What made Brave New World far more interesting to me than 1984 is that the bad guys in 1984 are really clearly bad guys who hide behind an impossibly thin veneer of public mindedness in order to live exactly as grandly as they want whereas in Brave New World the man at the top truly believes that he is a force for good in the world. His life is not a selfish one, not in the same way, he just believes that most people are happier living in his pleasure dome. He doesn't hate or fear the protagonist but instead he wants to help him by spiriting him away from the happy drugged masses to let him live out his life with the other people who don't want to live that way. It's an entirely different kind of conflict and much much more compelling.
Actually they create a lower class by adding alcohol into their incubation chambers. The rich/smart make them stupid. They make them cheap laborers like a dictator keeping the value of a currency low with respect to other countries.
On the one hand, they say that they can't have automation: they tried, and the lower castes got too bored. On the other hand, they need the lower castes as menial labours.
Do away with the alcohol, and add robots, and you'll have a much nicer society.
So here's a question that has been on my mind for a while. I regularly read articles on some aspect of our society that is distressing. Articles such as this one, as well as articles on 'consuming devices killing creativity', 'bite-sized articles keeping us from reading bigger material like books', 'our school system turning us into automatons', and so on.
While I find myself agreeing with some of these articles based on my observation of myself and others, I can't help but wonder to what degree they actually apply to 'the larger population'.
All these people mindlessly consuming memes on their devices could be creating something new instead. That's wasted potential. But would they in any other time period, faced with the societal dangers of those times, be any more creative?
All these people reading bite-sized articles could be reading meatier material instead. Again, wasted potential. But there was a time were much of these people couldn't even read, or didn't have access to much information, so any reading and awareness of the world at large by chunks of the population is a win anyways.
And before we had schools, didn't most people follow some other kind of pre-determined path that shaped them to function appropriately in their respective societies, losing potential in the process?
Basically, when discussing these supposed problems, are they really problems, or do these things just fall short of what we can imagine, some potential that we project on the entire population (which is not a bad reason for discussing them, of course)? Isn't it the case that in any time period there are only smaller subsections of people who create, research, and/or people who are autodidacts that eschew a traditional education for something different?
Would those of us who are amusing ourselves to death not simply do something else 'mindless' in previous generations?
If you think only about creating content, I think you have a very good argument. Historically, not everybody was fit/interested in creating.
However, the underlying theme in these books seems to be one of freedom and our destiny. I don't think they focus much on creation but more on assessing reality and being able to change it.
In the past, at least in my 3rd world country, people were much more interesting in politics, health, education, etc. Nowadays, most people are happy to be distracted so I fully agree with the author here. Over and over, political scandals abound, corruption is everywhere and made plain clear to anyone who wants to see it.. yet, I don't see anyone complaining as they did in the past. It seems we've reached a plateau and we're comfortable enough. Distracted enough perhaps.
Perhaps the potential to create has kept the same, not very high, lots of wasted potential. But the potential to be angry/worried about things that matter seems to be going down the toilet lately. Just see how nobody besides IT people and the media cares about the NSA scandal.
> In the past, at least in my 3rd world country, people were much more interesting in politics, health, education, etc.
I've been thinking about this too, but I can't help but wonder if the higher interest in "politics, health, education, etc." wasn't just mindless distraction in disguise. I grew up in a developing nation where it appeared that people were more engaged with these sorts of things, but it every discussion could be appended with '...but hey, that's the way it is'.
There are periods in time where a society is more engaged as a whole, and there are subsections of society that are, among other things politically engaged. Of course. But I truly wonder how different all that 'reading the papers and discussing politics' actually is from 'looking at funny political memes and reading short blog entries on what's wrong with the world'.
> Just see how nobody besides IT people and the media cares about the NSA scandal.
That is a good point. But have we historically really done much better in this regard (other than some 'flare-ups' like the sixties)?
It's my opinion (not completely fundamented) that people engage more on aspects that they can change in some way. If they have no hope of changing anything in politics, for example, it feels no better than watching sports, so people flock to the later.
There were quite a lot of examples (all over the world) lately of people protesting about politics that couldn't even decide what they wanted.
"Would those of us who are amusing ourselves to death not simply do something else 'mindless' in previous generations?
"
Yes. They would probably have to work more to feed themselves, which is also wasted time. The world requires some sisyphean work from everybody, like doing the dishes, but this is increasingly automated.
"All these people mindlessly consuming memes on their devices could be creating something new instead. That's wasted potential. "
At the same time, someone is creating the memes. That's a creative process, as easy as it is today, some of them are irrelevant, some are slightly more involved.
"All these people reading bite-sized articles could be reading meatier material instead."
Yes, I personally try to vary, I think the bite-size material has a role as well.
Basically, when discussing these supposed problems, are they really problems
They are problems for those who think of nations as teams locked in a giant competition, always striving to one-up each other. On another level we have corporations doing much the same thing. It's a rude mêlée and the stakes are very, very high.
I'm currently living for a few month in the country side. People home are filled with stuff they had done by hand. In the past, instead of getting bored, people sewed, diy various stuff, made beer/wine/alcohol/...
Younger generation in the same village have more time thanks to all the benefit of modern life. They spend that extra time watching TV though.
