 There are a lot of dystopias that have been made over the years, lots of different interpretations of how the world can get worse in the future made by smart people, dumb people, and people cashing in on a craze. But when talking about the classics, there are two that stand out above all, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Both of these are seen as quintessential examples of the genre, as warnings of what the world may become if we're not careful. Both of them are frequently taught in high schools where kids pretend to read them, and both are frequently named by people who are bemoaning the state of society. And I can't really blame anyone for that, the book's work is a sort of cultural shorthand for referencing ideas about governmental power, censorship, propaganda, and hedonism. Having common ground that we all understand is an important part of communication, without that everything gets muddled. Imagine trying to talk to your grandparents exclusively through memes from 2017, it would be almost impossible because they would have no reference point. So people referencing popular cultural artifacts to try and comment on the real world isn't inherently good or bad, it just is. Here's the issue. For as many people reference these works, few people seem to understand them. At all. All they know is that the societies depicted are awful dystopias, which is true, but it goes much deeper than that. And for that matter, they're not interchangeable. While they both portray a future world that sucks for most of the people living in it, they do it in completely different ways. You can hate two different things for two different reasons, and there are more lessons to be learned in examining two things than in examining one. For that reason alone, I felt the need to make this video talking about the differences between these classic dystopias. 1984 is definitely more well known, or at least brought up more often by the far right whenever someone criticizes them. This one is all about authoritarianism through naked force, fear, and indoctrination. The story takes place in the year 1984, in Great Britain, which is now part of a continent spanning empire called Oceania. Oceania is run by an organization called The Party, led by a man called Big Brother, who may not even exist. Every citizen is constantly watched for any sign of dissent, and anyone who the police forces deemed subversive is kidnapped. Then they're either indoctrinated into following the proper ideology or disappeared. Not just killed, all evidence of their existence is destroyed. But you know, that's basically the same thing as getting banned from Twitter. The Party's control is maintained through stuff like DoubleThink and Newspeak. Newspeak is essentially control of language, if the people are never taught about things like democracy or self-determination, never even taught the words for it, then those ideas will fade from the cultural consciousness, making them easier to stamp out. DoubleThink is more interesting since it involves holding two contradictory ideas at once. Ingsoc, or English socialism, is the ideology of the Party. Their propaganda makes references to the evils of capitalism all the time, claiming that before the revolution, the capitalists ran everything with an iron fist while abusing those beneath them. Yet at the same time, the Party hates socialism. It completely rejects the ideas of collective ownership and liberation of the working classes. Depending on the situation, the Party shifts its propaganda focus so it's always in the right, and its enemies are always irredeemably evil. No sort of purposeless pleasure or recreation is allowed. Everything is for the benefit of the state, to the point where sex and marriage between people who are attracted to one another is not allowed. The government constantly switches up who is supposed to be their enemies and their allies with no recognition of who was who prior to that, and all kinds of other dictatorship stuff I have no time to mention. If I had to compare this to real-world regimes, which you really can't in any meaningful way, I would first jump to the fascist and Stalinist regimes that popped up in the 1930s and 40s. George Orwell was an outspoken democratic socialist who fought in the Spanish Civil War. He hated authoritarianism in all its forms and wrote extensively about that in stuff like homage to Catalonia. While most people have a general distaste for tyranny, the specifics of it are lost on those who have never lived under it, and Orwell tried to give people a feel for it. The world of 1984 is scary, even without deeper examination. It's a very in-your-face type of cautionary tale, and it's all based on things Orwell saw around him. Brave New World is much different. In some ways, it seems almost like a utopia at first. See, this world is completely controlled by a single government. Technology allows everyone to travel all over the planet at a moment's notice. There appears to be little poverty or homelessness. Everyone has some sort of employment, and there's even medication that prevents them from feeling sad. All of this is deeply impersonal, though. Humans are no longer born, but grown in labs, and everyone is developed for specific roles in society. These casts are given different mental faculties, and after birth, they're conditioned to like or dislike certain things to further control their behavior. The social conditioning borders on eugenics, and since everyone is raised collectively, there's no family unit or anything to replace it. Mother is seen as a swear word, and the idea that someone could be one