Reading 1984 and Brave New World has been a given for literate adolescents for at least 50 years now. I did it, and kids nowadays do it. When I did it, though, 1984 hadn't rolled around yet, as compared to being itself back in the dark ages when viewed now. Engagement in a cold war against the Soviet Evil Empire... well, the possibility rang true. Totalitarian government wasn't an obscure concept: there were examples all over the place. Sometimes even our good old U. S. of A. seemed to dabble in it. (Still does, sometimes.)
Brave New World was a different breed of dystopia, but dystopian all the same. It was published in 1932; Orwell's book came out in '49. Huxley described a less brutal but more sinister future, where our dreams are not punished but seemingly fulfilled. In both books, though, one thing is clear: individuality will not have a place in either of these futures. The concept of individual freedom, born in the Enlightenment, will not live forever. That's scary no matter how you envision the details.
It's an entertaining game to analyze our present and compare it to either of these books, and for that matter, to attempt to imagine our future in the shadow of their predictions. There's a wonderful letter from Huxley to Orwell that does a little of just that, remarkable of course considering that, well, it's Huxley and Orwell! Huxley comes down on his own side, and did so again publicly a decade later when he wrote Brave New World Revisited.
Huxley did have an alternate view of the future, though. His last book, Island (1962), is a utopian, not dystopian novel. It's also a little psychedelic (Huxley famously experimented with LSD).
Where are we now, then? It remains to be seen, vis-a-vis the future? Threats to individual rights certainly exist all around us; there are plenty of politicians who want nothing more than to tell the rest of us how we should live our lives. Will they do it? Ask the next Orwell or Huxley.
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