![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Brave-New-World_.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOrwell, most famous for Nineteen Eighty-Four <\/em>(one of the earliest works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame), was inspired by Stalinist communism in imagining his \u201chard tyranny\u201d of brute dictatorship.<\/p>\n Writing for the Institute for Art and Ideas, a British philosophical organization founded in 2008, British university instructor Emrah Atasoy compares Orwell and Huxley\u2019s different dystopian visions in an informed and provocative essay: \u201cOrwell, Huxley and the path to truth: How fiction can help us to understand reality.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cIn a world heavily stricken by disaster and tragedy, we may of late find ourselves asking whether we live in a utopia or dystopia,\u201d Atasoy writes.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIn this transitionary period, Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World\u00a0<\/em>(1932) and George Orwell\u2019s Nineteen Eighty-Four\u00a0<\/em>(1949) come to mind whenever the word dystopia is spoken of as the two pioneering cult texts.<\/p>\n \u201cThese classic dystopias seem to depict completely different world orders; however, the rulers\u2019 ultimate motivation in these respective novels remains the same: to circumvent possible dissent and uprising against their repressive regimes and to have total conformity and submission, in order to maintain absolute power and govern in line with their interests accordingly, even though their means are disparate.\u201d<\/p>\n While finding much to savor in each novel and identifying several common themes in each that continue to resonate, Atasoy ultimately concludes that Huxley’s “soft tyranny” better fits the disturbing and complex trends of today.<\/p>\n \u201cI believe that both authors predicted the future and today\u2019s world correctly in their respective ways.<\/p>\n “In different parts of the world, a society of fear, or surveillance society,.. has been created through constant watching via social media, populism, demagogy, and propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n BRAVE NEW WORLD<\/strong> “There is insistence on perpetual consumerism through the state motto \u201cEnding is better than mending\u201d; this social conditioning is compounded through the destruction of familial bonds and the prevention of emotional bonds, and through direct psychological conditioning in the form of hypnopaedia (sleep-teaching) or Neo-Pavlovian conditioning to deter children from books.<\/p>\n “Through all of the above measures, individuality is suppressed…, manipulative social engineering is enforced, and absolute power is maintained under the guise of a free \u201cutopian\u201d society.”<\/p>\n NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR<\/strong><\/p>\n “Big Brother creates a cult of the leader, in which thought-crime is used to prevent critical thinking and questioning, and hate weeks are organised to make citizens hate enemies of Oceania such as Emmanuel Goldstein, and by extension increase loyalty to Big Brother and the Party. Banning sexual activity (which Winston violates through his sexual activity with Julia) aims to prevent the development of emotional bonds, and the violation of this results in \u201crewiring\u201d this love towards Big Brother in the Ministry of Love, through torture (best exemplified through the protagonist Winston Smith\u2019s journey of<\/p>\n rehabilitation\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0renormalisation\u00a0<\/i>in Room 101, which teaches him to love Big Brother again, and that 2+2=5).”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters! We understand that the arts and literature can be vital, and in some ways even more powerful than politics in the long run, by sparking innovation, better ideas, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other\u2019s rights and differences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Who had the more prophetic and realistic vision of a dystopian future? George Orwell? Or Aldous Huxley? Orwell, most famous for Nineteen Eighty-Four (one of the earliest works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame), was inspired by Stalinist communism in imagining his \u201chard tyranny\u201d of brute dictatorship. Huxley, best known for Brave New World, … Continue reading Orwell\u2019s 1984 vs Huxley\u2019s Brave New World: Which fictional dystopia seems more timely today?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32,1585,1862],"tags":[815,437,142,529,1888,1886,814,59,1887,629],"class_list":["post-5557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-author-updates","category-fiction-in-the-news","category-george-orwell","tag-aldous-huxley","tag-animal-farm","tag-big-brother","tag-brave-new-world","tag-cautionary-tales","tag-conditioning","tag-dystopian-literature","tag-george-orwell","tag-hate-weeks","tag-nineteen-eighty-four"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-1rD","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5557"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5790,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5557\/revisions\/5790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>
\nHuxley, best known for Brave New World, <\/em>worried that a softer tyranny would ultimately prevail, one more insidious partly because it was more enveloping of both politics and culture and more seductive via a future of mindless pleasures.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u201cComparing and contrasting Huxleyan dystopia and Orwellian dystopia in the last instance, various pivotal questions emerge: Which projection resembles the reality we experience today? Which speculation best represents our society today?”<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n“Orwellian projection through sheer suppression can be observed in various parts of the world, as representation rather than truth itself may become more important and powerful due to the manipulative discourse and rhetoric of the ruling powers, and implanting absolute fear, rather than freedom, is the triggering force of various governing bodies.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nMeanwhile, Huxley’s dystopian classic achieves much the same goals through subtler and more seductive means.<\/p>\n<\/a>Orwell’s novel also suppresses individuality and independent thinking, but more directly.<\/p>\n<\/a>
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\nOf course, the subtitle of Atasoy\u2019s essay makes explicit one of the assumptions behind the Prometheus Awards: That fiction matters…. a lot… in shaping our ideas and assumptions.Despite a common misconception, science fiction writers do not actually predict the future. Instead, they imagine various scenarios, asking \u201cwhat if?\u201d and exploring the consequences, but all within the goal of telling good stories and imagining human behavior under multiple scenarios.Great literature, at its best, reminds us of human nature and history as well as the manifold human possibilities that people have explored \u2013 a far broader range than has existed within any one time and place.<\/a>
\nOrwell\u2019s two Prometheus Hall of Fame winners \u2013 Nineteen Eighty Four<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and Animal Farm<\/em><\/a> \u2013 resonate today as cautionary tales… not specific prophecies of the future but reminders of the grim past that may arise again if the lessons of history and human nature are not learned anew.To read the entire essay, visit the IAI.TV website.<\/a><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nIF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE:
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\n<\/u><\/strong>* Prometheus winners:\u00a0<\/strong>For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees \u2013 for the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the enhanced\u00a0Prometheus Awards page\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to the full set of published appreciation-reviews of past winners.* Read\u00a0\u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0an essay in the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/em>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.*\u00a0Watch\u00a0 <\/strong>videos <\/strong>of the 2022 Prometheus ceremony with Wil McCarthy, and past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog\u2019s\u00a0Video page.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>*\u00a0Join us<\/strong>! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards,\u00a0join\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans.<\/p>\n