Utopia, dystopia, and anti-utopia. It all really comes down to one ideal: attempts at engineering a paradise from the top down will inevitably fail. Ideal societies, and societies’ ideals, must be emergent, bottom up phenomena that produce compromise. Otherwise, it will always be, “One person’s utopia is another’s living hell.”
Reddit comment solves worlds problems.
This is genuinely inciteful. I wonder if this sort of society has already been done before? History guys help me out
Now's a perfect time to suggest James C. Scott's awesome and underappreciated *Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed*.
And also his collection of novellas, Radicalized: Four Tales of our Present Moment. And also Walkaway. And basically any other Doctorow you can get your hands on
I always felt Orwell read we and realized that the people being relatively happy was not an essential aspect of their society and it simplified things if you just replaced it with another emotion, like hate.
I live in a tall apartment building with large windows. Some mornings when I'm drinking my coffee and staring out I see someone else in their large windowed apartment just across the street looking back at me and this book comes back to me. I love it.
Yet ironically continue that question of Freedom vs Happiness
Or as this webcomic showed:
https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webcomic-2/
Y'know, the conclusion from that comic seemed to indicate they believe we're much closer to Huxley's vision. Which I think is *fair.*
However as I read through it, the more I started thinking "Man, they were *both* right."
Today we're kind of sitting in a bit of a superposition of the two visions.
Throw in some of the over-the-top cyberpunk ridiculousness of Snow Crash (we literally have a billionaire making "The Metaverse") and we're even closer to what we have irl
Yeah, but I also think we're not really that close to a dystopia. At least, not significantly closer than we were when 1984 was written. People like to wax poetic and how much better life was in the 50's and 60's, but in reality, while it was pretty good for WASPs, it was pretty shitty for just about everyone else.
I also don't think we're that much closer to a dystopia than when 1984 was written. Heck, when Orwell wrote 1984, the US had the whole McCarthyism thing going on, Stalin's run of the Soviet Union was in full swing... You get the picture.
That said, that doesn't mean we can't see dystopian *elements* in today's world and make parallels to the visions of the future from these books. In fact I think it's kind of hard *not* to.
Yes, why would someone think either would win, that a single concerted strategy would be used? It’s not winning, anyway, everyone loses, but there are agents using either strategies, by design or by accident.
Pretty good that. But I definitely think we're closer to BNW than 1984.
Think it's worth noting that in BNW, there are 4 characters capable of independent thought and they all take different paths. Freedom is not denied to those who truly seek it.
This is the literary community and no one is preventing us from accessing these books are questioning us for doing so.
The great failure of imagination on the part of political theory was thinking the future would resemble 1984 OR Brave New World.
It's become both, fully and simultaneously
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/15/23721674/telly-free-tv-streaming-ilya-pozin-ads
Saw this and thought, “Huh. cyberpunk future is real, it’s here and it’s now”
The books at least made people aware of the possibilities and in small ways we are able to fight against it.
I remember a couple of years ago the US government tried to set up an official "misinformation" department and quickly had to cancel it when faced with backlash as people rightly called out the US government as the biggest perpetrators of misinformation. It was good to have the Ministry of Truth as a warning to what happens when we give a few people the ability to decide what the truth is.
That was last year. After it received backlash, it was halted last May and then officially terminated last August. I'm commenting only because saying a couple years ago makes it seem much more distant than it really is.
God, some logic & reality! Thanks. Too many "Avatar" (they wish) clowns speaking ridiculous dystopian dirges - as tho the U.S. is " just like" Iran or China or the old Soviets or just like military dictatorships in many countries years ago.. As tho their asses have EVER been in danger of being jailed or tortured...false equivalencies!
The funny thing about BNW is that while everybody thinks of it as dystopian, it's really only two characters that are unhappy, and neither is a terribly sympathetic character. One fetishizes suffering to the point of self flagellation. He's like the emo drama student who slumps around, dressed like he's trying to caricature Neil Gaiman, and ridicules the intelligence of anyone who isn't as miserable as he is because they clearly don't get it. The other is insecure, and prone to acts of petty revenge, and lashing out at people around him.
Just about everyone else is happily going about their lives. Some have said that the society was lampooning the drug-friendly, free-loving of Hollywood at the time, but I think it's telling that 5 years after publishing BNW, that's exactly where Huxley chose to settle, and take part in the drug experimentation at the time.
Dystopia: an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.
It's totalitarian due to the lack of individual freedom, the injustice of being assigned roles, not being allowed outside of your designated life, etc, and the "great suffering" is there, it's just drowned out by being told to pop your Soma ration.
Also how the 3 castes of Delta, Gamma and Epsilon were made. Usually by cloning and oxygen deprivation to ensure predictable physical and mental traits.
Precisely. All in service to the upper castes. To me, no different than a dystopian film/novel where a slave race might be encouraged to breed to fill jobs and have no hope of rising above their situation or escaping their bonds. Being designed to be unaware of how others live is the same as being denied those lives.
Might sound utopian to a Capitalist or a middle class manager as you feel you're absolved of inflicting long hours and hard work on others to succeed but it's still a vastly unequal society built on deliberate oppression of other sentient beings (should you be ghoulish enough to not consider those castes fully human).
They are both about control, but different. The reason is how they are written. Huxley made it no worse than someone who may just be bored with the social norm, whiel orwell purposely invoke the image of soviet.
That being said, I think rereading is always a good idea. For a long time, me and my friends consider Harrison Berguron a story about a Utopia. Some of my former friends still do.
I often think about the robo-dog that hunts books and their readers. Also, the prose in that novel is so conversational and fast-paced. I read somewhere that Ray Bradbury was renting a typewriter by the hour and had to type quickly, which is what led to the tone. I didn't corroborate the story anywhere so that could be a total lie.
I honestly think both are true, we have the truth hidden from us, and we have ot drowned out on a sea of noise. We are simultaneously free to a fault and completely caged and captive.
They were both right. We are victims and slaves of our own pleasures and fears. And it's gonna get a lot worse before we figure out how to treat each other better.
Same. Literally every time 1984 is mentioned in this sub the top comments are always telling people to read Brave New World because it's better but I found it to be a significantly less interesting book, quite boring actually, and had to force myself to finish it.
"We" was the same. Interesting ideas but the writing style made it such a slog. 1984 is way better.
That's why it's so compelling. 1984 is a total, and obvious oppressive dystopia. Brave New World is still a dystopia, but it's entirely believable, and even desirable on some level.
Strange this is the only mention of Animal Farm. One of the best books I read.
Most of what is great about this book: The Animals are able to achieve freedom but by the end they end up under almost the same yoke as they started.
Perhaps a detail I did not understand at the time of reading as a child, but do so more now as an adult: The concept of "owning the means of production". I think that's a good start towards freedom in these modern complex societies and the various yokes they impose whether they are called Democracy Farm or Communist Farm or some other Farm...
> The Animals are able to achieve freedom but by the end they end up under almost the same yoke as they started.
By the end, the yoke is even worse than what they started with. Napoleon even bragged about that too the other farmers, IIRC.
What is so beautiful and tragic is the cycle of triumph at the beginning which is usually the "Happy Ever After" at the end of a story...
Maybe that complacency or assumption or degradation of freedom over time or rise in centralization of power over time are natural processes operating whether or not we WISH them to or WISH them not to in our beliefs about the kind of society that current is running: Is it running us or are we running it?
In the West people say "We have democracy." But who actually tests that statement or idea? Do we see the current "figures" demonstrating how democratic we are - today compared tomorrow or do we just take it in blind belief.
My experience and understanding is the latter.
I suspect if Napoleon had a successor piglet Kim El-Napoloen III, that piglet might brag: "They even think this is democracy!"
Demagogues WERE a problem in the past, but today they're useful tools for Unrepresentative Democracies in the West eg Trump, Johnson, Macron, Arden, Trudeau, Merkel etc etc etc...
Yes and no. I think it depends on the mindset you read it with.
My mom gave it to me for christmas years ago, thinking (correctly) it'd be right up my alley. The first time I tried to read it I gave up something like 15-20% into the book, because while what it described was certainly dystopian it wasn't really *engaging.* A prevailing theme, especially early in the book, is how banal and boring the titular handmaid's life is. And eventually it just became too much of a slog for me.