No sure if there is a conclusion in there considering all other variables, but there is a visible effect.
Here's a partial answer: You gain some, you lose some, but in different things. There's a tradeoff, e.g. automatons can do things a lot faster/cheaper, at the expense of "creativity". The nature of society changes in a multi-dimensional way, so it's hard to say whether it has become more or less "mindless".
I don't think this issue is related to creativity. There are plenty of talented creators who choose to waste their time on meaningless stuff because it gives them more fun/fame/money(largely used for meaningless stuff).
And a creator in today's world can waste much more potential than a common man.
Now we have indications of the worst of both the Huxleyan and Orwellian dystopias: an Internet designed to exacerbate the proclivity toward hyperbolic discounting of the future, and runaway surveillance on a planetary scale.
If you are interested in a rather in-depth examination of this line of thinking, I highly recommend Adam Curtis's 2002 documentary "The Century of the Self"
I never finished 1984 but both seem to ignore the ultimate driving force behind both authoritarianism and consumerism that continues to rule the world, money and capitalism. In 1984, or at least this comic, power and violence seems to happen for their own sake, "power corrupting power", and similarly for Huxley's hedonism. The comic claims "Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity..." uh no, no one just gives us TV and distractions, they sell it to us.
Maybe that's a shallow analysis, and if so, tell me: where is the aspect of capital in either work?
> ultimate driving force behind both authoritarianism and consumerism that continues to rule the world, money and capitalism
I would say the problem is any social structure that allows money to buy power, i.e. that allows the translation of economic power into political power (and vice versa). Either we should prevent that, or consider placing a cap on maximum per-capita economic power (preferably as a factor of the average, not unlike the Swiss proposal for CEO salaries).
A person should be able to buy as many yachts, castles or private jets as he wants, but using his money to lobby, campaign or otherwise influence political process -- perhaps that should be severely limited?
Civilization and technology today allows individual human beings to wield far higher concentrations of power than our psychology evolved to deal with. A good social system should cap it below the threshold where people go crazy (i.e. where our brains malfunction).
As a Swiss and living within the Swiss political system I firmly believe that laws alone can never be enough to keep people from getting too much power. Instead, implementing and defending a democracy that actually deserves its name, as in a system where the majority of people keep the last say in the law making process, instead of just letting them delegate that right every few year, is what keeps the system stable and everyone in check. Besides the direct effect on the law, this has two positive effects that most people don't quite seem to grasp when arguing about direct vs. indirect democracy:
- People tend to be more content with the laws they need to follow. Even if they lost on a vote its easier to accept in a system where its an actual majority behind it instead of just some removed cabal that you can only elect based on some pamphlet information every few years.
- Politicians in such a system tend to think ahead in terms of what can and cannot be popular with the people. They do so not only for the election years (which don't have that great of an importance here, not only because of direct democracy but also because of the way our federal government is formed by all major parties) but whenever delicate issues are coming up. One example I'd attribute to this effect is our liberal online piracy laws and our seemingly better protected privacy. When we had our own small scale Snowden affair in the 80ies it blew up into a huge scandal leading to the resignation of a federal council member ('Fichenaffäre', http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal).
You should finish both books rather than go by the superficial text in those comics. Huxley lays out a society founded upon consumerism and, implicitly, a rampantly free market. Orwell's notion of the future seems to assume that the state has such total control that those in power may have anything they desire while the rest of the proles are left to scavenge what they can from the gutter. Simply because currency is not a major topic in either of the books does not mean they do not discuss the mechanics of power and social influence.
Orwell's book was entirely about state power; it was a parody of Stalinism. He was in the awkward position of being a socialist who'd been shot at by hardline communists during the Spanish civil war, and wanted to warn the left that Stalinism was really dangerous and should not be associated with.
Orwell was fighting for the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) not against them, this faction had the support of Stalin. He was shot by members of Francos army, they were a Fascist / Nationalist party that had the support of the NAZIs and Fascist Italy.
I'd conflated two events; you're correct that Orwell was shot by an Fascist sniper, but there were also Stalinist purges going on against POUM ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia ) as it was a non-Stalinist Marxist faction.
One correction: POUM was anti-Stalinist. By the end of Homage to Catalonia, Orwell describes how POUM was driven underground by pro-Stalinist parties PSUC and PCE (I think these were the two).
POUM was definitely left-anarchist/communist though.
The selective breeding of humans as "alphas", "betas", etc. may have been inspired by the eugenics movement[1], which had prominent supporters in the U.K. at the time (e.g., Winston Churchill).[2] Except that in the novel, instead of just getting rid of "inferior" people, they actively bred them into a servant caste. (After Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, it became much less respectable.)
I don't think it's off-base to say that this is an attack on the current state of society - the oft-repeated wail that capitalism and the opportunities it has brought (including technology) has made us all a despicable group of hedonistic thrill seekers. This is universally construed as a bad thing.
I have problems with this.
In order to decide that something is bad, we need to have an idea of what is good. Where does that come from here? The past? Your imagination? Do you 'miss' the olden days of constant strife, peril, religion that moulded those who survived into wise old men and women, their minds enriched by the fullness of life, but their bodies cold, wet, and illness-ridden from the lack of modern technology? Perhaps you miss the 'community' vibe of the 1950's. Or your own childhood. Or perhaps you dream of your own utopia. Am I close?