is abhorrence to the people there. There's tons of sex happening, but nothing beyond that. The world is run by a small elite cabal that relies on everyone else to maintain their power and lavish lifestyles, but everyone is too distracted by their hedonism to give a shit. It's still a dictatorship, and dissent isn't allowed. It's just one where no one ever notices. Maybe their hard work goes to benefit a small ruling class, but as long as they have all their luxuries, who cares? Some of the issues brought up here feel a little like moralizing, almost like Huxley was saying that too much sex will destroy society, but only a little. If I had to compare this one to the real world, my mind immediately jumps to the United States. There's all this prosperity, there are ideological disagreements, and tons of opportunity to have fun, giving the illusion of freedom. But that freedom is not extended to everyone. The lower casts are purposely kept ignorant about how and why things work, and as time goes on they get poorer. The spectrum of what ideals are acceptable is narrow, but within that spectrum lively debate is allowed, even encouraged. And once you step outside what's acceptable, the government doesn't outright murder you. It just puts you off in your own corner where you can't bother anyone else, a far cry from becoming an unperson. Both of these works have stayed relevant for decades after they were written, so they clearly speak to people on some level even if they're unaware of it. Why is that? Are they simply cautionary tales? Not exactly, there's a little more to them than that. Brave New World was published in 1932, right in the midst of the Great Depression. Millions of people all over the world were out of work and losing their homes, which brought class and race differences into focus. Many governments were destabilized, those that weren't kept on trucking in spite of all the suffering around them. Suddenly everyone could see that they were just cogs in a machine, and whatever honeyed words their leaders poured in their ears, he was only there to keep them from getting angry. Both fascism and socialism grew in popularity until the former exploded across the world in an orgy of violence, and both grew out of the anger caused by realizing they lived in a world with similarities to Huxleys. On the other hand, 1984 didn't come out until 1949. After World War II had ended and the Eastern Bloc had become solidified under Soviet control. People in the West had just beaten back fascism, it's sort of, kind of, a little bit, and now saw this different type of authoritarianism show up on their doorstep, and many of them were terrified. While the meaning of this one is more straightforward, namely that totalitarianism is bad, the specifics of what that sort of government is like are lost on many who haven't lived under one. That's why it brings up things like double-think and erasure of history, so people can see it in the real world and know what's next. Perhaps more importantly, both of these works show that the primary ingredient for totalitarianism to prosper is fear. That's how the people are controlled. Not just fear of what happens to those who criticize the state, but fear of some outside force, fear of what might happen when the rulers are gone. Before World War II, countries like Poland and Germany had thrown away their democracy, in some cases specifically to, quote, defend against communism. Because if communism came, then they'd all become authoritarian, so to prevent that, they have to become authoritarian. Hey look, more double-think. That's why Oceania is always at war with either East Asia or Eurasia. If there was peace, the people would look inward. If any citizens of the world state stopped taking their Soma, they might get upset about the way their fellows are treated. No one has to like the government, they only have to like it more than the alternative. Neither of these works is explicitly socialist, but Brave New World does have some critiques of capitalism thrown in there. They literally worship Henry Ford as a god because he made the assembly line, and the government will only allow new games to be produced if they'll increase the population's consumption. We're trying to stimulate the economy just for the sake of stimulating the economy. It's not subtle, guys. I know Ford didn't actually invent the assembly line, but the book's characters think that he did. The party in 1984 is one of contradictions. It doesn't have any coherent economic principles. As much as Orwell despised the control the wealthy had over society, he hated Stalin-style governments, too. Lust for power comes from people who hold, or claim to hold, all sorts of ideologies. It's not something that only applies to people you dislike, but constructing a society exactly like what came before, only it's all in red now, isn't helpful to anyone except whoever is in charge. No, neither of them is about how evil communism is. Both of them are about how much government sucks, and I think most of us can agree with that, at least a little. But that brings me to the important thing about dystopias. They're never predicting the future. They're criticizing the present. Brave New World in 1984 were criticizing the world where fascism was on the rise. More recent things have drawn attention to other issues, things like religious extremism in the Handmaid's Tale, American fetishization of violence in The Running Man, or climate change in The Wall. For a dystopian story to make any sort of impact, let alone stay relevant for 80 years, it has to make some sort of commentary on current issues. It