Orwell Versus Huxley
Inflicting pain is obvious. That’s an obvious way to hurt or subdue somebody. To break their will or to force them to let you have your way.
That’s what George Orwell was worried about.
But inflicting pleasure on someone is much more subtle and can be even more debilitating.
How can pleasure be more debilitating than pain?
Well, when’s the last time you heard someone try to beg their way out of pleasure?
Only addicts at the absolute bottom do that — and only because it’s no longer fun, and they have become acutely aware of that. As long as it’s still fun, there is no bottom. Until the pleasure is entirely replaced by pain, the person afflicted with it will continue to ask for more.
And that’s what Aldous Huxley was worried about.
These are two starkly different views on human dystopia. And, if you’ve read both Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, it’s easy to fall into a mental framework, as I did, of thinking of them as opposites. Or of being in competition: “which one of the two idealized dystopian futures is going to come true?” As if only one of them can, or would.
For those who haven’t read both, here’s the foreword to a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman — it gives a brief contrast between the two.
The thing is, they were clearly both right. About a lot of things.
Orwell tried to warn us that existential emptiness and utter powerlessness were going to be imposed upon us from outside. By a Party of people who re-write our history, control the way we think, and forcefully subdue those who resist. Huxley envisioned that no such thing was necessary — that we would eventually crawl willingly into slavery and stay there, like the bird who comes to love his cage.
Both authors had a deep understanding of human beings. Orwell focused on fear, Huxley focused on gratification.
If you wanted to maximize your chances of defeating someone in psychological warfare, you wouldn't just assault them outright. You'd distract them with something you know they’ll pay attention to, and then hit them while they're weakened. Or… you’d build them a golden bridge to retreat across. You’d make it so appealing for your opponent to walk away that he would happily cross that bridge for the prize you’ve offered. (Even if that prize is completely manipulative.)
Huxley knew this. He knew that fear wasn’t necessarily the most powerful weapon.
The world we live in is filled with both bad ideas and pleasure — both structures that would seek to abuse us, and the drooling passivity of consumer satisfaction. I no longer think of 1984 and Brave New World as being in competition.
The intersection of Orwell and Huxley is this: a world where we’re all filled with fear, hatred and ideology, and we all know we’re being encroached upon, but we’re too distracted and content to do anything about it.
It’s one of those positive feedback loop things. The more distracted you are, the easier you are to impose upon anyway. The more entertained you are, the easier it is to step closer into your personal space, off in the disregard of your peripheral vision.
One of my most core and oft-used philosophies on life is this: when there is more than one competing explanation for something, the answer is almost always both. There is rarely one single explanation or correct hypothesis for complicated human affairs.
Neo-classical economics is not “correct,” nor is the Austrian school, nor is the strictly monetarist view. They all have great explanations for different things, and even for overlapping things.
The average worker these days might be “more lazy than 50 years ago,” but the average employer offers less in the way of compensatory phenomena, too. If it’s one, it’s both. The problem isn’t one or the other — the problem is that the mutual trust and respect between employer and employee has degraded.
Look at some of the most powerful ideas that run our lives:
Freedom: uncompromising observance of personal importance
Efficiency: doing more with less by employing machines and tech (in other words, leverage)
Innovation: as if we have a quota of new ideas that we absolutely must create and implement each year
Knowledge: surely, knowledge will show us how to be happier
Free Sex: because we are entitled to pleasure and have nothing better to spend our time on
We hold these truths to be self-evident. As if each of these things is a standalone mountain of value, and is automatically good, no further questions thank you Your Honor. We rarely question things like efficiency and knowledge. We just pull them closer and say “yes, more of this, please. This tastes quite good, right now, today.”
And because we trust these things so implicitly, they could easily be used against us.
And they are. And they shall be, forever and ever Amen.
It’s easy to keep someone distracted by mentioning their favorite criteria for “progress” and then pointing out how we’re “progressing” just ever so encouragingly along those axes. It’s easy to keep Republicans happy when you tell them that we just became 4% more The Greatest Country On Earth, and it’s easy to keep Democrats happy when you tell them that we just expanded the federal budget for compassion by three hundred billion dollars.
I also recently finished David Foster Wallace’s mammoth Infinite Jest. Oh my allegedly-risen Christ, what a book. I can’t in good conscience recommend that book to anybody, but I am glad I read it. It’s about what happens to people, individually and in groups, as they get lost in the endless pursuit of pleasure. And, looking back over the book, there are echoes of both Orwellian and Huxleyan ideas.
If you were Orwell’s “Party,” you’d terrorize someone into obeying. Or you’d engage in deep and elaborate subterfuge to undermine individual thinking. This kind of stuff happens in the book.
But if you were Huxley’s “Controller,” you’d just pat their head and remind them to get back into their cage. And they would. Because it’s cozy in there. This kind of stuff happens in the book too.
