it is possible to read them in a different light (as I suggest above) - as a sort of visionary guide for those administrators of the 30's and 40's. This is to say, that a lot of power was already in existence then. Eugenics (a feature in both books) was an overtly accepted ideology of the upper classes at the time. The nazis made the term unfashionable, but there is are reasons to think that this ideology is still popular amongst the self-proclaimed elite class. In direct answer to the question, I think the elites would prefer us to self-select our future slavery along the lines of BNW - we can have moral degeneracy (its already here!) drugs (ditto) and just do our epsilon/delta jobs. However, Orwell was right about the talking screens, and ultimately if we won't self-select our slavery there is a harder form soon available - Chinese credit scores (aka bio-medical-ids/crypto-wallets) which thanks to the technocracy we have been working hard to achieve (esp in IT), will mean some of us will be locked out of life in the system. So, its a mix of both visions.