Infinite Distraction Or Government Oppression? Huxley vs. Orwell

Controlling People and Society Writers for a long time have agued about whether or not “greater powers” control society. Will aliens come to earth in the form of humans and try to take over the world? Will crazy dictators take over? Will manipulative politicians undermine democracy by legislating for personal gain? All of these scenarios have been discussed, debated and written about for a long time.

A Popular Viewpoint One popular view of the world was written about by an author by the name of George Orwell. In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, Orwell describes a world where a totalitarian government controls everything the people do. The book popularized the phrase “Big Brother is watching you.” Much or what Orwell wrote was influenced by what he saw in Nazi Germany. Readers believed this could happen based upon what they had seen in WWII.

A More Subtle Perspective A similar, but subtly different, novel, written by Aldous Huxley in 1932, was Brave New World. Brave New World is also a dystopian novel which predicted that the rise of technology, science, and totalitarianism in the 1930s would create a future totalitarian state in which humanity had been robbed of all free choice and were forced into happiness through the manipulation of genetics and psychology. Its focus was on the use of technology to create and support totalitarian rule.

A Comparison Here’s a thought-provoking illustration about the dystopic visions of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a compare-and-contrast text borrowed from media critic Neil Postman’s still-relevant 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman published the book long before many of the technologies depicted in the pictures shown here even existed, but his message is as clear as ever. 

So who is right? Huxley or Orwell? Aldous Huxley George Orwell