4 ms·

I'm usually not a big fan of infographics, but there's been an infographic that displays the differences between the future that Huxley depicted and the future

I'm usually not a big fan of infographics, but there's been an infographic that displays the differences between the future that Huxley depicted and the future that Orwells depicted surprisingly well [1]. I always found the world in 'A brave new world' to be better designed than the world in 1984. Orwell installed Big Brother and had tight control structures organize society. I.e. people are forced to not misbehave. Huxley, on the other hand, (at least that's how it felt to me) found solutions to all the small issues that make people misbehave, and just implemented a society around it. In his dystopian future, people don't want to misbehave, they're not interested in it. I think both societies have equal chances of survival, but the Huxley society has a higher chance of coming into existence because it installs itself in line with peoples desires, instead of confronting their desires. [1] http://thesleepymoose.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/huxvor-2.png?w=604 http://thesleepymoose.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/huxvor-2.p...

smutticus 13y ago
'Amusing Ourselves to Death' is actually the name of a great book by Neil Postman. I'm a little bothered by the author of that infographic stealing it for his title. It's a great book and if you like thinking about this kind of thing you should check it out.
- hhariri 13y ago
  He's not only used it for the title but the actual quotes are from the Prolog of the book.
- terhechte 13y ago
  Yeah, I've read the book many a years ago. Another good read in this vein is Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" [1]: "they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc. — that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
- dmoo 13y ago
  Also used by Roger Waters for inspiration for his album Amused to Death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amused_to_Death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amused_to_Death
- basch 13y ago
  The author of the comic went out of his way to contact the estate, ask for permission, and removed the comic when permission was denied. http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/cartoon-blog/amusing-ourselves-to-death/ http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/cartoon-blog/amusing-ours... http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse... And that's on top of the fact that his comic has probably sold an incalculable number of copies of the book, due to people discovering Neil Postman.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
forkandwait 13y ago
I think also that a society like Brave New World will outcompete a society like 1984. You can get agricultural labor to perform at the point of a gun, but you can't really develop engineering talent the same way. Though maybe if one stratifies society the right way, it is possible somehow. A lot of modern Foucault-ish social theory is around how we manufacture/ enculturate the desires of a populace and they basically oppressive themselves with little or no maintenance....
anon4 13y ago
Huxley's world can only function if you remove all capability of imagination from man. At which point it really doesn't matter which dystopia you're shooting for - each and every one would function just as well at governing machines. And given our advances with AI, I'm willing to bet we'll have reliable imaginationless smart robots long before anybody is able to reliably make imaginationless people.
- emn13 13y ago
  Can you explain how imagination figures into it? I don't see the link. Sure, if they couldn't imagine an alternative, that would make escape tricky, but just thinking of an alternative doesn't necessarily make it attractive or achievable. Also, looking at our history, I think we're not that good at thinking of alternatives. We've currently convinced ourselves (for instance) that democracy and capitalism are the one true way, but not too long ago there were people who quite seriously believed in communism. And there are lots of people who live(d) in monarchies, religious fundamentalist states, single-party power, or even dual-party power. What "the others" are doing feels so obviously wrong, the only reason you'd consider the alternative is because you're forced by it's actual existance to consider it - certainly not because of our intrinsic imagination. And when we do imagine alternatives (such as BNW), they don't really matter much because they aren't serious alternatives, if only because society is so large that it's almost impossible to imagine effecting such change. Also, that kind of thought doesn't come out of a vacuum - Huxley almost certainly built on the ideas of others, and "merely" crystallized it into a novel, including his own twist. So... I don't think imagination would affect the outcome, and I think the notion that we are very imaginative is deceitfully flattering, but not true. People are good at taking existing ideas and making small changes, and they're good at identifying the important bits of good ideas of others and then making them their own - so that in the end a little bit of imagination goes a long way.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Well admittedly, the search space of possible ideas is too damn large to be very efficient about searching it. Real people search it roughly breadth-first, and that works pretty well for us considering the cost/benefit ratio of depth. Consider if people had been imaginative about, say, Stalinism.
dmerfield 13y ago
I want to agree with you. 'Brave New World' did seem a better designed vision of a society. But there's no society yet that resembles it quite as closely as North Korea resembles Oceania. As Christopher Hitchens said, 1984 was published in the same year that the Korean war ended. It's almost like Kim Il-Sun read the book and thought, 'I think we can make this work'. And he did.
phaus 13y ago
Orwell based his writings on his first hand experiences with communism. I agree that 1984's world is unrealistic and destined to fail, but it is in fact pretty much identical to the world that the Soviets were attempting to build.
- scotty79 13y ago
  Only unrealistic thing I found there is stability. And half of the book is just torture porn. On the other hand some thing in Brave New World are just plain silly.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Things in fiction have to wear "stage makeup". This is because the subtlety and complexity of the real world is essentially impossible to get across in only a few thousand words, especially if you also want to tell a story. So characters and events have to be a bit more exaggerated, have a bit more definition than they would normally. It's similar to the way an actor on stage in a theatre wears stage makeup. Up close such makeup would appear garish, but from tens or hundreds of meters away it makes the features of a character's face more distinctive, makes people easier to tell apart, makes emotions more obvious, etc. The same is true of the socio-cultural and political systems in these dystopias. 1984 and Brave New World are both caricatures of ideas about the evolution of society. They are meant to draw people's attentions to the problems inherent in the idea by advancing it to an extreme that would probably never exist in real life. In reality we've seen that the examples presented in both 1984 and Brave New World provide practical examples of problems that have become very real over time. It turns out that massive government surveillance and incredible state control over everyone's lives is a big deal, and something that is actually far more common and far more easily put in place than we would have ever imagined.