I hope the point made in the above paragraph is self evident, but in case it's not, ask yourself how many of your alternative realities you've actually experienced, and how many are just ideas you've accrued with the blanks liberally filled in by educated guesses and imaginations. Try and find one that isn't. Got one? Good.
Now let's plan. How would you - or anyone - transform the whole of society from what we have today to your new utopia? Plan it out. Perhaps government has to do something. Perhaps government has to go. You're almost certainly going to face dissent - perhaps some people need to face some hard realities for a short time, you know, in the transition period. Think like this for a while. I don't think it will be long before 1984 starts to take shape.
Let's categorise society. Let's construct a hypothetical index in our minds that tracks intelligence/education/income in a single number (the actual equation isn't relevant). Assume it's normally distributed[0]. Let's also assume that the kind of person who sympathises with the article in this link is in the top 25% (far right quarter), so put yourself up there. Let's consider the bottom 55% - the kind of people whose chief pleasures in our Brave New World may be TV, alcohol, taking selfies, incorrect spelling in text messages, Facebook, Instagram, Candy Crush, etc. - they're not massively intellectual.
Where exactly do these people (who I posit construct the majority of our actual society) fit in to your new utopia, assuming you managed the transition without creating 1984? Are they suddenly reading books, in a newfound passion for learning? Maybe they accept their place in their world, respectfully keeping quiet in reverence to their overlords, the intelligensia. Can you fit them in anywhere whilst maintaining the utopia?
This thought experiment should be difficult by this point. I say it's impossible.
If you are not in the bottom 55% of our hypothetical index, there is a great wealth of things out there to please you. Almost all activities are in reach of the average person now. You have books, the ability to travel, the internet, base jumping, mountaineering, arctic exploration, even space travel is expected to be affordable within most of our lifespans. You probably know this already, I guess you're probably happy enough with your own life and world. The discomfort you feel is with the rest of us 'out there', right?
Society is reflective of its components. People will seek to maximise happiness and pleasure under given constraints. This has always been and will always be so. It is the essence of humanity. The simple truth is that the industrial and technical revolutions of late have loosened those constraints by many orders of magnitude, and now instead of dog-fighting, back-room card games, duels, 24-hour boozing, or whatever it was the bottom 55% used to do 'back in the day', they have other things. Like you, they are who they are: a conflagration of nature/nurture forces that amount to a personality.
The difference is that instead of making use of all things available in the world to please you, you've chosen to spend your time sat on your high horse looking down on them, wishing they were different, so that the view from up there was a little nicer.
There's a difference between what we want and what we enjoy. You see this most clearly in drug addicts - no, in compulsive gamblers: they desperately want their fix, but aren't any happier when they're doing it. But the same effect is in play for all of us, in more subtle form. You can find it in people who are trying to write: they enjoy writing, but they don't want to do it, have to force themselves to start.
There's a pattern in this. People enjoy improving themselves, enjoy learning even - but most people don't want it. Strikingly, if you have people make the choice for their future selves, they prefer the self-improvement option; if you offer someone a choice between, say, a ticket to a museum exhibition, or a couple of free drinks (at equal price), in three months' time, most will choose the exhibition. But if you give them the choice for tonight, they'll take the drinks - and when choosing in their own lives, that's what they tend to prefer. Even if they're going to enjoy them less.
So the best way to make people happy isn't just to give them what they ask for. A paternalistic intervention where you, say, banned certain kinds of entertainment, and funded others, might well result in people living lives they were happier with than the lives they would have chosen for themselves.
> A paternalistic intervention [...] might well result in people living lives they were happier with than the lives they would have chosen for themselves
The problem with this argument is that it assumes that the pater making the decisions is wiser and more able to make correct decisions for others than others themselves. In a utopia, the decision maker might be the smartest, wisest person alive, with a nigh god-like ability to discern what's best for everyone. In reality, the decision maker is just a regular Joe. Worse, in democracies like the US and UK -- where potential leaders seem to primarily be chosen solely on the basis of social class (when did you last see a genuinely lower class politico?) -- there is absolutely no reason to believe that the leader has cognitive abilities that are above those of the population.
In a utopia, a paternalist system would work because the decisions made by the pater would be better than those made by the populace. In reality, it results in USSR supermarkets stuffed with canned tomatoes because the ever-wise pater wasn't even able to predict people's most basic wants.
> in democracies like the US and UK -- where potential leaders seem to primarily be chosen solely on the basis of social class (when did you last see a genuinely lower class politico?) -- there is absolutely no reason to believe that the leader has cognitive abilities that are above those of the population.
The upper classes generally seem to have a lower time preference than "average joe", which is an encouraging factor for this kind of politician. (If anything I worry that the rise of a populist politics where lower-class leaders are electable will lower the stability of the country - to my mind the last genuinely lower class prime minister was a certain greengrocer's daughter)
> In reality, it results in USSR supermarkets stuffed with canned tomatoes because the ever-wise pater wasn't even able to predict people's most basic wants.