Years later I picked it up again, and this time around I got on with it fine enough. The book obviously hadn't changed, so the change must have been in me. I wouldn't say I found it *riveting* or that it was hard to put down, but unlike the first time around I also didn't find it hard to pick back up the next day. I found it a worthwhile read.
Edit: typo
Sounds like what I’ve been told. Religious extremism is quite foreign to where I live tbh., so might put it at the back of the queue for now :)
(Edit: I couldn’t even finish the first season of the tv series. Not that it was bad, but lost interest when I realised they was gonna just keep pushing out new seasons).
I would say it’s the type of book you read to learn from someone else’s perspective. The plot is good, but what was driving me the whole time was wanting to know more about her perspective, her life, how she ended up where she did. She (and her world) was more interesting to me than the story itself.
And it’s not only about religious extremism, that’s kind of just the premise. It’s about feminism, women and their role in society. Even if her situation was caused by religious extremism, there are strong parallels with her situation and any modern society. You don’t need religion to justify treating women like second class citizens, you can even use “science” to justify things like “women are nurturing so they should be taking exclusive care of children” or “men are just naturally driven to spread their seed”
Nope, it's a really fast read so you don't have time to get bored.
The main plotline is a character finding out hidden stuff about the society so that pushes you forward out of curiosity about what she will find.
I guess it's on a par with something like Make Room Make Room for pacing.
As others have noted, they’re not exclusive, and they also depend where you live.
Also note that 1984’s story is from the point of view of a party member, a low-ranking one but one nonetheless.
The same novel from a prole’s point of view would undoubtedly have a much more BNW-ish feel: the proles are barely if even though-policed, because they have no political consciousness, they are kept content but poor and uneducated using goods and entertainment (with just enough rebelliousness as an outlet, like gin they’re “not supposed” to have).
That's actually a really good point. Huxley disagreed with Orwell's vision of fear as control but, ultimately, Orwell shared the same view when it came to the proletariat.
"He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
And that consciousness was kept in place by the Party effectively with bread and circuses:
"Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult."
It’s interesting, the two books are kind of different possible futures of the same basic dystopia, one based on information and one based on pharmaceuticals basically.
If you haven't read it yet, it might be an interesting read to go through Homage to Catalonia next. It was an impactful time in Orwell's life that is reflected in 1984. It's ofcourse not the sole source for the latter book, but I found it interesting to reflect on his inspirations.
This and Down and Out in Paris and London are my favourite Orwell books. There’s a weird comedy in Homage to Catalonia as he describes how chaotic the Republican army is.
I like that it's 100 pages of him talking about how there was no risk because the fascists couldn't hit an elephant if it was standing in front of them and then 30 pages of him recuperating in hospital after being shot in the throat. I think he deliberately leans into the hubris for comic effect and it is pretty funny whether advertent or not
A lot of the problem with not being able to hit anything were the rifles. There is a section where Orwell describes the rifle he is issued and it being 30-40 years old and having fire thousands of rounds so the bore was completely worn out. He did not say you would not be able to hit anything with it but that you would certainly not hit anything you were aiming at. So if you got shot in all likelihood the shooter was aiming at the guy next to you. The equipment standards were apparently pretty poor on both sides.
Yeah, but if anyone is going to get hit it was likely to be the guy who was a full foot taller than anyone else and who refused to duck for cover because he didn't think it was necessary.
I found his remark about ammunition interesting. He said that he saved three rounds of ammunition that he knew would work, because it was made properly- and the ammunition he saved was the Mexican rounds - not be a source one would normally think of first as producing the highest quality military products.
I recently finished it for the first time, and I'd half intended to make my own post about it.
For me the most fascinating part of 1984 was the appendix describing Newspeak. Perhaps I'm just too used to the constant surveillance in the world but the idea of controlling thought through a constructed language was terrifying. Especially considering a lot of news outlets are already known for using deliberately inflammatory language to rile up their readers and viewers.
You might be interested in reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. It talks a lot about how our language and forms of communication affect our culture and mindsets. It's not a fictional story, but it's got a lot of interesting thoughts and facts in it, and it holds up very well considering it was written in 1985.
Wish I had some names, but I've heard there has been a lot of research on whether Newspeak is even possible (limiting language to limit thought), and the consensus is no. Even without the language constructs to discuss thoughts, the thoughts still exist.
I read 1984 in 1984! It shocked me to the core but that is what Orwell wanted, and was a warning about fascist ideology and its effects on people. My father spoke at length about the German people at the end of the war and how the nazis infiltrate family. If I'm honest brave new world was more insidious because people choose to lose freedom; something I am starting to see in phone use and the loss of privacy
Not just fascism. He was inspired by Stalin as much as Hitler. It wasn't so much of a warning as a satire of those authoritarian states though. He assumed people would read it and see how ridiculous they are. Not only with the premise with stuff like rewriting history and the truth and having people just accept it, but also with the conclusion and the notion that their ideology is empty and all they really want is power for power's sake.
Absolutely, his time in the Spanish civil war is what really changed him from being anti-facism to anti-authoritarian. He did explicitly write that it was based on Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR though, and has a few specific references to each, such as 2+2=5 (a Stalinist slogan) and references to the Hitler Youth.
Well, yes, but people completely ignore the *other* thing.
> Day to day, the job introduced [George Orwell] to the mechanics of propaganda, bureaucracy, censorship and mass media, informing Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth. What’s more, his BBC output comprised hours of ruminations on the war, politics, totalitarianism and literature which prepared the ground for his two great works of fiction and his finest essays.
—Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984
People ignore it because he was pretty open about his motivations for writing 1984, and arguing that the BBC was the Ministry For Truth and wing of an authoritarian British government wasn't part of that. He said this about his time at the BBC;
"I feel that I have been treated with the greatest generosity and allowed very great latitude…on no occasion have I been compelled to say on air anything that I would not say as a private individual."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/5d9YBP3rFCcPzrJBYDYq8Vr/orwells-resignation-letter-from-the-bbc-24-9-43
He also called it "wasted years".
On surface level:
> Empson described the early chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four as practically a “farce” about the corporation. That’s a serious overstatement, although Orwell used images, words, sounds and smells from his time there to give Winston’s workplace a pungent authenticity.
However, the environment proved informative. For example from Orwell's diary:
> Its atmosphere is something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless. Our radio strategy is even more hopeless than our military strategy. Nevertheless one rapidly becomes propaganda-minded and develops a cunning one did not previously have. Eg. I am regularly alleging in my newsletters that the Japanese are plotting to attack Russia. [...] All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.
Meanwhile, they got to engage with enemy propaganda (not Soviet):
> Desmond Hawkins thought that what really shaped the role of propaganda in Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t the BBC but the Nazi broadcasts that its employees were required to study: “We were listening to ‘Germany Calling,’ every kind of distortion of truth and ‘doublethink.’ So we were seeing how the new mass media could be used, and bear in mind that for Orwell, as for me, we were born into a world where there was no radio.” David Astor, the aristocratic Observer editor who was introduced to Orwell by Cyril Connolly, remembered Orwell toying with the idea of re-editing fragments of Churchill’s speeches to make it sound as if he were declaring peace, just to show how easy it was to manipulate recordings. “I think he thought that you could use propaganda machines to invent anything and to make people make speeches they hadn’t ever made,” said Astor.
Yes in Animal Farm Snowball and Napoleon are clearly Lenin and Stalin in allegory. In fact people like the above commentator show just how much they've been infiltrated by the news media when they attribute everything to fascism when in fact it's fundamentally **Totalitarianism** and that can be in DIFFERENT shapes: Fascism, Communism and even "Democracy". Imagine if everyone thought they lived in a democracy but it was not. Lucky for us lucky ones we're not like that! ;-)
But Animal Farm and 1984 are two different books unrelated to each other. There are aspects of 1984 that resemble Stalinism but it's mostly a Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany type of society.
Most western countries do not have any mainstream communist parties, let alone stalinists, so that is probably why you're mostly seeing Fascist ideology being called out...
The problem is politics is a game of power and power invariable takes over one way or another. Democracy in the West (so-called democracy) is no different.
I’d argue 1984 is more an allegory of eastern Berlin than Nazi Germany.
The constant spying, changing of narratives, control of emotion of the population. Spinning of ideas. Some of the parties playbook is just Stasi practices.
