Since 2016 we’ve been hearing rumors of impending totalitarian takeover. One might have expected the Orange Man hysteria to die down after Joe Biden’s 2020 win. But instead we ourselves faced with dueling despots, as Grabber of Pussies and Sniffer of Children battled once again for the Dark Throne.
2024 is shaping up to be a battle against ontological evil. Each side is convinced the other is prepared to commit any perfidy to seize power. Both expect their opponent to take harsh retributions upon taking the throne, and neither will trust the vote unless it goes in their favor.
As has been the case since 2016, Trump has done a superior job of stoking imaginations. If you believed everything you read on the Internet, you’d be convinced that Trump is plotting with Putin and the Proud Boys to institute a Nazi Christofascist tyranny. The Bad Orange Saga has reached its Antichrist arc, complete with crowds bemoaning the end of the world.
But there’s also plenty of apocalyptic fervor outside the mainstream media circuits. As supervillains go, Biden is less blustering overlord and more seedy old man in a playground. But lacking a charismatic Goldstein, Right-leaning dissidents find their monsters hiding in the shadows. The terrors of Trump pale beside the pods, bugs, and social credit scores of their Agenda 2030 future.
Given the multiple crises swirling around us today, it’s easy to understand our End Times fears. We haven’t been this close to a nuclear exchange since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Economic indicators suggest an impending downturn that makes 2008 look like the Moderately Unpleasant Recession.
But it’s also hard to miss the barely-concealed glee with which people across the political spectrum anticipate the apocalypse to come. One would think the rise of authoritarian tyranny to be a cause for fear and trembling. Yet we’re left to speculate on why it is that when things get bad, many wait in joyful hope for dystopias to come.
George Orwell’s 1984 has become the go-to cliché for political commentators. Putin, Soros, Zuckerberg, and many other controversial figures have been recast as Big Brother. Our modern vision of tyranny derives largely from a Cold War-era critique of Stalinist Russia. We fetishize Eurasia’s poverty, brutality, and naked oppression and expect the enemy to arrive marching in jackboots.
That model certainly makes for some high no-safeword drama. And it’s not entirely inapplicable. Our Party leaders certainly have unprecedented tracking and surveillance capabilities. Our AWFLs are as enthusiastic in their goodthink as any Anti-Sex League member, meaningless hookups notwithstanding. But in other ways it’s an ill fit for our post-industrial world.
When you wage war with the Thought Police, you expect ruthless killers who will stop at nothing to stamp out subversion. You know this will be a dirty war, and so you will have to get accustomed to rolling around in the mud yourself. What would you do to stop Christofascists or Agenda 30 bureaucratic totalitarians from taking the country?
O'Brien … began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.
'You are prepared to give your lives?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit murder?'
'Yes.'
'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?'
'Yes.'
'To betray your country to foreign powers?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'
'Yes.'
'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face--are you prepared to do that?'
'Yes.'
As commonly read today, 1984 is a moralistic parable you weaponize against your enemies. You’re the honest seeker after truth and freedom. They’re power-hungry sadists or cowardly bootlickers. Most dystopian stories end with the protagonist crushed, but that’s not a deal-breaker. Christianity may not be what it once was, but we haven’t lost our martyrdom fetish.
Besides, declaring your opponents supervillains frees you from the shame of defeat. If your enemy is invincible, there’s no need to feel bad about surrendering — or not fighting at all. And with the rise of the Internet, you can scream DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER across the aethyr without consequences.
For those trapped in an unpleasant and boring world, a LARP war with the Thought Police offers intrigue and excitement. There’s no need to worry about dead end jobs or past due bills when you can be a rebel battling powerful enemies. And while morality is complicated in the real world (and, we should note, in Orwell’s book), the 1984 clichés have clearly defined heroes and villains. Just follow the crowd and you’ll always know who you’re supposed to hate.
In its lowest form, 1984 decays from tragedy to melodrama. A complex commentary on the human condition is recast as a simplistic fable to keeps us distracted. And political players on all sides have used these myths to win contracts and influence voters.
Time spent playing as a hashtag warrior for #theresistance is time not spent asking inconvenient questions. Waiting for Q to save you like Goldstein wastes energy you could use saving yourself. Melodramas are predictable, and so are those who use them as guide books.
For a different dystopian model, we might turn instead to a book that was published 17 years before 1984, and one that has largely been forgotten.
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
Aldous Huxley to George Orwell, October 21, 1949
1984 as a blistering critique of Stalinist Russia from a disillusioned fellow traveller. Brave New World is a satire of the Utopian socialism of English writers like Edward Bellamy, John Morris, and H.G. Wells. These Victorian and Edwardian writers envisioned a future of peace, prosperity, and stability. Brave New World takes those ideas to their logical conclusions.
The World State City of London in the year 632 AF (After Ford, 2540 AD) offers free sex and creature comforts that today’s NEETs and incels can only dream of. Soma has replaced Valium as the relaxant of choice. Poverty, war, and want have long been forgotten. Sexual repression is long forgotten and monogamy is seen as selfish.
