4 ms·

Right now it rather seems Orwell had it closer to right on the predictions in the letter: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/US_incarceration_ti

Right now it rather seems Orwell had it closer to right on the predictions in the letter: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/US_incarc... Some of this stuff is expanded on in Huxley's forword to BNW[1], btw, written in 1947. I have always been fascinated by this assertion in it: As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. He doesn't support this axiom in the forword (or this letter), and I've always wondered if anyone has ever written a compelling, historically-based, argument for this idea. [1] http://www.wealthandwant.com/auth/Huxley.html http://www.wealthandwant.com/auth/Huxley.html

krrishd 12y ago
I think both Orwell and Huxley had some extremely prescient insight on the future, and I personally felt that we have come to somewhat of an Orwellian time period, although a lot of Huxley's predictions will be seen in the long term future as well.
bpodgursky 12y ago
IMO Huxley's predictions are much harder to appreciate given the relativity of cultural norms to what we grew up experiencing. While it's certainly possible to be desensitized to totalitarian oppression, I think it's harder to really appreciate the a more gradual cultural shift wrt acceptance of mood-altering prescription drugs, sexuality, mass market entertainment, etc. Not scientific in the slightest, I just think it's easier to miss the subtler ways that Huxley's predictions have been realized.
- stormbrew 12y ago
  One of the issues I have with Huxley's view of things is that I think it makes a massive leap from the idea of people being content to that being pathologized into being oppressed. Part of that is that I'm not sure there's ever been a point in history in which the majority of people actively contribute to the political sphere on a regular basis. They have always been distracted by something (often mere survival). Even revolutions have usually been driven by top-down movements led by discontent elites. Given that, I don't find the argument that a state in which most people are content and non-participant (somewhat the current state of most western nations) is worse than one in which most people are discontent and non-participant (the previous state of most western nations, and the extreme form of which is presented in 1984). Even more fundamentally, there's a distinct air of moralism to Huxley's arguments. Anti-sex, pro-marriage, body-is-temple kind of stuff. These positions are taken as given, and given very little support, in all of his writing. I think it taints his entire premise.
  - nickff 12y ago
    The people of "Brave New World" (BNW) are not truly content, they are merely happy. The BNWers are terrified of being without their soma, because without the soma, they realize their lives are empty and unfulfilling. The soma is a way to escape the reality of their lives, and avoid any self-awareness or unpleasant truths. If you were to examine their lives under almost any metric, such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you would see that they are not leading good lives; in Maslow's terms, they have only satisfied their physiological and safety needs. I would not describe this state as 'content and non-participant', it is more of a self-perpetuating drug-induced ignorance.
    - stormbrew 12y ago
      Sure. To be clear, I'm not saying that they are happy in BNW. BNW is deliberately an exaggeration of trends that Huxley feared in his present, though. And, as can be seen in other threads (see the comic someone linked to) is taken as a meaningful depiction of the current state of affairs. So I'm here arguing about the idea that Huxley would see the state we're in now as being representative of his dystopic ideas in principle if not in fact. And given his own commentary on his and others' work, I think he probably would. The question then is: is the contentedness of the masses right now reflective of a 'drug/distraction-induced ignorance' of a Huxleyan style? It's often asserted, but I don't think I've seen a compelling argument. People are largely free to be discontent, and what means the state actually seems to use to work against popular discontent look more like Orwell than Huxley to me.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    Huxley's anti-sex Savage in Brave New World was ridiculous in his extremism (and the World Controller wise) for a reason. Whilst his views on drugs certainly mellowed over time he was never really a committed puritan.