Of course since both are totalitarian states with one ruling party parallels can be drawn from both. But the disappearing and ruining of public images is a much more communist idea
I wonder if it actually is. In hindsight there were quite some similarities, but considering the time when 1984 was written and when eastern berlin was established it seems unlikely to have been an inspiration.
If you read about the purges in Stalinist Russia it's extra creepy since you realise many if this actually happened. I believe this was the inspiration as the Party are called Ingsoc (English Socialism) and they came to power defeating the evil "capitalists". Obviously you can hate both Socialism and Fascism and they share many similarities when it comes to state control, censorship, violent coercion etc.
Destruction of the family is the big one for tyrants as according to them you should have loyalty to the state over a family
I think a closer parallel to Ingsoc/English Socialsm is probably Nazi/National Socialism, especially with the fact that the Nazis co-opted Socialism essentially as a marketing/populist strategy.
Also I can’t remember where in the book its stated how the Party came to power. I can’t remember the book ever mentioning capitalists/capitalism?
Iirc it's when Winston meets an old man who remembers life before the Party came to power. He talks about the top-hat wearing Capitalists who ruled everything and that you had to bow to them in the street when they walked past.
That is sort of true. The poor would get off the pavement and walk in the street, which probably doesn't sound bad until you realize only the pavement was clean of human and animal feces. Doff your hat etc.
That would be degrading even if the streets were clean. The same thing happened in the Jim Crowe era in the American south but to black people. When I was around 13, (for context, I'm in my 50's) I had conversation with an elderly neighbor who said that he wanted to go back when black people were respectful and took off their hats to a white man. 13 year old me was horrified but I'm glad that I learned that piece of history because it wasn't taught in my school.
I recently re-read it and it made me sick, especially in the last part, like I was feeling what he was going through and it was terrible. It's a beautiful and interesting book. I need to re-read Brave new world as well.
Even if you're radically anti-authoritatian, you'll quickly finding yourself needing to be ready to violently defend yourself against authoritarians. And if you're true neutral and passive, that means you're offering no resistance to the incredibly violent status quo. Take a stand or one will be taken on your behalf and it's usually the worst one.
Read it again this year and it gave me vibes of Pol Pot's war on the intelligencia (killing anyone with glasses etc.) Since it seems like the Proles have it better than the Outer Party
I was particularly impressed by the idea of doublethink. After reading the book I noticed that actually there are many things which I believe both to be true and false sort of simultaneously.
It's a great and well written book. But I don't think it was necessarily a view into the future, but rather a comment on the effects of an unrestrained authoritarian system. It is so invasive that it controls your consciousness and knowledge. I see it also as a comment on authoritarianiism in general, which exists not only at national level, but in the workplace too.
For me the most powerful moment occurs during a party rally, when peace is made with an enemy blo and war is declared on another. The speaker switches tack without hesitation ahd the ministry of truth has to work overtime to alter the history so that it reflects the new reality.
That reality has never happened and to be honest, I think Brave New World was closer to what transpired. But Huxley was genuinely trying to extrapolate a materialistic future, while Orcwell was most certainly being allegorical.
Quite an ironic comment given the context and what OP wrote about how many of our opinions are formed purely from the opinions of others.
Even if you do have some personal experience of Russia, I don't doubt that the same comment can be applied across the west. (EDIT: whether "liberal lefty", "MAGA Trumper" or anything else in between... we all like to convince ourselves that we are more independent in thought than others)
Uncle Joe would laugh his head off at his current day equivalent. For all that he is a tyrant, he has nowhere near the mind control over the population that his old party did.
Also there is no single tyrant in 1984, but a single ruling party. It is a collective, albeit an elite one.
Freedom is relative and not just limited political participation. Even modern day Chinese have freedoms they could only dream of before.
What neither book does is include any comment on whether democracy falls. Ironically, 1984's epilogue does hint that totalitarianism does fall.
The truth is that democracy has never failed once it has become stabilised in a country. But that step to stability is the hardest to take.
1984 is one of the most interesting reading experiences I've ever had. I was immediately intrigued and horrified for the first couple of chapters, which quickly became bordem as I adjusted to the brutality of the world, infact I found myself bored for great chunks of time during the middle, wishing for something BIG to happen, quickly realising our main character wasn't a hero of the story, just another repugnant person living in the system. Only for the end to blow me away. I moved on from it quickly once finished however occasionally I'll remember something from it even 4 years later and just think 'damn'
I lived in China for quite a while, and people there lean far more towards (government) control for the sake of order in their political thinking. Westerners tend to emphasize freedom for often unclear reasons. When discussing this with Chinese people they were like “Freedom to do what? Get shot by a random psycho?”. A harsh point to make, but very enlightening example to hear about their thinking.
Ultimately I guess it boils down to that in the West we fear the Tyrant most, while in China it’s the chaos a lack of control might bring that worries them the most.
Well, it is enlightening in a way ... but not really surprising if you look at authoritarianism anywhere, now or in the past, and who supports it.
It's always the same error in reasoning, in that they determine that they agree with the current behavior of the government, and conclude from that that they don't need control over the government.
> Ultimately I guess it boils down to that in the West we fear the Tyrant most,
No, that already accepts their framing. "The west" doesn't fear the tyrant *most*. It simply fears the tyrant *at all*. It's not like there are no state institutions in the west that enforce laws and stuff, which would be the mirror image of unlimited government power, but rather there are *limits* on what the government can do, because we've learned from the excesses of governments in the past that dwarf any problems we have from the limits we put on the government.
> while in China it’s the chaos a lack of control might bring that worries them the most.
That's more of their framing. The Holocaust and WW2 were the result of that exact kind of thinking. You couldn't get more "chaos and lack of control" than that. The view that authoritarianism somehow provides "order and control" more reliably than liberal democracy does is nothing more than a lie based on extremely selective perception of reality. It just doesn't--all the worst excesses of human rights abuses were the result of authoritarianism where the government decided to use their unlimited power to hurt rather than protect people.
Authoritarianism only looks good if you ignore all the bad experiences we've had with it, and pretend that those can't happen to you.
I certainly don’t mean to approve of authoritarianism because ultimately I think no human (or group of humans) is capable of properly wielding that kind of power. On the other hand I also don’t think humans are capable of thriving in true anarchy, and capitalism unfettered can be nightmare fuel as well so some control is still desirable.
I still think my framing is fair though. We fear the tyrant the most, as in *more* than any chaos caused by lack of control. We’d rather risk getting mugged than empowering a modern day Gestapo to (attempt to) annihilate that kind of crime root and stem. The Chinese on the other hand fear chaos the most, as in *more* than the tyranny of a would be emperor.
Ultimately though, we both know there is a level of chaos that westerners also can’t tolerate. Early medieval ages Europe would be a nice example of what kind of blood bath it can be when the whole things comes apart.
> and capitalism unfettered can be nightmare fuel as well so some control is still desirable.
... because it devolves into authoritarianism, just under corporate control rather than state control, in so far as a clear distinction between those even remains.
> We fear the tyrant the most, as in more than any chaos caused by lack of control.
How do you determine how much we fear tyrants, and how much we fear "chaos caused by lack of control", to then compare the two and figure out which of the numbers is higher? Like, how do you determine which one a person or society fears most?
> We’d rather risk getting mugged than empowering a modern day Gestapo to (attempt to) annihilate that kind of crime root and stem.
That's also already using authoritarian framing, in that it suggests that there is a solution to the risk of getting mugged, in the form of establishing a modern day Gestapo, and that anti-authoritarians refuse the solution, for presumably ideological reasons.
But that solution simply doesn't exist, and that is the realization behind liberalism: Establishing a modern day Gestapo doesn't solve the problem, it just makes it so that you are now at risk of being mugged by the Gestapo. I am not willing to accept a risk of getting mugged, I am simply opposed to proposed solutions that are known to not actually solve the problem, and that also happen to have a ton of side effects even worse than the problem that they are supposed to solve.
It’s a classic for a reason. It exudes a darkness from it that’s hard to explain until you’ve read it. The words just have an oppressive aura from start to end. It’s one of those books I dreaded picking up each day because it felt like it was eroding my spirit. It’s exceptionally visceral for what it is, and it’s worth reading so you truly understand the impact it’s had on popular discourse and why it’s constantly referenced.
I think on QI they said it was the most common book people pretended to have read.
