Thread: 1984 vs. Brave new world

I would say 1984. Nothing in that book is THAT far fetched, keeping in mind that the thought police didn't actually read your mind, they were just very good at following people and freaking them out. There is enough propaganda out today that could almost justify what Big Brother distributed in the book. Now, Brave New World... I don't see emotionally, random sex being accepted anytime soon. I don't know, just the whole thing seems a bit too far fetched to be taken seriously.

I think that 1984 is such a well developed, emotionally stimulating book. The feelings that Winston goes through in regards of hiding his emotions, of finding intellectual stimuli, of finding emotional stimuli, then betraying his love... It moves me. Brave New World didn't do that for me, so maybe that fact curved my vote to 1984. It seemed to be such a sterile story. I always look to be moved emotionally by stories, for better or worse.

- -Barrett

I think both of those books were contracted by the Free Masons in order to make it seem that Government was the most serious threat to Civilization.

No educated intellectual could ever really think so.

The most significant threat to us all is the unstrained power of Private Wealth. If one is most worried about being enslaved, then one does not worry about Government so much as one should worry about Slave Owners. And Private Wealth is Slave Owners.

Government is the only Institution ever created by People that can possibly be strong enough to protect the ordinary Individual from the vast and almost unlimited power of Private Wealth.

So, we have books like "1984" and "Brave New World" which attack and slander the Institution of Government, that is, the only Thing we have that even has a chance of Protecting us.

And we have idiots who think that their choice of Truth is between One Attack on Government and Another Attack on Government, without ever suspecting that both authors may have been in the pay of the same Conspiracy -- a conspiracy of Private Wealth to destroy the institutions that protect the Common Man from the slavery of unlimited exploitation.

You don't believe me? Study History. No Civilization has fallen because of too much Government. Every Civilization has fallen when Private Wealth overthrew Government and then lost control of the chaotic ramifications. you see, what we know certainly about Private Wealth is that it has never cracked a History Book. it blithly attacks Government to destroy Civilization ever supposing that in the general ruin, they can pick up more pieces then they started with. It is a stupid hope, but there are plenty of stupid people.

And we have idiots who think that their choice of Truth is between One Attack on Government and Another Attack on Government[/b]

if you are refering to me than you're wrong. i just asked which people thought was more accurate and more likely. i was just wondering other people's opinions on two books that have a similar message.

Originally posted by rexle

And we have idiots who think that their choice of Truth is between One Attack on Government and Another Attack on Government

if you are refering to me than you're wrong. i just asked which people thought was more accurate and more likely. i was just wondering other people's opinions on two books that have a similar message.[/b]

If I am so wrong about supposing that you must believe that the Absolute Truth must reside somewhere in or between Huxley and Orwell, and that you therefore hold Government to be the greatest threat to Civilization, then you did little to prove me wrong.

Where, for instance, is any confession that Government is at all positive and desirable.

No, you simply repeated what I found to be problematic in the first Place, and that is you wanted your Anti-Government Colleagues to conspire with you as to whom is to be preferred in propagandizing against the Forces of Order and Civilization.

Well, if you want my opinion, I I were a dedicated anarchist and wanted to return the World to the utter darkness of Chaos and Barbarism, then I would prefer Huxley. Orwell, after all, was a drunk and not quite so at his intellectual peak. "1984" therefore seems overlly contrived and too far over the top. Propaganda needs to be more believeable then that. But Huxley's "Brave New World" is a study of intellectual imagination and manipulation. and cunning. For instance, many of the the abuses and threats that we would have most to fear from Private Wealth, Huxley assigns to Government. He takes all of the real threats but pastes them over from the Actual Good Guy Defenders of Civilization. So we have it that Huxley is intelligent enough to lie with half truths. The threats are real, but he mixes up the True Enemy.

And for Huxley, the True Enemy would be the one who isn't paying him or offering him Membership into the Private Country Clubs of Wealth and Privelege.

My.. Sometimes you just want to pound the living shit out of disingenuous intellectuals, huh. Oh, but leave all that to me. One needs to be able to tell which ones are the disingenuous ones... which is apparently beyound your grasp.

Huxley's "Brave New World" from me, mainly for the reason that genetic engineering and brainwashing are, in my opinion, a likely path this world will take...

I can't say which is more likely to come true, probably a mixture of both. If the internet is censored then I say 1984, but brave new world is probably more likely at the moment.

I really like the way 1984 is written, though. It's very straightforward and capable of speaking to a very large audience. Everything in the book is a metaphor for much larger things, for instance the anti-sex league. That predicts not the outright banning of sex, but rather the general repression of human desires that comes along with advancement in civilization. Sex would never become illegal IMO, but denying the very things that make you human already takes place.

And Goldstein as a scapegoat. Perfect metaphor for the situation that's happening right now. We're being conditioned to HATE terrorists with all our hearts, and it's becoming all too easy to forget that american revolutionaries were themselves TERRORISTS in every sense of the word. The government wants us to hate revolution and attaches it to racial prejudices and giving it a label engineered to generate hate, to give it some more convincing power. Think Immanuel Goldstein. Now think Osama Bin-Laden. One is a jew who wants to bring down oceania's way of life. The other is an arab who wants to bring down america's way of life. Neither has ever been caught by their enemy governments, and probably never will be. Both appear on television screens every day as part of our daily hate ritual. In 1984 it's the daily hate, and IRL we call it the evening news.

I don't really think it's necessary to rail on rexle, Leo; of the two books, our future will more closely resemble one over the other. It's not a matter of fulfilling some prophecy foretold in one of the books; our future could look nothing like either of them, it could be a 24-7 circus show where we dance for the amusement of fluffy pink aliens on punishment of being forced to listen to Spice Girls albums for all eternity if we don't, and that future would still more closely resemble one than the other - government might not be involved, but lack of freedom still would be. It's like asking people if object X is more feminine or more masculine - most people still have an easy time choosing an arbitrary gender for things that have no sexual or gender characteristics whatsoever.

I imagine it would be a bit of a hybrid, leaning more towards the BNW side - we'd be dominated by some sort of domineering, manipulative, monopolistic entity a la 1984, but the fact would be hidden behind an endless array of superficially tittilating diversions by way of Brave New World. At least, insofar as our future going Dystopian, that's the future I imagine, although it should be said that I have high hopes for the institution of government and consider it, in its most ideal form, to be a Very Good Thing. There are plenty of outcomes that fall short of those extremes... and I still think most of them will gravitate more towards Huxley's portent of cheap thrills and shallow thoughts than Orwell's "Boot stamping on a human face... forever" vision.