h/t /r
"It's wild how we somehow managed to get both Huxleyan and Orwellian dystopias operating simultaneously"
Georgia police are searching for a man who picked up $30 off a Walmart floor — and the law is on their side
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/georgia-police-searching-man-picked-091500322.html
I think I've mentioned this, but Huxley himself said in Brave New World Revisted, written in almost 30 years after the original, that he feared we were careening toward totalitarianism faster than he had guessed. I'm not sure he thought it would be more Orwellian than he originally thought. I wonder if he ever reviewed 1984.
It is always striking to remember that he wrote that book in 1931 before the Nazis came to power and conceived it in 1921 only a few years after Lenin came to power, let alone before Valium and Facebook and surveillance capitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Brave_New_World_Revisited
> review
Answer, yes, in a letter to Orwell (who was his French student at Eton)
QuoteWhether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.
QuoteIn other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.
https://gizmodo.com/read-aldous-huxleys-review-of-1984-he-sent-to-george-or-5890861
In other words, in Huxley's mind, the phase we are in now with "both Huxleyan and Orwellian dystopias operating simultaneously" is a phase predicted by Huxley but which he expected to pass because it's just such an inefficient and tiresome way to run a totalitarian society.