Sure, no-one would advocate a centrally planned economy. But I think there's a case for soft incentives - central government funding for museums, art galleries, and universities; taxation of drugs and perhaps of sports or similar popular entertainments. These things have a long history but are being undermined by a postmodern view that says that all art is equally valuable, that popular music is just as worthy of funding as experimental music, popular authors just as worthy as literary authors.
In recent years I've seen what feels like a dumbing down of e.g. the Proms - indeed, of the whole BBC - justified on the grounds that it should give the people what they want. And while that's an important consideration - there's no point in a public service channel that no one watches - it shouldn't be the only one. Even as imperfect humans, we should try and help people better themselves, rather than just leave them to what they want.
> In recent years I've seen what feels like a dumbing down of e.g. the Proms - indeed, of the whole BBC
I can't argue whether this is the case or not, because I rarely watch TV. I've heard that BBC4 is quite cerebral, but I've also heard no-one watches it, yet I'm pretty sure this means that no-one would watch its contents even if they were the sole thing on the television. It seems that most people don't find cerebral activities fun.
I went to your typical rough, inner-city, London comprehensive, and saw precisely the 'bottom 55%' being debated here on a daily basis. It certainly seemed to me that these people would never have been interested in cerebral activities even if they would have been offered. Whenever a cerebral activity (e.g., reading Lord of the Flies) presented itself, they diverted across to violence, or gossip, or some other form of utter rejection of the cerebral activity on offer.
I have no reason to believe that it'd be possible -- or indeed positive -- to force these people to play up to the interests of their social 'betters'. I'd rather we accept who they are than demand they play the role of poseur. Like with everything else in life, I'm sure that the place to intercept this problem -- the issue of people wasting their life on entertainment -- is in childhood. One clear consistency among the lower classes I grew up with was that their parents either didn't give a damn about their kids (sadly the case for a huge number of them), or were too busy with the demands of being a single parent to dedicate time to raising them.
If we want a civilization which is more interested in learning and self-improvement than X-Factor, then we'll have to start with making sure that our civilization's parents are willing and able to emphasize learning and self-improvement over X-Factor.
Not sure the pater agent needs to be wiser, not even seen as wiser, more the result of some people psychology not willing to take decisions and happy this way (butler mentality) meanwhile others want/need this position to feel fulfilled.
Boo on that social science study. It doesn't offer any illumination as to why people made that choice - or, if it did, you haven't included it. Instead, you're using it as evidence that people can't act in their own interests. Can you really draw that conclusion?
I think you're doing a disservice to the 'bottom 55%' of society. Ignoring perhaps the bottom and top 5% of the curve, the spectrum of intellectual difference isn't that big. Most people can read a book. Most people can visit a museum. Hell, most could write a book. Most people can understand and enjoy intellectual pursuits. The reason why the bottom 55%'s chief pleasures are "TV, alcohol, taking selfies, incorrect spelling in text messages, Facebook, Instagram, Candy Crush, etc" is because they believe society's lie that they can't enjoy anything else. The overwhelming majority of people are actually very capable of doing intelligent and creative things.
The problem is that intelligence and creativity are a threat to the 'elite' at the top of society in terms of power and wealth - society has been designed to subjugate as many people as possible with Huxley-esque triviality for fear that if people started using their brains that power and wealth would no longer be in the hands of a few. Everyone would be a bit more equal if instead of sitting down to watch the latest Hollywood movie or listen to whatever reality star's new album we sat down and painted a picture or talked about philosophy - there would be no money flowing towards the rich any more.
I said their chief pleasures 'may' be those things - a list suffixed with 'etc'. My aim was to get the reader to have an idea of the kind of person I was talking about rather than construct an exhaustive but useless and pointless list of their activities.
Yes, those people could do the things you say. But they don't. The point I'm making is that coercing them into behaving differently is not practical nor moral.
I have an IQ in the top 0.001%, am relatively wealthy, relatively well educated, and have a bizarrely diverse skillset. I play Call of Duty and enjoy life's trivialities much more than I paint or talk philosophy.
I agree that society can be fearsome for some in the way you describe, but as I said its reflective of its components, and in order to change the scary bits you have to enforce change on those nearer the top of our curve - and I outright reject the notion that they are more deserving of the pains of coercion owing to their status. Everybody will always suffer in a plan to take one set of ideas and force them upon others. History teaches this lesson over and over again. Present government is teaching it now.
Capitalism - the best word to describe our current societal system - is the antithesis of this. It promotes freedom for everyone to do what the hell they want, not what they 'should' or are told to, and prescribes nothing but subscription to capitalism itself which incidentally is not a system imposed on the world by political leaders, but rather a descriptive term for something humans have been doing (or trying to do against a range of government constraints) for centuries: trading 'stuff' they have for stuff they don't freely and openly.
"The point I'm making is that coercing them into behaving differently is not practical nor moral."
I agree that it's not moral, but it is demonstrably practical - business changes the way people act all the time, coercing people into behaving in a way that, in my opinion, holds the majority back and turns them into mere passive consumers rather than the creative, intelligent people they could be. While you say in another comment that you want purer capitalism without government interference, I actually want to go further still - removing corporate interference in our lives as well. Although, admittedly, I have no idea at all how you'd do that.
So there is a conspiracy by the "elites" to make the masses love the Kardashians? This level of absurdity is not apparent to you? Being intelligent is not a perfect defense to confusion.
