"Huxley vs. Orwell"
by Neil Postman
“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...
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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...
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Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance...
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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...
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As Huxley remarked in 'Brave New World Revisited', the civil libertarians and the rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In '1984,' Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In 'Brave New World,' they are controlled by inflicting pleasure...In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."
Huxley was quite obviously correct...
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“What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold,
is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be
granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.”
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.”
– George Orwell,
“Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel” (1949)
Freely download “1984″, by George Orwell here:
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