Paradise is maintained through efficiency and organization. Humans are now bred in incubators rather than wombs, and conditioned from fertilization to love their assigned job. Hypnotic conditioning from childhood helps keep workers and leaders alike from stepping outside the bounds of order. Everyone produces and consumes in the appropriate amounts for social and economic stability, their needs and wants shaped by endless repetitions.
Our Ford’s thoughts on history as “bunk” have become Gospel in the world state. Most history and literature has been discarded, with only outlines of its horror remaining. As World Controller Mustapha Mond explains the past:
Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby.
No wonder those poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn't allow them to take things easily, didn't allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty--they were forced to feel strongly.
And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?
Bernard Marx, is one of this civilization’s few discontents. A hypno-conditioning specialist, he can’t help seeing the machinery underlying his utopia. But where Winston Smith ultimately rebels against Big Brother, Marx tries desperately to fit in with the taller, more socially adept Alphas. The reader shares Marx’s discomfort and his nagging sense of the world’s utter emptiness.
Marx gains a bit of social status when he’s assigned to watch over John Savage, a child born on a reservation outside the world state. John has grown up in the Savage Reservations, the child of a woman abandoned there during a tour twenty years ago. The unconditioned barbarian quickly becomes a World State celebrity. But, repulsed by the society he once called a Brave New World, John becomes uncontrollable. The book ends with Marx exiled to an island for misfits and John Savage dead by suicide.
One can draw plenty of parallels between Brave New World and our modern situation. Those who dislike LGBT childhood education efforts could find a convenient cudgel in its childhood sex play games. Those who hate the Longhouse and the Nanny State could easily point to Huxley’s nightmarishly managed society. And those who see botnets behind every critical Tweet could give a nod to hypno-conditioning.
But while it’s still read, Brave New World has become neither an icon nor a cliche. For every “I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta,” you’ll hear a thousand “We have always been at war with Eastasia”s. 1984 is widely cited by people who have neither read nor understood it. Brave New World is nearly as obscure as the Utopian socialists that inspired it. And I would submit that this is largely because while Orwell’s vision critiques society, Huxley forces us to critique ourselves.
Like 1984, recent dystopian hits like The Hunger Games and The Handmaid’s Tale have clearly delineated villains. The Capitol leaders and the Sons of Jacob, like the Thought Police, are irredeemable evildoers who do evil. This gives the reader the joy of villains to hiss at. But, most compellingly, it gives them a protagonist to identify with.
In the World State of London, humanity has evolved past the need for villains. Tomakin, who abandoned John’s mother Linda in the Reservation, is probably the book’s most unpleasant person. But his is a social faux pas, more Chappaquiddick than Killing Fields. He resigns and vanishes from the scene the way any disgraced gentleman in Huxley’s circle would if caught up in a sordid affair.
There are no glorious torture scenes here, and nobody whose vices can make you feel more virtuous. What you get is an unvarnished view of a materialist Utopia. The state has not withered away so much as it has been transmuted. There’s no longer any need for an iron fist, as there are no enemies left to crush. The World State spends its time balancing budgets and ensuring citizens produce according to their abilities and consume according to their needs.
Most of us are well aware of consumer culture. We regularly mock the Leftist “consoomers” genuflecting before their game consoles and Funko Pops. But there are lots of Right-leaning folks building identities on buying choices. As
notes in his excellent piece, “The Battle of Woke Hill”:The very notion of identity — in the popular contemporary sense — is a pure invention, a fashion phenomenon. That exurban nitwit with the big black pickup and its oversized wheels, gun logos, black-and-white “no quarter” flag, and Punisher-skull decal is no less “performing an identity” than the purple-haired trans-kid at the nearby college.
We think of ourselves in active verbs. Our identity hinges on what we buy, where we live, who we fuck. We measure our lives with emojis and hashtags. But we have forgotten the great Is at the center of the equation. Our obsession with Black bodies and sexual variance is rooted in a deep existential hunger. Shorn of an immortal soul, we genuflect before immutable incidentals like race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Brave New World reflects this emptiness back in our faces. It reminds us that we have chosen our chains because they are comfortable. It hints that many “individualists” are actually living out someone else’s script. Instead of imagining ourselves heroes, we see how much we are controlled by outside forces.
This is hard to swallow, especially in a freedom-fetishizing culture born out of revolution. And so we turn away from those bitter and oversized red pills and lose ourselves in less discomforting dreams. This distracts us from our fears. But it also ensures we will do nothing to change the situation at hand.
Considering that even before Covid some 1 in 6 Americans were on some form of prescribed psychoactive like SSRIs and that north of 20% of women in their 40s and 50s are on antidepressants, I'd say we're well on the way to Huxley's vision. I imagine those numbers are much higher post-Covid. All we need is better drugs to get on the path to Soma and the narco-tyranny is nearly ready.
"Brave New World" was mandatory reading and test topic in my english class in the early eighties. I wonder if that had much impact on my classmates. I had decided I was like the "savage" protagonist but couldn't make up my mind about the whole thing being dystopian. This goes deep. On the surface, abolishing human suffering would be a great achievement.