“The dictatorship of the future will be very unlike the dictatorships of the past. … They will get the consent of the government by…”
There are two great 20th Century dystopian novels that predicted what the world might look like if things go very, very wrong.
The first, and probably more familiar one is by George Orwell… 1984.
It lays out a future of Stalinist police state tactics, a surveillance state, a government whipping up fear, rage, mistrust, and propaganda to control their population. “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
In the end, they terrorize people into the unquestioned belief of things they knew not to be true. (As seen in the 2+2 question they asked in Room 101.)
Brave New World took a very different approach.
They sedated people with SOMA. They dulled their passions with the over-indulgence of pleasure. And in doing so, made willing slaves of them all.
Both models got some things right. But listen to Aldous Huxley’s 1958 interview and ask yourself if he’s not doing a pretty accurate job of describing the world we now live in… and where we’ve gone wrong.
Aldous Huxley on the dictatorship of the future (1958): This kind of dictatorship will be very unlike the dictatorships we've been familiar with in the past. People may be happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn't to be happy. pic.twitter.com/H9TUUAodNq
— Wojciech Pawelczyk (@WojPawelczyk) December 14, 2019
Both authors predicted some of what we see today.
Who’s picture best describes our 21st Century world?