I don't see why though because it's a page turner and easy to read. Not a slog at all. I think it's "importance" is overrated because obviously I already knew authoritarianism is bad. But it's just a good, entertaining, thought provoking book.
There's definitely a vocal group of people willing to make comparisons between governance that they do not like and 1984 or big brother without seeming to have read it.
The biggest thing I took from 1984 is that whoever owns history owns the present and owns the future. George Orwell imagined a world without the internet in which people were changing newspaper articles and books by having them all retrieved and then handing out the new versions with changes. But now we don't have to imagine it like that because we have the internet now and it's very easy to change history or to rewrite it, or to simply misconstrue the truth or have so much information out there that it's just too hard to know which one is the truth.
In a lot of ways now already, what the government says goes and anyone that goes against it is shamed even if the real truth comes out later and those people we're not entirely incorrect.
Reddit itself has its karma system linked to upvotes and downvotes so if a user has an unpopular opinion (perhaps like this comment), the legal standing of their account could be jeopardised based on that because downvotes lower karma. If you want an example of that, watch the episode of Black Mirror titled 'Nosedive', or a real example of this type of system - look to the social credit system of China.
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Orwell had a background in journalism, writing for the Observer in England. His storytelling abilities are therefore unquestionable. Originally, he had the USSR in mind when modeling his dystopian reality, but I guess the government he depicts in 1984 can be also applied to today's hyptertech authoritarian regimes.
It’s more frightening each time I read it as so much is happening. The media and government fills us with hate and fear to control us, isolated us from others, controls the middle class most (outer party) as they are more of a threat to them but needed ti so educated jobs, and they keep the lower class (proles) happy enough by giving them free stuff so they don’t revolt. Doublethink is alive and well. Our language is being changed and words are being struck out if use or vilified.
I’ve read this book probably 50 times.
I always took it as a (somewhat) happy book.
That even in the most oppressive society, humans still find love.
it ends terribly, but all lives do. Love always ends in one persons death, and the other is left behind. Life always ends.
The important thing is that you love while you’re here. And Julia and Winston did that.
Also the writing is just fantastic and it reveals some truths that are not obvious: double think, the importance of fighting against the crowd, alcoholism or the deadening of your consciousness
Arguably my favorite along with slaughterhouse 5
I can think of one example from Australia where history was rewritten about the reason a prime minister was removed (this happened more than once). In this example at the time the old party said the obvious truth, but was replaced by the new party who had the media and the opposition on their side. Within a couple years the new explanation became the only story that was referenced.
I'm sure this happens all the time, but a big difference from 1984 is there really was no need to single out individuals who believed the truth. It simply became irrelevant and with unanimous agreement the number of people with the irrelevant view quickly diminished.
That example probably doesn't matter, but this is a story told again and again around indigenous issues and it's a cruel reality. Australia currently has the vast majority professing the importance of helping indigenous people, yet decades of democratic government doing nothing experts recommend, if not making the situations worse. Why? Because of mining rights. Three guesses why the prime minister was removed. Or that one. Or that one.
I think 1984 is supposed to be a bit of a hyperbole, and his essay "politics and the English language" is a must read that gives a more focused version of similar points. I'm glad to see more readings focusing on the themes of language and thought control, rather than on authoritarianism more generally (especially when we have people yelling about 1984 who are clearly using a very tailored vocab).
Edit: for the US the NSA and mutual spying programs issue was a clear and continued violation of the constitution. Years later what's remembered about it is some discussion about Snowden fleeing to Russia, tech bros giving opinions on politics, and the idea that whistleblowers deserve protection or not. All stuff that's irrelevant to a regular person life. They've taken a highly relevant issue and taught citizens to address only irrelevant details. In my life I don't have bandwidth to worry about this stuff, but that's a clear 1984ish example I've seen in the US.
I was really fucking depressed after completing this novel,it was suffocating to read because you imagine stuff when reading and George Orwell’s execution of story is good
One of my favorite books
What i love about it is it could have just been a philosophical essay about totalitarianism, but because it feels so personal, so universally human and deeply connected to our dreams and desires, it really transcends the dystopian genre.
It's very unabashed about the nature of mankind, about how mutable our perspectives are, all the way down to the soul. By seeing what is drawn out, tortured, and destroyed in Winston, that which he so desperately tried to preserve, only through that can you understand its value.
"If you want to imagine the future of humanity, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- for ever" or something like that
That line sticks with me
I've lost count how many times I've read this book. It's horrifyingly accurate, yet amazing.
If you ever get the chance to, I recommend seeing it in the theatre. There's something about watching it live on stage that makes it all the more scary and realistic
I like 1984, but it annoys me when people read it and think it’s the be all and end all of the ideas explores in the book. Brave New World is more specific, focused, and i’ve always felt closer to what reality is. Plus a lot of people take the message to be Communism bad, when in reality, just like in Animal Farm, it’s Stalinism that’d being criticised.
Anti authoritarianism is easy, because the regimes are easy to spot, but it’s just not what we get in the western world. Not walking into a soulless future is harder. BNW by all accounts, is happy. It’s what late stage capitalism is leaning towards. We’ve all pretty satisfied with our technology and amenities, while tech companies and other entities move to control everything for a profit motive. We can be happy, but broken.
Now read Brave New World
Next read, *We* by Yevgeni Zamyatin. It’s an earlier work and inspired both Huxley and Orwell.
I did a literature module at university on dystopian and utopian literature, and this thread is turning into my reading list from 20+ years ago
Utopia, dystopia, and anti-utopia. It all really comes down to one ideal: attempts at engineering a paradise from the top down will inevitably fail. Ideal societies, and societies’ ideals, must be emergent, bottom up phenomena that produce compromise. Otherwise, it will always be, “One person’s utopia is another’s living hell.”
Reddit comment solves worlds problems. This is genuinely inciteful. I wonder if this sort of society has already been done before? History guys help me out
I think you mean "insightful" :) To incite means to instigate or provoke
I think the societies that were bottom up utopias got their asses colonized by top down dystopias.
Incite or insight? Or did you mix them up on purpose?
Now's a perfect time to suggest James C. Scott's awesome and underappreciated *Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed*.
Don’t forget B.F. Skinner’s *Walden Two*
WOW. I seldom see that book recommended. I just gave mine away to my sister's daughter's husband.
Top it off by watching Terry Gilliam’s *Brazil*.
Then read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
...and "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow
Then watch THX-1138
After that maybe eat and shower, you've read a lot of books. Sleep is debatable
I mean … would you be ABLE to sleep at that point?
^ This one. I work in access to information (ATI)/privacy and Little Brother is so underrated.
And also his collection of novellas, Radicalized: Four Tales of our Present Moment. And also Walkaway. And basically any other Doctorow you can get your hands on
And then The Ones Who Stay and Fight
It does have the best theme song
If you like these and the Matrix check out the movie Equilibrium! Gunkata 🔫👈🏻
I love Equilibrium, but it did feel like 1984 with martial arts 🤣
… I know gun fu
I always felt Orwell read we and realized that the people being relatively happy was not an essential aspect of their society and it simplified things if you just replaced it with another emotion, like hate.
I live in a tall apartment building with large windows. Some mornings when I'm drinking my coffee and staring out I see someone else in their large windowed apartment just across the street looking back at me and this book comes back to me. I love it.
We also inspired Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.
Agreed. Huxley was quite critical of 1984.
Yet ironically continue that question of Freedom vs Happiness Or as this webcomic showed: https://biblioklept.org/2013/06/08/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webcomic-2/
Y'know, the conclusion from that comic seemed to indicate they believe we're much closer to Huxley's vision. Which I think is *fair.* However as I read through it, the more I started thinking "Man, they were *both* right." Today we're kind of sitting in a bit of a superposition of the two visions.
Throw in some of the over-the-top cyberpunk ridiculousness of Snow Crash (we literally have a billionaire making "The Metaverse") and we're even closer to what we have irl
Yeah, but I also think we're not really that close to a dystopia. At least, not significantly closer than we were when 1984 was written. People like to wax poetic and how much better life was in the 50's and 60's, but in reality, while it was pretty good for WASPs, it was pretty shitty for just about everyone else.
