One dystopia the other – Neil Postman

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman compares George Orwell’s dystopian worldview in 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s in Brave New World.

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Postman argues that Huxley’s dystopia might be closer to reality. Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985. The situation in the Western world, and especially the United States, is indeed terrifyingly even more spot on than in 1985. In today’s China, and even more so in Russia, Orwell’s reality, where Big Brother watches over the people, seems to be the state of affairs.

How astonishingly farsighted were Huxly and Orwell in 1932 resp 1949.

Fahrenheit 451 and The Hours

Two books I read recently: The Hours, read this week, and Fahrenheit 451 today. (That makes Fahrenheit 451 the first book of 2022 – not a bad start.)

The impossible: comparing these two totally different books. I’m going to try, very briefly. I will tell you in advance that I found Fahrenheit 451 to be a lot more my thing.

The story in The Hours is told from a three-person perspective. The story contains a lot of monologue interior and relatively little action. I would call Cunningham’s style baroque. The main characters in The Hours suffer under the great lives of others, which makes them feel limited. They want to break free from that, which is this book’s theme. It reminds me of Hanya Yanagihara’s overrated A Little Life, but in The Hours, unlike the pathetic protagonists in A Little Life, the protagonists do manage to move themselves to positive action.

The story in Fahrenheit 451 is told from the perspective of one person. The story is built primarily around action, and the background is mainly told in dialogues between the protagonist and extras. Bradbury’s style is tight and firm. The main character lives in a dystopian country in the future, where people’s abilities are suppressed, and all books must be burned. The protagonist “awakens” from his role in this dictatorship and takes action against it, which reminds me of 1984.