  - zorked 12y ago
    "Island" is completely pro-sex, anti-monogamy.
  - kirsebaer 12y ago
delecti 12y ago
I think both sides of it go hand in hand. The government is only having such an easy time of going Orwellian on us because we've become so Huxlian and easily distracted.
rprospero 12y ago
While I probably agree with you about the prison system, I dislike your graph. Using the absolute incarceration count is misleading, as the population has grown threefold since the 1920s. To put it differently, I could say that the there are 200 million more Americans out of prison now than there were in the 20s, so we must be better off now than before. The next graph down on the wiki page is far more representative: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png/1280px-U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/U.S... It actually makes your case stronger by showing a relatively flat line from the 20's through the 70's, indicating that this is really a recent trend. The other graph made it look like a historical inevitability, since the prison population is always increasing.
- stormbrew 12y ago
  Yes, I didn't notice the better graph before I posted. This one is indeed better.
notahacker 12y ago
I'm not convinced by the thesis that sexual freedom is inversely related to political and economic freedom, but if you were to chart virtually any of indicator "sexual freedom" over the same time period as that graph of prison population the trend line would certainly be moving in the same direction.[1] Same goes for "level of alarm at the apparent 'decadence' of modern society expressed by economically poorer and religiously strict cultures" which is a pretty major theme in the book. For all Brave New World's glib exaggeration for comic effect, I'd argue that anticipating sexual liberation (and mass consumerism and distraction-based mass media strategy) was a far more perceptive view of the future than Orwell's ideological slavery. Whatever the intended or actual psychological effects of the "War on Drugs" may be, those prison sentences certainly aren't an Orwellian attempt to unite the population in support of the executive. Then again, Huxley was satirising what he perceived as relatively novel trends emerging in the United States whereas Orwell directed his ire at the Soviet Union, fascism and highlighted tendencies present in virtually every other authoritarian state that had gone before.
- stormbrew 12y ago
  I admit I'm actually kind of caught up in a potential self-contradiction here, where I'm arguing that people are largely freer than they were before while also pointing out that the government does seem to act in a fairly orwellian way and seems to desire to do so more (both in terms of surveillance and imposition of a prison-driven police state). I think that both these things can be true, but I haven't completely convinced myself of that. So what I'd really like is an example of a state that undisputably reduced in political and economic freedoms while also undisputably increased in sexual freedoms. Maybe Rome? But I think sexual freedoms probably only increased for the most privileged classes there. I'm not aware of a sexual renaissance in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany or Soviet/American client states with brutal puppet governments.
- chiaro 12y ago
  The US is big exception here, and the supposed inverse relation between sexual liberty and incarceration rates evaporates when you look at the bigger picture. Western European countries are arguably more liberal in this area (take a look through what is acceptable in advertising, for one example) and have much lower prison rates than the US, at least.