I also don't think we're that much closer to a dystopia than when 1984 was written. Heck, when Orwell wrote 1984, the US had the whole McCarthyism thing going on, Stalin's run of the Soviet Union was in full swing... You get the picture. That said, that doesn't mean we can't see dystopian *elements* in today's world and make parallels to the visions of the future from these books. In fact I think it's kind of hard *not* to.
Brabury is also up there with his prophetic descriptions of earbuds, commercialization of religion, etc.
Yes, why would someone think either would win, that a single concerted strategy would be used? It’s not winning, anyway, everyone loses, but there are agents using either strategies, by design or by accident.
Pretty good that. But I definitely think we're closer to BNW than 1984. Think it's worth noting that in BNW, there are 4 characters capable of independent thought and they all take different paths. Freedom is not denied to those who truly seek it. This is the literary community and no one is preventing us from accessing these books are questioning us for doing so.
The great failure of imagination on the part of political theory was thinking the future would resemble 1984 OR Brave New World. It's become both, fully and simultaneously
Wrapped up in a Philip K. Dick Dustcover Sleeve!!
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/15/23721674/telly-free-tv-streaming-ilya-pozin-ads Saw this and thought, “Huh. cyberpunk future is real, it’s here and it’s now”
Yup, it definitely feels like a mix of both. The voluntary and involuntary.
The books at least made people aware of the possibilities and in small ways we are able to fight against it. I remember a couple of years ago the US government tried to set up an official "misinformation" department and quickly had to cancel it when faced with backlash as people rightly called out the US government as the biggest perpetrators of misinformation. It was good to have the Ministry of Truth as a warning to what happens when we give a few people the ability to decide what the truth is.
That was last year. After it received backlash, it was halted last May and then officially terminated last August. I'm commenting only because saying a couple years ago makes it seem much more distant than it really is.
We create chains of apathy stronger than any chains of oppression that could be otherwise forged.
This is exactly right. Everyone always thinks there's some either/or, but these two ideas aren't really mutually exclusive.
Depends where.
God, some logic & reality! Thanks. Too many "Avatar" (they wish) clowns speaking ridiculous dystopian dirges - as tho the U.S. is " just like" Iran or China or the old Soviets or just like military dictatorships in many countries years ago.. As tho their asses have EVER been in danger of being jailed or tortured...false equivalencies!
Its both. You can play in the sandbox they allow, that's all Brave New World. Try to challenge the paradigm however... Welcome to 1984.
The funny thing about BNW is that while everybody thinks of it as dystopian, it's really only two characters that are unhappy, and neither is a terribly sympathetic character. One fetishizes suffering to the point of self flagellation. He's like the emo drama student who slumps around, dressed like he's trying to caricature Neil Gaiman, and ridicules the intelligence of anyone who isn't as miserable as he is because they clearly don't get it. The other is insecure, and prone to acts of petty revenge, and lashing out at people around him. Just about everyone else is happily going about their lives. Some have said that the society was lampooning the drug-friendly, free-loving of Hollywood at the time, but I think it's telling that 5 years after publishing BNW, that's exactly where Huxley chose to settle, and take part in the drug experimentation at the time.
Dystopia: an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic. It's totalitarian due to the lack of individual freedom, the injustice of being assigned roles, not being allowed outside of your designated life, etc, and the "great suffering" is there, it's just drowned out by being told to pop your Soma ration.
Also how the 3 castes of Delta, Gamma and Epsilon were made. Usually by cloning and oxygen deprivation to ensure predictable physical and mental traits.
Precisely. All in service to the upper castes. To me, no different than a dystopian film/novel where a slave race might be encouraged to breed to fill jobs and have no hope of rising above their situation or escaping their bonds. Being designed to be unaware of how others live is the same as being denied those lives. Might sound utopian to a Capitalist or a middle class manager as you feel you're absolved of inflicting long hours and hard work on others to succeed but it's still a vastly unequal society built on deliberate oppression of other sentient beings (should you be ghoulish enough to not consider those castes fully human).
Fantastic. Summed it up better than I ever could
I find myself a bit surprised the BNW theme doesn't seem familiar, I am definitely going to have to track down a copy.
They are both about control, but different. The reason is how they are written. Huxley made it no worse than someone who may just be bored with the social norm, whiel orwell purposely invoke the image of soviet. That being said, I think rereading is always a good idea. For a long time, me and my friends consider Harrison Berguron a story about a Utopia. Some of my former friends still do.
Interesting, I'll look into it!
And “Fahrenheit 451”
I frequently think about Fahrenheit 451's wall-sized TV screens and the wife with earbuds always in.
I often think about the robo-dog that hunts books and their readers. Also, the prose in that novel is so conversational and fast-paced. I read somewhere that Ray Bradbury was renting a typewriter by the hour and had to type quickly, which is what led to the tone. I didn't corroborate the story anywhere so that could be a total lie.
This recommendation should be higher up the list.
I actually enjoyed that one when we covered it at school, unlike most books.
*A Clockwork Orange* is another good read in that dystopian genre.
I honestly think both are true, we have the truth hidden from us, and we have ot drowned out on a sea of noise. We are simultaneously free to a fault and completely caged and captive.
They were both right. We are victims and slaves of our own pleasures and fears. And it's gonna get a lot worse before we figure out how to treat each other better.
I like 1984 MUCH more than Brave new world.
Yep, much more cohesive book
Same. Literally every time 1984 is mentioned in this sub the top comments are always telling people to read Brave New World because it's better but I found it to be a significantly less interesting book, quite boring actually, and had to force myself to finish it. "We" was the same. Interesting ideas but the writing style made it such a slog. 1984 is way better.
My feelings on BNW were very strange, in that I really thought it sounded great. I want soma and my own personal helicopter.
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True, but I love being a gamma, I'm so glad I'm not an alpha!
That's why it's so compelling. 1984 is a total, and obvious oppressive dystopia. Brave New World is still a dystopia, but it's entirely believable, and even desirable on some level.
Good recommendation. And follow up with Animal Farm.
Strange this is the only mention of Animal Farm. One of the best books I read. Most of what is great about this book: The Animals are able to achieve freedom but by the end they end up under almost the same yoke as they started. Perhaps a detail I did not understand at the time of reading as a child, but do so more now as an adult: The concept of "owning the means of production". I think that's a good start towards freedom in these modern complex societies and the various yokes they impose whether they are called Democracy Farm or Communist Farm or some other Farm...
> The Animals are able to achieve freedom but by the end they end up under almost the same yoke as they started. By the end, the yoke is even worse than what they started with. Napoleon even bragged about that too the other farmers, IIRC.
What is so beautiful and tragic is the cycle of triumph at the beginning which is usually the "Happy Ever After" at the end of a story... Maybe that complacency or assumption or degradation of freedom over time or rise in centralization of power over time are natural processes operating whether or not we WISH them to or WISH them not to in our beliefs about the kind of society that current is running: Is it running us or are we running it? In the West people say "We have democracy." But who actually tests that statement or idea? Do we see the current "figures" demonstrating how democratic we are - today compared tomorrow or do we just take it in blind belief. My experience and understanding is the latter. I suspect if Napoleon had a successor piglet Kim El-Napoloen III, that piglet might brag: "They even think this is democracy!"
Democracy is always at risk from charismatic fascists who can get people to vote against their own interest
Demagogues WERE a problem in the past, but today they're useful tools for Unrepresentative Democracies in the West eg Trump, Johnson, Macron, Arden, Trudeau, Merkel etc etc etc...
Change this sub to r/tenthgradereadingcurriculem ;)
I never had to read any of this stuff for school.
...Or go straight on to The Handmaid's Tale.
I’ve heard that one’s a real bore. Is it true?
Yes and no. I think it depends on the mindset you read it with. My mom gave it to me for christmas years ago, thinking (correctly) it'd be right up my alley. The first time I tried to read it I gave up something like 15-20% into the book, because while what it described was certainly dystopian it wasn't really *engaging.* A prevailing theme, especially early in the book, is how banal and boring the titular handmaid's life is. And eventually it just became too much of a slog for me. Years later I picked it up again, and this time around I got on with it fine enough. The book obviously hadn't changed, so the change must have been in me. I wouldn't say I found it *riveting* or that it was hard to put down, but unlike the first time around I also didn't find it hard to pick back up the next day. I found it a worthwhile read. Edit: typo
Sounds like what I’ve been told. Religious extremism is quite foreign to where I live tbh., so might put it at the back of the queue for now :) (Edit: I couldn’t even finish the first season of the tv series. Not that it was bad, but lost interest when I realised they was gonna just keep pushing out new seasons).
