What differs, however, is the means of repression, the ways in which each society seeks to control its populations. Winston Smith is no freer than Bernard Marx or the gray-cowled, blindly-toiling sub-morons to express their particular desires, needs or grievances. Repression of people and ideas certainly exists in both social orders. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were manned by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons” (Orwell, 1961:8).īut the similarities between the two worlds are only apparent. could be entered “only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Winston Smith, the writer-hero of 1984, wanders through a frigid, gray society, suppressed by the power of the state, by propaganda and the sheer threat of deadly force. Writing, art, free-thinking of any kind, creativity, resistance are all suppressed, with the “thought police” poised to crush any hint of individuality. This, it seems, is also the case with the bleak world of 1984. Freedom, creativity, inventiveness, art, scientific discovery, any form of personal spontaneity is a virtual impossibility given the brave new world system.
Effectively, the cradle-to-grave existence of Huxley’s various populations is remarkably suppressed by the social orders in which they live. Unruly class systems are converted into caste systems, and the high-born (alpha-pluses) are as rigidly managed as the low-born (epsilon sub-morons). Virtually nothing happens spontaneously, as even the number and aptitude of the newborn are rigidly controlled. Huxley’s society is preplanned in extremis. Both recount a modern dystopia – worlds in which individual freedoms have been drastically limited in pursuit of a rational, orderly and stable society. In certain ways this is true, but in other significant ways it is not.
The original Brave New World has often been considered a companion piece to George Orwell’s 1984. What is even more startling about Huxley’s prescience is that, in the postmodern world, not only have some of his predictions materialized but that they have in a certain sense become signposts of the socio-political and cultural framework of the western world. In his 1958 revisitation of the brave new world he envisioned in 1932, Aldous Huxley was shocked to see how many of his predictions had been realized, and, even more so, how quickly they had arrived: “The prophesies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would” (Huxley, 1958:4). most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution (Huxley, 1958).
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