can't just be that there's an evil government, there needs to be something else there. Even shitty young adult dystopias from the last 10 years usually got that right, although I think most of those were on accident. The Hunger Games is all about wealth inequality and how an American-style life of luxury is only possible when a small group of people exploit the labor and resources of other places. But I guess no one told Jennifer Lawrence that. To see what kind of political or social movements scare people, look at what sort of dystopias they imagine. Most of them involve some sort of strictly controlled society, though occasionally you'll see some that showcase how authority has completely broken down in chaos reigns, like in A Clockwork Orange. But what if you're a government who wants to control its people without outright burning all the books and imprisoning dissidents? After all, that could make them angry enough to revolt, and even if it didn't, that method of control is resource-intensive. It requires hiring tons of police and or military forces to protect you from internal and external threats, and they have to be compensated well enough for them to be willing to brutalize the population. You also need to spend a lot of time on propaganda, including tracking down and destroying subversive media, and dictatorships run on corruption, bribery, and nepotism, all of which are expensive as well. You can't just ban or get rid of all the books that seek to warn people about you because that confirms all their fears. So what do you do? You change the message. Don't stop the river, just change its course. That's why most American schools who teach about 1984 in Animal Farm failed to talk about George Orwell himself. If they mentioned that he was a hardcore socialist who went to another country to fight in a war for his beliefs, kids might start to think that communists aren't all cartoon villains who are out to eat American babies. And if they think that, then they might start to think that our current system is imperfect and try to change it. And if they do that, then that could threaten the power of those in charge. Many dystopias lack any sort of nuance, which makes them shitty. All they do is push a strawman that gets them praise from people who already agree, limiting your success to certain circles. But Huxley and Orwell had a ton of nuance in their writing. The bad guys were clear cut enough to make the point, yet they felt like actual people with actual motives beyond being evil. Nuance is poison to propaganda though. And if these popular writers were circulating around with their dangerous ideas, that would be the end of the government's control of the people's minds. That's why American schools spend so much time on these. So they can make sure everyone is familiar with them and have the quote, correct interpretations running around in their heads. It's about making sure they know they're allowed to question things, then feeding them the answers to those questions. That way, those in control have command over the cultural touchstone that we reference, and therefore they have command over communication. It's the same way rulers have always tried to influence or control religion to suit their needs. It's a powerful force that shapes the actions and beliefs of their populace. The point is to destroy nuance on an individual and cultural level. 1984 has been twisted so far beyond recognition that people can pair any sort of criticism to the thought police. That holding any sort of unpopular opinion makes them a visionary who sees better than the sheeple. Orwell's messaging barely gets through all the bullshit. And even people who understand the important parts are drowned out by those who don't. No matter how many people see this video, millions more are going to hear about how it was written specifically to call out how evil America's enemies are and how none of that criticism should be turned inward. Brave New World admittedly has less notoriety, but it's still important to let the kids know that the world will become bad if you let everyone be happy. We can't let them think that the message is that if you ignore problems, they get worse. We need them to understand that the only way to achieve true happiness is to be constantly working for one of our many illustrious corporations. Being occupied with leisure activities was the true source of John's woes, after all. And before anyone gets pissy with me, this goes the other way too. Propaganda knows no borders. All that changes is the message and framing. There are countries that have outright banned books like this because they didn't want people questioning the status quo. And that's even worse than flooding the airwaves with propaganda to pervert the original meaning. At least this way, some people can get the real message. Normally, I'm all on board for differing interpretations of things unless they clearly had a message that the creators were trying to send, then saying it's something else is asinine, if not outright dishonest. You can like these books. You can hate George Orwell's beliefs. You can come to your own conclusions about the real world, but you don't get to lie about what other people said. That got angrier than I intended it to. Patreon, Patreon, Oppo Savilane and Eva Tumor, Brother Santotis, Christopher Quinten, Deanna Dahem, Mbis, Emily Miller, Joel, Carcat Kitsune, Lauren Tix, Lisa Rudikkova, Madison Lewis Bennett, microphone, Rees Yeroll, Sad Martigan, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, Vacuous Silas, Bay Victus. 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