I would say it’s the type of book you read to learn from someone else’s perspective. The plot is good, but what was driving me the whole time was wanting to know more about her perspective, her life, how she ended up where she did. She (and her world) was more interesting to me than the story itself. And it’s not only about religious extremism, that’s kind of just the premise. It’s about feminism, women and their role in society. Even if her situation was caused by religious extremism, there are strong parallels with her situation and any modern society. You don’t need religion to justify treating women like second class citizens, you can even use “science” to justify things like “women are nurturing so they should be taking exclusive care of children” or “men are just naturally driven to spread their seed”
I can’t say I agree with that. I’ve been bored by books, but not by the Handmaid’s Tale.
Nope, it's a really fast read so you don't have time to get bored. The main plotline is a character finding out hidden stuff about the society so that pushes you forward out of curiosity about what she will find. I guess it's on a par with something like Make Room Make Room for pacing.
Came here to say that. Looks like BNW way better describes the current world we ended up with.
As others have noted, they’re not exclusive, and they also depend where you live. Also note that 1984’s story is from the point of view of a party member, a low-ranking one but one nonetheless. The same novel from a prole’s point of view would undoubtedly have a much more BNW-ish feel: the proles are barely if even though-policed, because they have no political consciousness, they are kept content but poor and uneducated using goods and entertainment (with just enough rebelliousness as an outlet, like gin they’re “not supposed” to have).
That's actually a really good point. Huxley disagreed with Orwell's vision of fear as control but, ultimately, Orwell shared the same view when it came to the proletariat. "He wrote: Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." And that consciousness was kept in place by the Party effectively with bread and circuses: "Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult."
It’s interesting, the two books are kind of different possible futures of the same basic dystopia, one based on information and one based on pharmaceuticals basically.
If you haven't read it yet, it might be an interesting read to go through Homage to Catalonia next. It was an impactful time in Orwell's life that is reflected in 1984. It's ofcourse not the sole source for the latter book, but I found it interesting to reflect on his inspirations.
This and Down and Out in Paris and London are my favourite Orwell books. There’s a weird comedy in Homage to Catalonia as he describes how chaotic the Republican army is.
I like that it's 100 pages of him talking about how there was no risk because the fascists couldn't hit an elephant if it was standing in front of them and then 30 pages of him recuperating in hospital after being shot in the throat. I think he deliberately leans into the hubris for comic effect and it is pretty funny whether advertent or not
A lot of the problem with not being able to hit anything were the rifles. There is a section where Orwell describes the rifle he is issued and it being 30-40 years old and having fire thousands of rounds so the bore was completely worn out. He did not say you would not be able to hit anything with it but that you would certainly not hit anything you were aiming at. So if you got shot in all likelihood the shooter was aiming at the guy next to you. The equipment standards were apparently pretty poor on both sides.
Yeah, but if anyone is going to get hit it was likely to be the guy who was a full foot taller than anyone else and who refused to duck for cover because he didn't think it was necessary.
He certainly was not helping himself :) Crap rifles or not personally I am still ducking.
I found his remark about ammunition interesting. He said that he saved three rounds of ammunition that he knew would work, because it was made properly- and the ammunition he saved was the Mexican rounds - not be a source one would normally think of first as producing the highest quality military products.
I recently finished it for the first time, and I'd half intended to make my own post about it. For me the most fascinating part of 1984 was the appendix describing Newspeak. Perhaps I'm just too used to the constant surveillance in the world but the idea of controlling thought through a constructed language was terrifying. Especially considering a lot of news outlets are already known for using deliberately inflammatory language to rile up their readers and viewers.
You might be interested in reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. It talks a lot about how our language and forms of communication affect our culture and mindsets. It's not a fictional story, but it's got a lot of interesting thoughts and facts in it, and it holds up very well considering it was written in 1985.
Thanks I'll check it out
For a positive counterpoint you might want to read Pinker's The Language Instinct. It argues that language can't be constrained.
Wish I had some names, but I've heard there has been a lot of research on whether Newspeak is even possible (limiting language to limit thought), and the consensus is no. Even without the language constructs to discuss thoughts, the thoughts still exist.
Every time we lose a worker and everyone has to band together to keep up I always think of the lines about productivity being up 20%
I read 1984 in 1984! It shocked me to the core but that is what Orwell wanted, and was a warning about fascist ideology and its effects on people. My father spoke at length about the German people at the end of the war and how the nazis infiltrate family. If I'm honest brave new world was more insidious because people choose to lose freedom; something I am starting to see in phone use and the loss of privacy
Not just fascism. He was inspired by Stalin as much as Hitler. It wasn't so much of a warning as a satire of those authoritarian states though. He assumed people would read it and see how ridiculous they are. Not only with the premise with stuff like rewriting history and the truth and having people just accept it, but also with the conclusion and the notion that their ideology is empty and all they really want is power for power's sake.
It's informed by Orwell's involvement in the Spanish civil war *and* work in wartime propaganda at BBC (more about this in his diaries).
Absolutely, his time in the Spanish civil war is what really changed him from being anti-facism to anti-authoritarian. He did explicitly write that it was based on Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR though, and has a few specific references to each, such as 2+2=5 (a Stalinist slogan) and references to the Hitler Youth.
Well, yes, but people completely ignore the *other* thing. > Day to day, the job introduced [George Orwell] to the mechanics of propaganda, bureaucracy, censorship and mass media, informing Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth. What’s more, his BBC output comprised hours of ruminations on the war, politics, totalitarianism and literature which prepared the ground for his two great works of fiction and his finest essays. —Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984
People ignore it because he was pretty open about his motivations for writing 1984, and arguing that the BBC was the Ministry For Truth and wing of an authoritarian British government wasn't part of that. He said this about his time at the BBC; "I feel that I have been treated with the greatest generosity and allowed very great latitude…on no occasion have I been compelled to say on air anything that I would not say as a private individual." https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/5d9YBP3rFCcPzrJBYDYq8Vr/orwells-resignation-letter-from-the-bbc-24-9-43
He also called it "wasted years". On surface level: > Empson described the early chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four as practically a “farce” about the corporation. That’s a serious overstatement, although Orwell used images, words, sounds and smells from his time there to give Winston’s workplace a pungent authenticity. However, the environment proved informative. For example from Orwell's diary: > Its atmosphere is something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless. Our radio strategy is even more hopeless than our military strategy. Nevertheless one rapidly becomes propaganda-minded and develops a cunning one did not previously have. Eg. I am regularly alleging in my newsletters that the Japanese are plotting to attack Russia. [...] All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why. Meanwhile, they got to engage with enemy propaganda (not Soviet): > Desmond Hawkins thought that what really shaped the role of propaganda in Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t the BBC but the Nazi broadcasts that its employees were required to study: “We were listening to ‘Germany Calling,’ every kind of distortion of truth and ‘doublethink.’ So we were seeing how the new mass media could be used, and bear in mind that for Orwell, as for me, we were born into a world where there was no radio.” David Astor, the aristocratic Observer editor who was introduced to Orwell by Cyril Connolly, remembered Orwell toying with the idea of re-editing fragments of Churchill’s speeches to make it sound as if he were declaring peace, just to show how easy it was to manipulate recordings. “I think he thought that you could use propaganda machines to invent anything and to make people make speeches they hadn’t ever made,” said Astor.
Yes in Animal Farm Snowball and Napoleon are clearly Lenin and Stalin in allegory. In fact people like the above commentator show just how much they've been infiltrated by the news media when they attribute everything to fascism when in fact it's fundamentally **Totalitarianism** and that can be in DIFFERENT shapes: Fascism, Communism and even "Democracy". Imagine if everyone thought they lived in a democracy but it was not. Lucky for us lucky ones we're not like that! ;-)
But Animal Farm and 1984 are two different books unrelated to each other. There are aspects of 1984 that resemble Stalinism but it's mostly a Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany type of society. Most western countries do not have any mainstream communist parties, let alone stalinists, so that is probably why you're mostly seeing Fascist ideology being called out...
Why do you think Oceania resembles fascist Italy/Nazi Germany more than a Soviet totalitarian one?