smutticus 13y ago

'Amusing Ourselves to Death' is actually the name of a great book by Neil Postman. I'm a little bothered by the author of that infographic stealing it for his title. It's a great book and if you like thinking about this kind of thing you should check it out.

hhariri 13y ago
He's not only used it for the title but the actual quotes are from the Prolog of the book.
terhechte 13y ago
Yeah, I've read the book many a years ago. Another good read in this vein is Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" [1]: "they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc. — that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
dmoo 13y ago
Also used by Roger Waters for inspiration for his album Amused to Death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amused_to_Death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amused_to_Death
basch 13y ago
The author of the comic went out of his way to contact the estate, ask for permission, and removed the comic when permission was denied. http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/cartoon-blog/amusing-ourselves-to-death/ http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/cartoon-blog/amusing-ours... http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse... And that's on top of the fact that his comic has probably sold an incalculable number of copies of the book, due to people discovering Neil Postman.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

forkandwait 13y ago

I think also that a society like Brave New World will outcompete a society like 1984. You can get agricultural labor to perform at the point of a gun, but you can't really develop engineering talent the same way. Though maybe if one stratifies society the right way, it is possible somehow. A lot of modern Foucault-ish social theory is around how we manufacture/ enculturate the desires of a populace and they basically oppressive themselves with little or no maintenance....

anon4 13y ago

Huxley's world can only function if you remove all capability of imagination from man. At which point it really doesn't matter which dystopia you're shooting for - each and every one would function just as well at governing machines. And given our advances with AI, I'm willing to bet we'll have reliable imaginationless smart robots long before anybody is able to reliably make imaginationless people.

emn13 13y ago
Can you explain how imagination figures into it? I don't see the link. Sure, if they couldn't imagine an alternative, that would make escape tricky, but just thinking of an alternative doesn't necessarily make it attractive or achievable. Also, looking at our history, I think we're not that good at thinking of alternatives. We've currently convinced ourselves (for instance) that democracy and capitalism are the one true way, but not too long ago there were people who quite seriously believed in communism. And there are lots of people who live(d) in monarchies, religious fundamentalist states, single-party power, or even dual-party power. What "the others" are doing feels so obviously wrong, the only reason you'd consider the alternative is because you're forced by it's actual existance to consider it - certainly not because of our intrinsic imagination. And when we do imagine alternatives (such as BNW), they don't really matter much because they aren't serious alternatives, if only because society is so large that it's almost impossible to imagine effecting such change. Also, that kind of thought doesn't come out of a vacuum - Huxley almost certainly built on the ideas of others, and "merely" crystallized it into a novel, including his own twist. So... I don't think imagination would affect the outcome, and I think the notion that we are very imaginative is deceitfully flattering, but not true. People are good at taking existing ideas and making small changes, and they're good at identifying the important bits of good ideas of others and then making them their own - so that in the end a little bit of imagination goes a long way.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Well admittedly, the search space of possible ideas is too damn large to be very efficient about searching it. Real people search it roughly breadth-first, and that works pretty well for us considering the cost/benefit ratio of depth. Consider if people had been imaginative about, say, Stalinism.

dmerfield 13y ago

I want to agree with you. 'Brave New World' did seem a better designed vision of a society. But there's no society yet that resembles it quite as closely as North Korea resembles Oceania. As Christopher Hitchens said, 1984 was published in the same year that the Korean war ended. It's almost like Kim Il-Sun read the book and thought, 'I think we can make this work'. And he did.

phaus 13y ago

Orwell based his writings on his first hand experiences with communism. I agree that 1984's world is unrealistic and destined to fail, but it is in fact pretty much identical to the world that the Soviets were attempting to build.

scotty79 13y ago
Only unrealistic thing I found there is stability. And half of the book is just torture porn. On the other hand some thing in Brave New World are just plain silly.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Things in fiction have to wear "stage makeup". This is because the subtlety and complexity of the real world is essentially impossible to get across in only a few thousand words, especially if you also want to tell a story. So characters and events have to be a bit more exaggerated, have a bit more definition than they would normally. It's similar to the way an actor on stage in a theatre wears stage makeup. Up close such makeup would appear garish, but from tens or hundreds of meters away it makes the features of a character's face more distinctive, makes people easier to tell apart, makes emotions more obvious, etc. The same is true of the socio-cultural and political systems in these dystopias. 1984 and Brave New World are both caricatures of ideas about the evolution of society. They are meant to draw people's attentions to the problems inherent in the idea by advancing it to an extreme that would probably never exist in real life. In reality we've seen that the examples presented in both 1984 and Brave New World provide practical examples of problems that have become very real over time. It turns out that massive government surveillance and incredible state control over everyone's lives is a big deal, and something that is actually far more common and far more easily put in place than we would have ever imagined.