I found the article “Conclusion: Two Futures: A.F. 632 and 1984” to be very interesting. The comparisons and similarities to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 helped me better understand the respective societies of the two dystopias.
I agree whole-heartedly with Ward’s assertion. Orwell’s society is incredibly inefficient on many levels. The most obvious inefficiency is cost; telescreens would cost millions to both research and produce, and to keep them running - and pay people to monitor and run them - would be incredibly costly as well. The cost to brainwash an entire society would be astronomical. Additionally, the impossibility of brainwashing our society is quite possible. Our society is too educated, too large, and too intelligent for such brainwashing to occur without incredible protest. Such an undertaking would be drastically inefficient, and would cause so much instability that an attempt would be promptly stifled.
As it is, our society is already strikingly similar to Huxley’s dystopia. Pleasure is the focus of Huxley’s dystopia, and it is also the focus of many American lives, with amusement parks, casinos, restaurants of every kind, and prostitutes readily available. All the American government has to do is loosen the reigns on our society a little more (in terms of sexual conduct specifically) and deny the existence of God. This could be easily done through internet protocols through TV programming, and through public education.
“In both cases, man must be intoxicated. For Orwell, the most potent intoxicant is power; for Huxley – at least at the time he wrote Brave New World – it is sex. But for Orwell, as for Huxley, only a state that takes the ultimate intoxicant into prime consideration can achieve stability. The choice of power leads to a stability based on repression; the choice of sex, to a stability based on license. The final aim is the same; only the means are different.”
This quote was extremely powerful to me, because thoughts of this nature had gone through my head as I was reading both of these novels. Both novels share the same cornerstone: repression of human rights. When Ward brought up the subject of plagiarism with regard to the authors of these novels, I thought, “Who cares?” Either way you go about it, a dystopia will end up repressing basic human rights. Even though similarities abound in these novels, the final aim is achieved through different means. The end is always the same in a dystopia; the means to the end is where the contrasts abound. These contrasts are irrelevant in the big picture; eventually all that will be left is a few people basking in infinite power as the rest of the society lives in complete ignorance to the truth.
Though these dystopias are frightening and difficult to read at times, their purpose is quite profound: to “help to prevent something from happening.” If we take anything away from these books, I hope that we at least grasp that concept – for the reality of a dystopia could be on our very doorstep.