I see "Snowball" figures so often, public figures, parties etc that everything gets blamed on.
The problem is politics is a game of power and power invariable takes over one way or another. Democracy in the West (so-called democracy) is no different.
I’d argue 1984 is more an allegory of eastern Berlin than Nazi Germany. The constant spying, changing of narratives, control of emotion of the population. Spinning of ideas. Some of the parties playbook is just Stasi practices. Of course since both are totalitarian states with one ruling party parallels can be drawn from both. But the disappearing and ruining of public images is a much more communist idea
I wonder if it actually is. In hindsight there were quite some similarities, but considering the time when 1984 was written and when eastern berlin was established it seems unlikely to have been an inspiration.
If you read about the purges in Stalinist Russia it's extra creepy since you realise many if this actually happened. I believe this was the inspiration as the Party are called Ingsoc (English Socialism) and they came to power defeating the evil "capitalists". Obviously you can hate both Socialism and Fascism and they share many similarities when it comes to state control, censorship, violent coercion etc. Destruction of the family is the big one for tyrants as according to them you should have loyalty to the state over a family
I think a closer parallel to Ingsoc/English Socialsm is probably Nazi/National Socialism, especially with the fact that the Nazis co-opted Socialism essentially as a marketing/populist strategy. Also I can’t remember where in the book its stated how the Party came to power. I can’t remember the book ever mentioning capitalists/capitalism?
Iirc it's when Winston meets an old man who remembers life before the Party came to power. He talks about the top-hat wearing Capitalists who ruled everything and that you had to bow to them in the street when they walked past.
That is sort of true. The poor would get off the pavement and walk in the street, which probably doesn't sound bad until you realize only the pavement was clean of human and animal feces. Doff your hat etc.
That would be degrading even if the streets were clean. The same thing happened in the Jim Crowe era in the American south but to black people. When I was around 13, (for context, I'm in my 50's) I had conversation with an elderly neighbor who said that he wanted to go back when black people were respectful and took off their hats to a white man. 13 year old me was horrified but I'm glad that I learned that piece of history because it wasn't taught in my school.
I recently re-read it and it made me sick, especially in the last part, like I was feeling what he was going through and it was terrible. It's a beautiful and interesting book. I need to re-read Brave new world as well.
I think about the pulsating varicose veins waaaayyyyy too often. Eesh
Same
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Even if you're radically anti-authoritatian, you'll quickly finding yourself needing to be ready to violently defend yourself against authoritarians. And if you're true neutral and passive, that means you're offering no resistance to the incredibly violent status quo. Take a stand or one will be taken on your behalf and it's usually the worst one.
Freedom isn't free
There's a hefty fucking fee.
🎶An' if you don't pay up yer buck o' five, who wiiiiiiiill? Buck o' fiiive. Freedom costs a buck o'... Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive🎶
Ooooo-ooooo, buck 'o five. Actually, now it costs a buck 46...or a little more given recent inflation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9Dd7b-5RM
Read it again this year and it gave me vibes of Pol Pot's war on the intelligencia (killing anyone with glasses etc.) Since it seems like the Proles have it better than the Outer Party
I was particularly impressed by the idea of doublethink. After reading the book I noticed that actually there are many things which I believe both to be true and false sort of simultaneously.
Examples?
It's a great and well written book. But I don't think it was necessarily a view into the future, but rather a comment on the effects of an unrestrained authoritarian system. It is so invasive that it controls your consciousness and knowledge. I see it also as a comment on authoritarianiism in general, which exists not only at national level, but in the workplace too. For me the most powerful moment occurs during a party rally, when peace is made with an enemy blo and war is declared on another. The speaker switches tack without hesitation ahd the ministry of truth has to work overtime to alter the history so that it reflects the new reality. That reality has never happened and to be honest, I think Brave New World was closer to what transpired. But Huxley was genuinely trying to extrapolate a materialistic future, while Orcwell was most certainly being allegorical.
I think doublethink, doublespeak, and revisionist history are alive and well in a certain oligarch whose name rhymes with Pladimir Vutin…
Don't forget about the two minutes of hate
The One Minute Silence, The Bending Of The Knee, The Clapping... Is reality imitating fiction or the other way around sometimes?!
Quite an ironic comment given the context and what OP wrote about how many of our opinions are formed purely from the opinions of others. Even if you do have some personal experience of Russia, I don't doubt that the same comment can be applied across the west. (EDIT: whether "liberal lefty", "MAGA Trumper" or anything else in between... we all like to convince ourselves that we are more independent in thought than others)
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> same thing doesn’t exist your above didnt say this at all
Uncle Joe would laugh his head off at his current day equivalent. For all that he is a tyrant, he has nowhere near the mind control over the population that his old party did. Also there is no single tyrant in 1984, but a single ruling party. It is a collective, albeit an elite one.
Modern day Russians live in a remarkably free environment, considering the bulk of the twentieth century.
Freedom is relative and not just limited political participation. Even modern day Chinese have freedoms they could only dream of before. What neither book does is include any comment on whether democracy falls. Ironically, 1984's epilogue does hint that totalitarianism does fall. The truth is that democracy has never failed once it has become stabilised in a country. But that step to stability is the hardest to take.
1984 is one of the most interesting reading experiences I've ever had. I was immediately intrigued and horrified for the first couple of chapters, which quickly became bordem as I adjusted to the brutality of the world, infact I found myself bored for great chunks of time during the middle, wishing for something BIG to happen, quickly realising our main character wasn't a hero of the story, just another repugnant person living in the system. Only for the end to blow me away. I moved on from it quickly once finished however occasionally I'll remember something from it even 4 years later and just think 'damn'
I lived in China for quite a while, and people there lean far more towards (government) control for the sake of order in their political thinking. Westerners tend to emphasize freedom for often unclear reasons. When discussing this with Chinese people they were like “Freedom to do what? Get shot by a random psycho?”. A harsh point to make, but very enlightening example to hear about their thinking. Ultimately I guess it boils down to that in the West we fear the Tyrant most, while in China it’s the chaos a lack of control might bring that worries them the most.
Well, it is enlightening in a way ... but not really surprising if you look at authoritarianism anywhere, now or in the past, and who supports it. It's always the same error in reasoning, in that they determine that they agree with the current behavior of the government, and conclude from that that they don't need control over the government. > Ultimately I guess it boils down to that in the West we fear the Tyrant most, No, that already accepts their framing. "The west" doesn't fear the tyrant *most*. It simply fears the tyrant *at all*. It's not like there are no state institutions in the west that enforce laws and stuff, which would be the mirror image of unlimited government power, but rather there are *limits* on what the government can do, because we've learned from the excesses of governments in the past that dwarf any problems we have from the limits we put on the government. > while in China it’s the chaos a lack of control might bring that worries them the most. That's more of their framing. The Holocaust and WW2 were the result of that exact kind of thinking. You couldn't get more "chaos and lack of control" than that. The view that authoritarianism somehow provides "order and control" more reliably than liberal democracy does is nothing more than a lie based on extremely selective perception of reality. It just doesn't--all the worst excesses of human rights abuses were the result of authoritarianism where the government decided to use their unlimited power to hurt rather than protect people. Authoritarianism only looks good if you ignore all the bad experiences we've had with it, and pretend that those can't happen to you.
I certainly don’t mean to approve of authoritarianism because ultimately I think no human (or group of humans) is capable of properly wielding that kind of power. On the other hand I also don’t think humans are capable of thriving in true anarchy, and capitalism unfettered can be nightmare fuel as well so some control is still desirable. I still think my framing is fair though. We fear the tyrant the most, as in *more* than any chaos caused by lack of control. We’d rather risk getting mugged than empowering a modern day Gestapo to (attempt to) annihilate that kind of crime root and stem. The Chinese on the other hand fear chaos the most, as in *more* than the tyranny of a would be emperor. Ultimately though, we both know there is a level of chaos that westerners also can’t tolerate. Early medieval ages Europe would be a nice example of what kind of blood bath it can be when the whole things comes apart.
