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By Root 1694 0

the situation. Nevertheless, that this is how they choose to interpret the nature of political control under authoritarianism is not an accident. Much of Western thinking on this issue has been heavily influenced—perhaps even constrained—by two twentieth-century thinkers who spent decades thinking about the diffusion of power and control under democracy, communism, and fascism. George Orwell (1903-1950) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), both men of letters who managed to leave indelible marks on the world of modern political thought, have each offered us powerful and yet strikingly different visions for how modern governments would exercise control over their populations (those visions haunt millions of high school students who are to this day tasked with writing essays comparing the two). The presence of these two figures in modern public life is hard to miss: A day hardly goes by when someone in the media doesn’t invoke either man to make a point about the future of democracy or the history of totalitarianism, and it’s quite common to invoke both, as if one could fit any possible kind of political control in the spectrum between those two polar ends. Thus a shrewd Western politician would profess admiration of both (cue Hillary Clinton, who, when asked about books that influenced her the most, mentioned both Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World in one breath).

Orwell’s 1984 (1949), his most famous work and certainly one of the best novels of the twentieth century, emphasizes pervasive surveillance and mind-numbing propaganda composed in the meaningless vocabulary of “Newspeak.” In Orwell’s world, citizens are not entitled to any privacy; hence they treasure junk and scraps of paper, as those lie outside of the sphere controlled by the government and remind them of a much different past. Even their television sets are used to monitor their behavior. Winston Smith, the protagonist, is warned that neurologists are working to extinguish the orgasm, as full devotion to the Party requires the complete suppression of the libido.

Huxley’s vision was articulated in Brave New World (1932) and a short later essay called Brave New World Revisited (1958). In Huxley’s world, science and technology are put to good use to maximize pleasure, minimize the time one spends alone, and provide for a 24/7 cycle of consumption (one of the regime’s slogans is “ending is better than mending!”). Not surprisingly, the citizens lose any ability to think critically and become complacent with whatever is imposed on them from above. Sexual promiscuity is encouraged from early childhood, even though sex is considered a social activity rather than the act of reproduction. The idea of a family is considered “pornographic,” while social relations are organized around the maxim “everyone belongs to everyone else.”

The two men knew each other and corresponded. Orwell, the younger of the two, even briefly studied French under Huxley’s tutelage at Oxford. In 1940 Orwell wrote a provocative review of Huxley’s book, and Huxley revisited both his own work and 1984 in his Brave New World Revisited. Orwell thought that while Huxley provided “a good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia,” he misunderstood the nature of power in a modern totalitarian state. “[Brave New World was] ... the kind of thing that seemed possible and even imminent before Hitler appeared, but it had no relation to the actual future. What we are moving towards at this moment is something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse, thanks to the radio and the secret police,” wrote Orwell in a 1940 essay.

Huxley, however, wasn’t convinced. In a 1949 letter to Orwell, he expressed his doubts about the social controls described in 1984: “The philosophy of the ruling minority in 1984 is sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.” He continued: “My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing