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Orwell wrote “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, and Huxley, “Brave New World”. Both are classic masterpieces of dystopian literature, and have shown the modern reader a haunting vision of what might have been had anything gone awry during the weird and terrifying twentieth century. Dictatorship and totalitarianism, governmental birth control and the suppression of all human rights—these are all elements presented by both writers as the great banes of human society, all in their most extreme form; and at the same time these are things that, under Fascist and Communist regimes, the human race has tasted ever so bitterly. It is the work of these two men to speak of the degeneration of the human race—to terrify and captivate us with tales of societies so alien to our own. Yet there is a significant difference between the Orwellian prole and Huxley’s Deltas and Epsilons, between the grey and gloomy London of 1984 and the seemingly bright and cheerful one of 632 After Ford; and that difference is one which serves to strike within the mind of the reader the death of the world as we now know it.


“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” “WAR IS PEACE/FREEDOM IS SLAVERY/IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” The principles of the Party, of Ingsoc (or English Socialism, so as to quote it in the uncivilized tongue of Oldspeak). In the year 1984 (is it really 1984, though?) the Party controls all, and rules over a flock of sheep, fearful and obedient. Oceania is currently and constantly at war with either Eastasia or Eurasia, depending on how the Party chooses to send it out. But they are always victorious, oh yes. Always does the radio resound with tales of stunning successes on the part of the armies on the Front, with stupendous figures of captured and killed, with regaling and inspiring tales of heroes in combat—succeeded by a short announcement that rations will be decreased, or in some rare cases increased, by a certain amount. Their victories are such that there exist Victory Mansions, Victory Gin, and even Victory Cigarettes. Under the glorious regime of the Party nothing is ever wrong; how could there be anything wrong? Big Brother watches on with his inexorable telescreens, Emmanuel Goldstein is an enemy of the Party who is severely criticized during the Two Minutes’ Hate, and those who dare to oppose Big Brother—not that they would, of course—are sent off to MiniLuv (the Ministry of Love), where they are… loved. Very much. Such is the Orwellian London, of Airstrip One, in 1984.


George Orwell created a dystopia which is both terrifying to behold and imagine. His chosen color is a bleak grey, and his London a city which has been, albeit not perfectly, cleansed of the traces of Capitalism. The abbeys, Westminster and St Paul, St Martin and such, yet stand, though they have been put to other uses. There is no miracle pill, no future technology, to cause its inhabitants to love Big Brother willingly and unconditionally, save that one tool used so frequently and favorited by all dictators from all ages: brainwashing. Mindless, sweet brainwashing that relieves people of the cumbersome liability to have to think for themselves. The unbridled madness of the Two Minutes’ Hate, the textbooks which have been tampered with to put the glorious Party above all, and the Ministry of Love which looms in the background as an ever-present threat to all those who might be foolish enough to rebel against, or (heaven forbid!) even think against the Party… It would be madness not to love the great and mighty Party in such an environment.


Let us now turn to the world of Huxley, the Brave New World; it is one which seems happy and gay, a stark contrast from that of Orwell. It is a world which approaches both enticingly and terrifyingly. The brave new world has murdered the hungry Socrates, rearing all its citizens instead to be well-bred, obedient pigs. Its citizens love the regime and their current state, not out of fear but willingly; and should they have any questions, qualms or worries, they need only take a pill of soma, to send them off to a delightful land where they might be free from all the mundane sorrows of the world. It is a drug, and a wonder-drug at that. There are no side-effects, no shortage of supply, no price whatsoever, and best of all, no addiction. You cannot be troubled with soma—if especially depressed, you need take only six pills or three grams for a delightful journey to the dark of the moon. The three S’s—Sports, Screen, and Sex—are all supplied quite adequately for the people to enjoy and abuse. There is no God to meddle with human affairs, no shortage of anything to trouble the human mind; and best of all, there is no jealousy. Every man is happy with his position, be it Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon, for they have been told that their position is the best one since in the cradle. The Epsilon and the Delta is happy that they are not Alphas, and vice versa. It is truly a “Brave New World”.


Yet both dystopias are, in their turn, are equally terrifying: Orwell’s because it shows us a haunting vision of a world controlled by a single Party above all, and Huxley’s because no one is dissatisfied. We are shown that a seemingly gay utopia can be more terrifying than a totalitarian and authoritarian society, for in this brave new world there is nothing that makes a human human. There is no literature, no flowers and furry animals, no God to follow and worship, no family, no spiritual love (there exists only love of the most degenerate kind: physical and sexual love), no poetry and good and evil, and absolutely no danger. It is a society of eunuchs—all castrated people, the lot of them, to follow their leaders wherever they might lead them without question if only they are given their precious soma. There is a terror lurking behind the softness and the gayness which seemingly inhabits this world.


Such are the two dystopias, both equally terrifying in their own right, and both worlds which very nearly became our own.










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