I think the conspiracy* is modern anti-intellectualism, mocking creativity, and the promotion of the idea that respect, fame and wealth should be something that comes instantly when you're judged better than your peers rather than something that can be earned by hard work. The Kardashians are the result of that rather than the means.
* Conspiracy is the wrong word. I think it's quite transparent how society has be changed in to something that benefits the ultra-wealthy more than the rest.
There doesn't need to be a conspiracy to make the masses love the Kardashians. All that is necessary is for the elites to follow their own drives to meet the demands of their social class and accumulate wealth to retain their position (and there's nothing sinister with wanting this; we all have strong drives to keep or improve our relative positions). The rest follows pretty much by itself:
It is easier to create wealth by feeding the immediate drives of the consumers than by trying to make them genuinely happy and fulfilled in ways that require their potential customers to put in effort and make sacrifices in the short term.
Nice stance! But isn't this apologetic thinking a pattern applicable on pretty much any order of things? "It can be worse" and "don't ask too much from your high-horse" are not the principles I choose to follow nor recommend to others. I agree that the world (at least in the most part) changed for the better from "back in the day" but I believe that it was thanks to that kind of people that use to sit on high horses trying to make their the view a little nicer. Here's an exercise for you too - try to imagine what kind of world do you want for your future descendants. This exercise will tell you by the way, depending on if you could come up with something better or not, what kind of people you are - the sitting on high-horse looking down kind or the rest.
Thanks! I have answered your question in my own mind many times.
I want to live in a world where there is true freedom. I want a purer form of capitalism with heavy reductions in current government control that inhibits the ability of us all to do things today. I want them to live in a world where the very concept that one person or group of people enforces control over others is both alien and absurd, and certainly not their reality as it is ours.
My solution involves only the absolution of control from those who should never have had in the first place, and enforces nothing on anyone.
How will you have "true freedom" in a world where your access to resources is restricted by government enforcement of private property?
What you describe as a whole is tautological. A world where "one person or group of people enforces control over others is both alien and absurd" is pretty much by definition not capitalist in any shape or form. Not only that, but most people who want such a "capitalism" and then invoke reductions in government control tend to want to remove lots of the regulation that reigns in capitalism somewhat to protect the freedoms of the rest of society.
"Purer" capitalism has been rejected time and time again because of what it implies.
Numerous lives were lost of the many decades US unions fought to get recognition of the 8 hour working day, for example (and May 1st is still celebrated as the international day for workers demonstration partly in recognition of the AFL-CIO's restart of the battle for the 8 hour day after the Haymarket Massacre), because of how uneven the power is and was between employer and employee in most fields: You may have any number of de jure freedoms, but they are irrelevant to someone who will starve to death if they exercise them.
> I want them to live in a world where the very concept that one person or group of people enforces control over others is both alien and absurd,
I'll bite. How exactly is your "freer version" of capitalism going to achieve this, where, by default, a group of stockholders, managers and producers will have tremendous influence on availability, pricing, selection and stock, whereas no safeguards exist against abuse of these powers?
I know I've cited it here before, but this is essentially what the concept of the culture industry describes, were all your freedom is only possible within the pre-chosen, pre-selected limits of production, i.e. you get to choose "freely" between all of the things others allow you to choose between.
Freer capitalism will maximise choice relative to alternatives. You are correct in saying it will not provide complete choice, for example I don't expect there will ever be a day - even if I had all the money in the world - where I could pay every last person on the planet to chant my name at once. Some things despite being physically possible will always be unattainable. Capitalism maximises the set of choices.
You are not beholden to company executives - you simply stop giving them your attention and money. Only in the case of monopoly and oligopoly can you be at the mercy of executives. Such problems are very real and the solutions much more difficult than those imposed by governments and moral crusaders, but they are necessarily worsened by the same. The reason we - at least in Europe - have a horrible banking industry is because the regulation around starting and running a bank is so complex it has the effect of restricting bank ownership to a very small subset of the population. The same is true for the insurance industries and many others. In the case of banking bail-outs mean that no matter how badly a bank is run, it will never go out of business (in Europe anyway). This is truly absurd, extremely damaging, and 100% the fault of people with moral agendas trying to force it upon the rest of us. You could own a bank, I'd love to consider you for my next account, but the incumbents won't allow that. I am beholden to shitty bankers because of the government.
You forget a category of people in the list of what is good. Unless it falls under the "utopia" category, there is the people that wants what mostly what we have today but durably available to a larger portion of the population.
"Brave New World" being a mainstream worry is relatively recent, 20 years ago, it was not. 20 years ago, we thought of our hedonistic society would look like Start Trek. So definitively not despicable. My theory is that it is all those indicators pointing to more misery / less good (depending if you live in the first world or outside) for our children generation is what makes people think we are living in Brave New World. (our children will study more to earn less money, work more, on a earth with less resources, less nature, harsher climate)
Anyway, the defeatist attitude of dismissing people because of their "moral high horse" is tiring too. Especially in the First World where society is definitively not representative of "the essence of humanity" the majority would impose. We enjoy Freedom and Human Rights that are not natural and as everything that has happened since 9/11 has demonstrated, fragile.
