Letter from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell About 1984
March 8th, 2012
Via: Letters of Note:
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In 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. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
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March 8th, 2012 at 12:55 pm
I just had to look up the entire letter. One key phrase: ” Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations.” – This is something I find fascinating. FDR’s New Deal forestalled the ultimate revolution by exactly that, and WWII spent the pent-up energy in ways beneficial to the ruling elites. Do you think they realized they did not yet have the technology to put down a massive, possibly worldwide rebellion? Communism was THE biggest threat to their plutocratic vision, what better way to disrupt its progress than to start a worldwide conflagration? Today, however, I imagine our elites like their chances a lot better. In the US, they have prepared the battlefield to their advantage by passing totalitarian laws and making communism abhorrent to the vast majority. By all indications, it looks like we are entering Orwell’s Age of The Boot.