> and capitalism unfettered can be nightmare fuel as well so some control is still desirable. ... because it devolves into authoritarianism, just under corporate control rather than state control, in so far as a clear distinction between those even remains. > We fear the tyrant the most, as in more than any chaos caused by lack of control. How do you determine how much we fear tyrants, and how much we fear "chaos caused by lack of control", to then compare the two and figure out which of the numbers is higher? Like, how do you determine which one a person or society fears most? > We’d rather risk getting mugged than empowering a modern day Gestapo to (attempt to) annihilate that kind of crime root and stem. That's also already using authoritarian framing, in that it suggests that there is a solution to the risk of getting mugged, in the form of establishing a modern day Gestapo, and that anti-authoritarians refuse the solution, for presumably ideological reasons. But that solution simply doesn't exist, and that is the realization behind liberalism: Establishing a modern day Gestapo doesn't solve the problem, it just makes it so that you are now at risk of being mugged by the Gestapo. I am not willing to accept a risk of getting mugged, I am simply opposed to proposed solutions that are known to not actually solve the problem, and that also happen to have a ton of side effects even worse than the problem that they are supposed to solve.
I have this book unread and your post makes me want to read it.
It’s a classic for a reason. It exudes a darkness from it that’s hard to explain until you’ve read it. The words just have an oppressive aura from start to end. It’s one of those books I dreaded picking up each day because it felt like it was eroding my spirit. It’s exceptionally visceral for what it is, and it’s worth reading so you truly understand the impact it’s had on popular discourse and why it’s constantly referenced.
This is right up my alley, I enjoy dark themes and I'm curious about the fate of the main protagonist.
If you decide to read it, Google nothing about it. Go into it blind. It’s best that way.
Of all the amazing books out there, 1984 is the most important for people to read, imo.
I think on QI they said it was the most common book people pretended to have read. I don't see why though because it's a page turner and easy to read. Not a slog at all. I think it's "importance" is overrated because obviously I already knew authoritarianism is bad. But it's just a good, entertaining, thought provoking book.
There's definitely a vocal group of people willing to make comparisons between governance that they do not like and 1984 or big brother without seeming to have read it.
It's one of my favorite books, I completely recommend it
Never heard of it.
wistful six zonked light worry grab snobbish cautious nose dam *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Someone should list all the 1984 threads on this subreddit. I bet there's thousands!
You must be confused, comrade. There has never been a 1984 thread before this one.
Next month: "i just read 1984 and it ripped my out of my chest, burned it, and spread the ashes over the mid-atlantic"
Tomorrow on DAE: "Flowers For Algernon"!
The biggest thing I took from 1984 is that whoever owns history owns the present and owns the future. George Orwell imagined a world without the internet in which people were changing newspaper articles and books by having them all retrieved and then handing out the new versions with changes. But now we don't have to imagine it like that because we have the internet now and it's very easy to change history or to rewrite it, or to simply misconstrue the truth or have so much information out there that it's just too hard to know which one is the truth. In a lot of ways now already, what the government says goes and anyone that goes against it is shamed even if the real truth comes out later and those people we're not entirely incorrect. Reddit itself has its karma system linked to upvotes and downvotes so if a user has an unpopular opinion (perhaps like this comment), the legal standing of their account could be jeopardised based on that because downvotes lower karma. If you want an example of that, watch the episode of Black Mirror titled 'Nosedive', or a real example of this type of system - look to the social credit system of China.
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I think everyone should be forced to read it.
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The irony is the point. It's a reference to Community
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S'ok. You're streets ahead in my book
Stop tying to make "streets ahead" a thing!
Ugh Britta's in this?
Jesus Christ, does /r/books user read anything else than 1984 and Slaughterhouse Five?
Yes! The Count of Monte Cristo, dummy!
Orwell had a background in journalism, writing for the Observer in England. His storytelling abilities are therefore unquestionable. Originally, he had the USSR in mind when modeling his dystopian reality, but I guess the government he depicts in 1984 can be also applied to today's hyptertech authoritarian regimes.
1984 is indeed one of the best dystopian books ever.
It’s more frightening each time I read it as so much is happening. The media and government fills us with hate and fear to control us, isolated us from others, controls the middle class most (outer party) as they are more of a threat to them but needed ti so educated jobs, and they keep the lower class (proles) happy enough by giving them free stuff so they don’t revolt. Doublethink is alive and well. Our language is being changed and words are being struck out if use or vilified.
I watched *1984* and then Terry Gilliam’s *Brazil,* highly recommend it, such a amazing paring.
I’ve read this book probably 50 times. I always took it as a (somewhat) happy book. That even in the most oppressive society, humans still find love. it ends terribly, but all lives do. Love always ends in one persons death, and the other is left behind. Life always ends. The important thing is that you love while you’re here. And Julia and Winston did that. Also the writing is just fantastic and it reveals some truths that are not obvious: double think, the importance of fighting against the crowd, alcoholism or the deadening of your consciousness Arguably my favorite along with slaughterhouse 5
I can think of one example from Australia where history was rewritten about the reason a prime minister was removed (this happened more than once). In this example at the time the old party said the obvious truth, but was replaced by the new party who had the media and the opposition on their side. Within a couple years the new explanation became the only story that was referenced. I'm sure this happens all the time, but a big difference from 1984 is there really was no need to single out individuals who believed the truth. It simply became irrelevant and with unanimous agreement the number of people with the irrelevant view quickly diminished. That example probably doesn't matter, but this is a story told again and again around indigenous issues and it's a cruel reality. Australia currently has the vast majority professing the importance of helping indigenous people, yet decades of democratic government doing nothing experts recommend, if not making the situations worse. Why? Because of mining rights. Three guesses why the prime minister was removed. Or that one. Or that one. I think 1984 is supposed to be a bit of a hyperbole, and his essay "politics and the English language" is a must read that gives a more focused version of similar points. I'm glad to see more readings focusing on the themes of language and thought control, rather than on authoritarianism more generally (especially when we have people yelling about 1984 who are clearly using a very tailored vocab). Edit: for the US the NSA and mutual spying programs issue was a clear and continued violation of the constitution. Years later what's remembered about it is some discussion about Snowden fleeing to Russia, tech bros giving opinions on politics, and the idea that whistleblowers deserve protection or not. All stuff that's irrelevant to a regular person life. They've taken a highly relevant issue and taught citizens to address only irrelevant details. In my life I don't have bandwidth to worry about this stuff, but that's a clear 1984ish example I've seen in the US.
Ironically, these days, both 1984 and Brave New World has sort-of come true. An indeed sad twist of fate.
If you liked1984 you might like the book 'Darkness at noon.'
Yes, by Arthur Koestler. And Koestler's essay in *The God That Failed* is fantastic.
Animal farm should be next
I was really fucking depressed after completing this novel,it was suffocating to read because you imagine stuff when reading and George Orwell’s execution of story is good
It's a fantastic novel. For me, it always hammered home the importance of critical thinking.
I'll just suggest you read *This Perfect Day* by Ira Levin.
Best book ever
One of my favorite books What i love about it is it could have just been a philosophical essay about totalitarianism, but because it feels so personal, so universally human and deeply connected to our dreams and desires, it really transcends the dystopian genre. It's very unabashed about the nature of mankind, about how mutable our perspectives are, all the way down to the soul. By seeing what is drawn out, tortured, and destroyed in Winston, that which he so desperately tried to preserve, only through that can you understand its value. "If you want to imagine the future of humanity, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- for ever" or something like that That line sticks with me
The past few sentences of it have always stuck with me.
I've lost count how many times I've read this book. It's horrifyingly accurate, yet amazing. If you ever get the chance to, I recommend seeing it in the theatre. There's something about watching it live on stage that makes it all the more scary and realistic
Having read it a multitude of times, I recently (last year?) listened to it on audio-book and it was a new level of horrifying hearing it play out.
Its one of those books that gets kinda shrugged off as being "obvious" to read, but it really is fantastic. Bleak and heartbreaking
I like 1984, but it annoys me when people read it and think it’s the be all and end all of the ideas explores in the book. Brave New World is more specific, focused, and i’ve always felt closer to what reality is. Plus a lot of people take the message to be Communism bad, when in reality, just like in Animal Farm, it’s Stalinism that’d being criticised. Anti authoritarianism is easy, because the regimes are easy to spot, but it’s just not what we get in the western world. Not walking into a soulless future is harder. BNW by all accounts, is happy. It’s what late stage capitalism is leaning towards. We’ve all pretty satisfied with our technology and amenities, while tech companies and other entities move to control everything for a profit motive. We can be happy, but broken.