We defined freedom roughly by saying you can do whatever as long as it is no depriving others from theirs. That goes against our nature. We should maybe think of limiting pleasure to anything you can have that does not deprive the rest of the world of it.
... has made us all a despicable group of hedonistic thrill seekers. This is universally construed as a bad thing.
Is that really what you take away from this discussion? To my eyes, the notion is that we have become passive and in the process abdicated control over our own lives. You can make an argument that that is a good thing, but that is a very different argument from yours.
Were you frustrated by the lack of public outcry at the NSA's secret activities? The idea here is that people brushed off the NSA's actions because they turned back to Candy Crush et al, which was oh-so-ready to distract them, and it is this that the original author is talking about- not moral criticism of shallow hedonism.
"has made us all a despicable group of hedonistic thrill seekers."
This has been a problem since the Roman times if not earlier- people focused on the games raher than the politics. Humans have been hedonistic thrill seekers pretty much since always, as far as I can tell.
The whole point of Huxley's view was that all these hedonistic tendencies you describe can be used to control people, to box them into tiny little worlds of their own making and keep them safely there, no threat to the ruling powers. If you are only focused on how happy these people (or even everyone) are, then you are missing the point.
1984 assumed a certain amount of inherent human dignity in each person, and described a world where that human dignity had been stripped away by an all-knowing oppressive power. Huxley envisioned a world in which people are little more than animals and anything that could be called human dignity was rare. How happy the cattle are in their pastures is not what Huxley cared about.
Although it isn't exactly off-base to say that this (article/comic?) is an attack on the current state of society, it IS off-base to equate the attack to the "oft-repeated wail that capitalism ... thrill seekers."
I would just like to remind everyone that BNW (the examples you chose seem to be parallels to BNW rather than 1984) doesn't have much to say about "capitalism." There seems to be a conflation here of capitalism with "consumerism" - consumerism being one of the pillars of the dystopia that the novel imagines, capitalism notwithstanding. You have to be careful where you draw the parallels. For example, the hedonistic thrill seekers in Brave New World were quite literally engineered to be that way - they were born in test-tubes and raised in a finely tuned environment. If anything, BNW is an argument against a utopia, not against a free market and the opportunities it provides. Actually, "opportunity" is unnecessary in BNW, because everyone is already mired in consumption and ecstasy. Nobody wants or needs it.
Whether capitalism is leading to that type of dystopia is another argument entirely, and one not addressed by the book... or even the article/comic.
"I don't think it's off-base to say that this is an attack on the current state of society - the oft-repeated wail that capitalism and the opportunities it has brought (including technology) has made us all a despicable group of hedonistic thrill seekers."
Why just "capitalism"? I think it's way too broad
Capitalism without civil society (in republican understanding), perhaps. It's still very general
"Let's consider the bottom 55% - the kind of people whose chief pleasures in our Brave New World may be TV, alcohol, taking selfies, incorrect spelling in text messages, Facebook, Instagram, Candy Crush, etc. - they're not massively intellectual."
No, but Postman argues that they used to make more intensive use of their brains in the "print era".
Right now I can't find the full text to copy and paste the relevant excerpt here, but I googled up a summary of his point:
"Before going into the details of how and why this is, Postman takes us back to the 19th century and uses the
debates between Lincoln and Douglas to illustrate the vast gaping chasm between discourse as it was then and
how it is now. The famous debates between Lincoln and Douglass each lasted three hours long, each devoted to
one issue, and divided between an hour of speech, an hour and a half of response, and a half-hour rebuttal. What
makes this even more striking is that these debates were actually shorter than most normal debates of the time!
Crowds would gather around these two men and listen to them speak at length about one subject, carefully
constructing logical arguments and parsing through each others’ claims in true analytical fashion. The 19th century
mind was habituated to a literary form of oratory, which unlike pictures and film has propositional content—one
can say of it that it is either true or false, which is not the case when it comes to images. Even advertising was
purely literary, designed to appeal to the understanding as opposed to desire."
My point is that there is no way to viably change the status quo - the merits of doing so are irrelevant. We should accept this and not spend our time trying to change others, or wishing they were different, but rather channel our own energies into things constructive for our own time on this earth.
To say that there is no way is rather arbitary. If people have always seeked to maximise happiness etc., then the status quo can't be solely the result of that
I seached your entire comment for something relevant to the excerpt that was posted and came up empty-handed. What, exactly, does anything you've said have to do with entertainment facilitating oppression?
> The difference is that instead of making use of all things available in the world to please you, you've chosen to spend your time sat on your high horse looking down on them, wishing they were different, so that the view from up there was a little nicer.
I'm utterly baffled. Where was anything remotely like this mentioned?
> I have an IQ in the top 0.001%, am relatively wealthy, relatively well educated, and have a bizarrely diverse skillset. I play Call of Duty and enjoy life's trivialities much more than I paint or talk philosophy.
This clarifies things a little bit. In your eagerness to impress everyone, you lost sight of the topic entirely.
You're putting far too much thought into it. Put it this way, I don't know anybody who actually goes home and just drills into the topics they are profoundly interested in.
99% of people go home, watch some news, and then watch reality tv.
A very small amount of people read or dedicate their lives to living a life of virtue not complacent pleasure.