krrishd 12y ago

I think both Orwell and Huxley had some extremely prescient insight on the future, and I personally felt that we have come to somewhat of an Orwellian time period, although a lot of Huxley's predictions will be seen in the long term future as well.

bpodgursky 12y ago

IMO Huxley's predictions are much harder to appreciate given the relativity of cultural norms to what we grew up experiencing. While it's certainly possible to be desensitized to totalitarian oppression, I think it's harder to really appreciate the a more gradual cultural shift wrt acceptance of mood-altering prescription drugs, sexuality, mass market entertainment, etc. Not scientific in the slightest, I just think it's easier to miss the subtler ways that Huxley's predictions have been realized.

stormbrew 12y ago
One of the issues I have with Huxley's view of things is that I think it makes a massive leap from the idea of people being content to that being pathologized into being oppressed. Part of that is that I'm not sure there's ever been a point in history in which the majority of people actively contribute to the political sphere on a regular basis. They have always been distracted by something (often mere survival). Even revolutions have usually been driven by top-down movements led by discontent elites. Given that, I don't find the argument that a state in which most people are content and non-participant (somewhat the current state of most western nations) is worse than one in which most people are discontent and non-participant (the previous state of most western nations, and the extreme form of which is presented in 1984). Even more fundamentally, there's a distinct air of moralism to Huxley's arguments. Anti-sex, pro-marriage, body-is-temple kind of stuff. These positions are taken as given, and given very little support, in all of his writing. I think it taints his entire premise.
- nickff 12y ago
  The people of "Brave New World" (BNW) are not truly content, they are merely happy. The BNWers are terrified of being without their soma, because without the soma, they realize their lives are empty and unfulfilling. The soma is a way to escape the reality of their lives, and avoid any self-awareness or unpleasant truths. If you were to examine their lives under almost any metric, such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you would see that they are not leading good lives; in Maslow's terms, they have only satisfied their physiological and safety needs. I would not describe this state as 'content and non-participant', it is more of a self-perpetuating drug-induced ignorance.
  - stormbrew 12y ago
    Sure. To be clear, I'm not saying that they are happy in BNW. BNW is deliberately an exaggeration of trends that Huxley feared in his present, though. And, as can be seen in other threads (see the comic someone linked to) is taken as a meaningful depiction of the current state of affairs. So I'm here arguing about the idea that Huxley would see the state we're in now as being representative of his dystopic ideas in principle if not in fact. And given his own commentary on his and others' work, I think he probably would. The question then is: is the contentedness of the masses right now reflective of a 'drug/distraction-induced ignorance' of a Huxleyan style? It's often asserted, but I don't think I've seen a compelling argument. People are largely free to be discontent, and what means the state actually seems to use to work against popular discontent look more like Orwell than Huxley to me.
- notahacker 12y ago
  Huxley's anti-sex Savage in Brave New World was ridiculous in his extremism (and the World Controller wise) for a reason. Whilst his views on drugs certainly mellowed over time he was never really a committed puritan.
- zorked 12y ago
  "Island" is completely pro-sex, anti-monogamy.
- kirsebaer 12y ago

delecti 12y ago

I think both sides of it go hand in hand. The government is only having such an easy time of going Orwellian on us because we've become so Huxlian and easily distracted.

rprospero 12y ago

While I probably agree with you about the prison system, I dislike your graph. Using the absolute incarceration count is misleading, as the population has grown threefold since the 1920s. To put it differently, I could say that the there are 200 million more Americans out of prison now than there were in the 20s, so we must be better off now than before. The next graph down on the wiki page is far more representative: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png/1280px-U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/U.S... It actually makes your case stronger by showing a relatively flat line from the 20's through the 70's, indicating that this is really a recent trend. The other graph made it look like a historical inevitability, since the prison population is always increasing.

stormbrew 12y ago
Yes, I didn't notice the better graph before I posted. This one is indeed better.

notahacker 12y ago

I'm not convinced by the thesis that sexual freedom is inversely related to political and economic freedom, but if you were to chart virtually any of indicator "sexual freedom" over the same time period as that graph of prison population the trend line would certainly be moving in the same direction.[1] Same goes for "level of alarm at the apparent 'decadence' of modern society expressed by economically poorer and religiously strict cultures" which is a pretty major theme in the book. For all Brave New World's glib exaggeration for comic effect, I'd argue that anticipating sexual liberation (and mass consumerism and distraction-based mass media strategy) was a far more perceptive view of the future than Orwell's ideological slavery. Whatever the intended or actual psychological effects of the "War on Drugs" may be, those prison sentences certainly aren't an Orwellian attempt to unite the population in support of the executive. Then again, Huxley was satirising what he perceived as relatively novel trends emerging in the United States whereas Orwell directed his ire at the Soviet Union, fascism and highlighted tendencies present in virtually every other authoritarian state that had gone before.

stormbrew 12y ago
I admit I'm actually kind of caught up in a potential self-contradiction here, where I'm arguing that people are largely freer than they were before while also pointing out that the government does seem to act in a fairly orwellian way and seems to desire to do so more (both in terms of surveillance and imposition of a prison-driven police state). I think that both these things can be true, but I haven't completely convinced myself of that. So what I'd really like is an example of a state that undisputably reduced in political and economic freedoms while also undisputably increased in sexual freedoms. Maybe Rome? But I think sexual freedoms probably only increased for the most privileged classes there. I'm not aware of a sexual renaissance in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany or Soviet/American client states with brutal puppet governments.
chiaro 12y ago
The US is big exception here, and the supposed inverse relation between sexual liberty and incarceration rates evaporates when you look at the bigger picture. Western European countries are arguably more liberal in this area (take a look through what is acceptable in advertising, for one example) and have much lower prison rates than the US, at least.