My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. “Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. Huxley even wrote to Orwell, explaining why his idea of the future was more realistic. It’s known that Aldous Huxley and George Orwell didn’t agree with each other’s views of the future. One warns of the watchful eye of Big Brother, while the other prophesizes a distant future where citizens are engineered and birthed from artificial wombs.
Such underlying themes are buried within the pages of two of the most well-known and celebrated dystopian novels of the 20th century. Often to make a point, either in regard to the current state of the world or where we’re heading, you might hear variations of “Nineteen Eight-Four is here,” something being ‘Orwellian’ or we’re heading towards a “brave new world.” Whereas Huxley … rightly foresaw that any such regime could break because it could not bend.” - Christopher HitchensĪs the tectonic gears of the world continually grind and change, populations grow, technologies improve, the struggle for power continues, and so do the references to some near and far off dystopian future. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. “We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression ‘You’re history’ as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself.
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