That's sad. We rather be on Facebook and Instragram and Snapchat 24/7 than disconnect ourselves and feed our brains.
as with any original content that is older than the average HN user memory threshold, which somewhere between 9 months and 3 years, there is also an old thread for it:
Why is that whenever I read something like, "Most of us will read this and continue living our life exactly the same way as before …wake up", my immediate response is, "Fuck off, you patronising wanker"?
I think it's probably the author's assumption that they're on to something new - a thought that doesn't recur over and over again:
If you like your depressing stories in musical form, try listening to 'Amused to Death' by Roger Waters, inspired by the book. Great album.
If you want to amuse yourself while listening, make sure you have your speakers set up so the stereo effect on the barking dog at the start sounds like it's coming from outside. Also make sure your system can cope with the sound of the bomb dropping.
In that it relates to information glut causing lost focus/awareness, this reminds me of the curse of the hyperlink in Wikipedia. I can start off reading about the early history of the Chevy 350 and end up reading about the Heaven's Gate cult an hour and a half later, wondering what the hell I sat down to do in the first place.
I've come to learn that recording goals/making lists is key to being productive when there's so much other stuff vying for my attention and trying to throw me off course. I used to think I could just keep everything in my head, but that's just not worked.
What's sad is that the original author of the comic was forced to take it down due to request from Estate of Neil Postman's. You'd think their estate would want his ideas spread.
Seeing this Brave New World thing pop up again. OMG sheeple wake up! People have become passive, drowned in irrelevance!
I find this line of discourse dehumanizing. "People" apparently includes everyone but the reader. Some would claim this is the conceit of such critique, a claim that only the reader sees the world for what it really is, the reader (and writer) are better than everyone else. But this kind of critique has gone on too long for me to feel this way – instead I think these critiques erase the reader, erase the idea of constructive engagement, they don't say "you, reader, are the smart one!" instead they say "you are stupid and purposeless, not even worthy of critique, instead I shall turn my eye to only the unnamed masses!"
People need to stop talking about "people". Neil Postman should stop talking about "people". Have the guts to say who you are talking about. Or if more likely you are only talking about archetypes, step up and acknowledge the universal inapplicability of archetypes to real people, each of whom is better than your out-of-focus description. When you multiple out individuals into a group you don't get a teaming mass – maybe YOU can only appreciate those individuals as a teaming mass, but don't project the limits of your perception onto those individuals. Life is bigger than any one goddamned sci-fi story.
I find that every generation thinks this of the next. For example here's what the early 1800's thought of students using paper: http://i.imgur.com/Od2BB51.jpg These kinds of declaration have been going on for centuries. There will always be some people who waste their time and others that produce. You can't produce, even low brow media, without some active members of the population who have to first create it ;)
Its not just about creating, its also what these people are creating and whats the incentive to create? Do these creators ever think about the repercussions of their creations on the society? If your creation is not motivating people to create themselves or even making them learn something interesting, I am not sure if its the ideal creation.
It's a catch-22. You can't have content without creators, and if the content gets so bad that no one creates anymore, then you have no new content, which means you get more creators. It's an oscillation.
>There will always be some people who waste their time and others that produce.
The people who are producing are creating content which encourages people to waste time. Producers will say 'we are just making what people want' but the problem is that most people don't know what they want. Its not like they watch 5-6 hours of TV and go to sleep feeling good about themselves. Producers will keep creating that since it equals shit loads of money but concomitantly it also ends up making majority of population less creative, less informed and more distracted.
Something I found surprisingly infuriating lately is that on the YouTube app for iOS, you can be watching a video full-screen and, before the video is even finished, a thing slides up from the bottom about what it wants you to watch next. Fuck off! I'm still trying to watch the one video I elected to see and it's already trying to herd me down the attention deficit rathole.
I have no idea what you're talking about. My specific complaint aside, the dedicated app is far more responsive and reliable to use than the mobile site, as is often the case when there's a choice.
Lately I have kept repeating to myself: You can either spend your time consuming or you can spend your time creating.
I have always felt guilty deep inside when watching something and not learning anything from it, I try to find that one thing, that small part of philosophy in a television series and use it as a motivation to watch (like the line: "We are the universe trying to figure itself out" and the stuff about humanity growing up in Babylon 5). But the feeling of uselessness kept creeping up.
Recently I have just told myself flat out: Just make something, I felt increasingly restless while watching TV. And it feels good, I make lego contraptions with my son, I make leds blink with Python on my RPi(s). It feels good. I don't know why but ever since I was I kid I have felt this, very deeply and only in the last year have I actually expressed it in words.
I have read 1984 and Brave new world in the last 3 years and they hit some sensitive spots for, must reads if you ask me.
How are making lego contraptions & leds blink not amusement. Consuming is NOT evil, we consume food & water in order to survive. The mind needs rest just like the body does, there is nothing wrong with sitting back and watching the world (or tv) go by once in a while.
"I make lego contraptions with my son, I make leds blink with Python on my RPi(s)." - just a different type of consumption. Unless you are building something conceptually new.
Waaaay back in highschool I read both 1984 and Brave New World (same weekend, even...come Monday I was extremely depressed), and came to a similar conclusion--because really, who wants to fight love?
