Why My Money's Still on Orwell

Always the televisions. They’re everywhere. Airports, taxicabs, hand held via smart phones. They make a single melancholy whisper: your life isn’t adequate; you must buy something and fast. Remember: when you’re in the mood to buy, you’re likely not thinking. Here’s some excellent prose from the opening of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, written almost forty years ago:

 

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

 

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley‘s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

 

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. 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. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. 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. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

 

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”  

 

**

 

Postman’s prose seems dated now. Like so many American writers he was captivated by choices—our Victorian inheritance perhaps. Orwell didn’t merely fear that what we fear will ruin us—he feared the falsified nature of fear, its easy plasticity, the way fear itself can be the distraction. All advertising is built from fear—or “agitation” if you like—your skin is loose; you’re bladder is insurrectionary; you drink the wrong brand of soft drink; or worse—you’re driving a proletarian automobile. Orwell understood the entertainment industry of fear all too well. Lately there’s been a ubiquitous commercial for a British luxury car which suggests that you also can be a James Bond-esque villain if you fork over $75,000 for the accoutrement. People are indeed controlled by inflicting pain, and imagining that you’re doing the inflicting is one of the centrifugal bumble puppies of falsified fear. So my money’s still on Orwell.