In Infinite Jest, there’s a videotape that is so emotionally compelling and so entertaining that it ruins your life. It empties you out. After watching the tape, you stop eating. You stop drinking water (a horrible idea). You cannot bring yourself to do anything other than rewind the tape and keep watching, until you die. Which doesn’t take long.
This videotape is sought by certain international government interests, so that it can be used to undermine the American population. (Couldn’t help being reminded of TikTok as I read.)
Now of course this book is completely unrealistic. But it’s also completely not unrealistic.
In any case it’s a hell of an exploration of what can happen to people when they don’t have something meaningful and useful to pay attention to. It’s an exploration of what happens when tyrannical forces collide with people who are just too entertained to give a shit.
But it’s not outside forces doing most of the entertaining. The book also highlights a familiar dystopian idea that exists between the lines: that we are our own biggest oppressors. A lot of tyrannical forces come from deep within us. Not “them,” but us.
Another thing that can happen to people is that we entertain ourselves with causes and morals. It’s not just phones and screens that keep us distracted.
One of Wallace’s characters in Infinite Jest likes to offer an old adage: “Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight.” This is also something Nietzsche cautioned against in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. People shouldn't have virtues and goals beyond their capacity — virtues and goals that are too big for us. That is, we shouldn't claim to want to "solve world hunger" if we clearly can't and clearly are not going to. We have to pick something smaller, something actionable. Like maybe improving transport infrastructure in Ethiopia for food delivery. Or starting a small non-profit that feeds hungry city dwellers. Or volunteering 2 nights a week.
These days making an internet dance video genuinely passes as "coming out in support of the women in Iran." What a pathetic state of virtue we are in, when doing absolutely nothing to support a cause counts as supporting that cause. And we do the same thing with politics, global warming, tech monopolies, et cetera — swearing fealty to a cause without learning even the most elementary details about it or doing anything to actually address it.
It’s how we entertain ourselves. It’s like playing video games: we get to achieve feelings of importance and challenge and integrity, without any real-world sacrifice or commitment. It’s a simulation.
On the one hand, we perpetually entertain ourselves. On the other, we worship things we shouldn't be worshipping. And often we do both.
And I know this all sound cynical. But we’re talking about dystopia here, not rainbows.
Furthermore, let me be clear that I’m not judging anybody. I’ve been a drooling consumer just as much as the next guy. I’ve put in my hours stupidly scrolling Reddit and then standing up and casting my phone down in disgust at how much time I’ve just wasted.
Still, there is balance to be found in the middle. Instead, we worship things that are the right size for us. We worship the things we can love properly. Things like being a mother or a father. Things like... being honest and accountable even when it's hard. Things like friendship. Like spending time sitting with people we adore in the cool evening breeze. These things are worthy of worship if anything is.
As DFW also said, we always worship something. There is no such thing as not worshipping something. Our only choice is what it might be. And there are certain strengths and benefits that come with worshipping any particular thing, and there are also drawbacks and weaknesses.
If we worship the happiness of today, we avoid the sacrifice that might improve tomorrow. If we worship order and structure, we close ourselves off to the magic of dancing and surprise. If we worship freedom, we forget what it feels like to forgo something for our own good or the good of others. And we forget the consequences, which are often much more satisfying than "freedom."
What we worship is our biggest "input" into our lives. And we will receive the corresponding output. Eventually. Not immediately, but eventually.
Which is why I believe that Huxley’s vision leads directly into Orwell’s.
Think about all the bad, toxic relationships you’ve ever seen. Think about how they got bad.
Over time, right? Rarely all at once. They get bad over time.
It’s the slippery slope problem. I think the intersection between Huxley and Orwell is the slippery slope problem of human boundaries. Or the problem of boundaries that are ignored altogether, because they’re not even being watched.
This is why having relationships is hard. For everybody. This is why being a citizen is hard. Because it requires awareness, boundaries, communication about those boundaries, and enough self-respect to either defend what one cares about or walk away. It's hard to maintain all of these things across time. Especially when the sex is good, or the wages are high, or the lifestyle is easy, or whatever other short-term temptations are currently outweighing good long-term sense.
The creep of dystopian ideas into our lives is nothing new. That’s always present. There’s always someone who wants to abuse us and there’s always another way for us to entertain ourselves to death.
I’m not saying that we live in a fascist state, and I’m not saying that we’re ever going to. What I am saying is, it would be a whole lot easier for someone to implement one if we’re all too entertained to do anything about it.
Orwell and Huxley were right about a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean they have to be right about where we end up going. That’s still up to us.
Drink some water and sit outside with a loved one,
JDR
“Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?” - David Foster Wallace
If you want something else to read, check out one of my favorite Square Man posts: Speak for the Listener.