Given the modern drive for micro-optimizing every bit of one's life (looking at you, /4 Hour.*/) there is a much better dystopic story out there by Harlan Ellison:
Doesn't practically every high schooler (in the U.S. at least) read both books, be assigned an essay to ask which one has happened, and then come to the conclusion that we're far more like Brave New World? As a foreword to a book, this isn't exactly original stuff.
But there's also a counterpoint, which is that all the distraction, or the pleasure, or gossip, or whatever it is -- that's the stuff that it means to be human. We don't just mindlessly watch TV -- we talk about it with friends, joke about it, have fun with it. When a man comes home after a hard day of work, and wants to unwind by watching Celebrity Apprentice with his wife, I think sometimes people are a little to quick to judge. Everybody needs their 'guilty pleasures'. That doesn't mean that's all we are.
I've seen this cartoon before, and honestly I think people are trying to pick either or (1984 or Brave New World), and are missing the more nuanced side of it.
My simplified summary though, is this: Brave New World for the masses, and 1984 for anyone who wakes up and tries to change it.
Also, that people talk about both authors works but neglect to discuss their British secret and not-so-secret society connections seems to create a sort of superficial aura of debate around the two. Frankly, the books only scratch the surface, but TPTB have done an excellent job at making any even potential association with the title "conspiracy theorist" a thing to be feared. (and plenty of the theorists themselves have helped in that cause)
I read the book (Amusing Ourselves to Death), and I would recommend it for these reasons:
- It explores a contemporary topic of significance. Relevance will depend on your interests. I do think it's an essential perspective for analysing the impact of media on society, and since the impact has been huge and is still increasing, it's relevant to all kinds of public and policy decisions.
- I haven't read any other works that discusses the topic in a similar perspective and in comparable or greater detail. I've come across few works on this topic. * Postman's later books and essays aren't anywhere close to this either.
- It is dated, and talks about last century's media - however, it is even more applicable to this century's computers, games, and internet, which are much more "addictive".
Alan Kay recommended it. He kept bringing it up. I finally read it last week. It's awesome. I think you can apply what people did with the TV to how people use social media: a series of interruptions.
Someone posted the pdf of the 20th anniv. edition. Google: Amusing Ourselves to Death pdf
It could be depressing as well, since the described effects correspond to the erosion of many important public institutions (like democratic governance).
Seems like this decade is a good time for an update on this issue, now that entertainment technologies are ubiquitous and totally attention grabbing, and cognitive psychology gives it good scientific grounding.
I only read a summary / excerpt / essay (don't which it was exactly and if it was from the book or another text by Postman on the same subject) quite some time ago.
His premise basically is that humans are increasingly becoming incapable of doing meaningful stuff or having meaningful conversations while gladly frittering away time for meaningless bullshit provided by the media.
While the dominant theme in his book naturally is TV the connection to today's social media usage and news consumption is quite obvious.
However, while the subject is important I'm not sure you need to read the entire book for the message to sink in.
I never understood why Brave New World is a dystopia. To me, it always seemed to be saying "yes, everyone's happy all the time, but our current values are marginalized!", which is just the appeal to tradition fallacy.
Can someone please explain to me what's bad about everyone being happy all the time? "They aren't happy in ways that currently make us happy!" isn't a strong argument...
The people in BNW aren't happy per se. Anyone with a desire to do anything outside of the accepted norm is outcast. They have no freedom. They only really have the illusion of happiness. Whether that's enough is the fundamental question the book asks.
I surely think a lot of popular culture is stupid/a waste of time, but as long as I (and others) have the freedom to freely chose more "fruitful" things to do with our time - then what's the big deal?
Do you? All it takes is social and cultural ostracism? That seems a bit expensive for something that should be very cheap if not freely encouraged.
Do you have the freedom to choose more fruitful housing architecture, or just a slightly different shade of beige? Can you marry whomever you please in any state you like? Can you teach your children your religion, or none at all, or will state sponsored schools tell them some creation myths are more equal that others? If there's one core value of all conformists, its trying to legislate their conformity, which is in direct opposition to your supposed freedom.
This is aside from PR issues, the embrace extend extinguish model of civil liberties. We'll kill brown people and take their oil because they hate our freedumbs. Whoops, that was an epic fail. Well guess we don't need this "freedom" thing anymore. No problemo, "Survivor" is on tonight so its all good.
You have less freedom than you think. Timesinks are addictive. We've all clicked on a link-bait headline, even though we knew it would waste our time, because the text was so enticing. And most can remember playing a boring video game longer than they wanted because they were distracted by some manipulative aspect of the game (need another level / badge / chicken on my farm). It's gotten so bad, people regularly refer to MMORPGS as "skinner-boxes."
With effort, and focus, we all can give up today's addictive timesinks. But when we're assaulted by the timesinks on an hourly basis, it's not as easy as you think.
Should the government ban stupid stuff in order to force people into "more satisfying pleasures" though a "moral ecology" that discourages addictive/pointless things?
The problem is that it reduces the capability of the population as a whole to make informed political decisions. The more distracted we are by superficial things, the less outrage we might express over abuses of power.
In other words, if more than half of our country buys into pure hedonism over critical thought, then there's ample room for democracy to fail.
