It happened again. It happened at work this time. And I’m getting sick of it. A colleague of mine, a fellow English teacher, swerved onto the topic of the novels 1984 and Brave New World in conversation with me (make that recklessly swerved, as she has no idea who she’s messing with) and, sure enough, she had to go and mention some pompous horse’s rear of an intellectual (I forget the idiot’s name) who has written an essay which supposedly showed that Brave New World was the superior work in terms of prescience, that Huxley was more of a prophet than Orwell, that the things Huxley predicted have come true for us today more so than have Orwell’s prophecies, and blah, blah, blah.
I wanted to gag. I’ve been down this road—far too often lately.
Look, I can’t help it, this takes me back: in a related way, this was the reason I stopped listening to Alex Jones back in 2003. Though sooner or later I would’ve quit listening to that bombastic ravening wolf anyway, it was Jones’s constant moronic refrain that Orwell was a bad guy—a New World Order operative who was rubbing it in our face when he wrote 1984—that made me shut off Jones for good. I knew that, at best, Jones was not well-read; he was ignorant. I knew that because I know Orwell. I understood his message. And not very many others did.
I was 30, I’m sorry to say, when I first got serious about books. I’m obviously an audio learner. I figured that out pretty quickly because what I got really hooked on were audiobooks. Previously only a TV head, I forced myself to undertake a crash course on classic literature from the 19th and 20th centuries. Most books I didn’t like. Some I did like. A few books I loved.
And then there was 1984.
I don’t want to sound blasphemous; I don’t want to be blasphemous; but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that listening to 1984 was very much akin to a religious experience of some sort. Or maybe a spiritual one, I don’t know. Is there a difference? All I know is I got a major case of goosebumps right from when I first began listening to 1984. And those goosebumps were all over my body and they didn’t go away until the book was finished. I knew, or I somehow sensed, that I was listening to something special. Something singular. Something very, very, very important. I knew this author had had some very privileged information to be able to say what he said in that book. And I immediately knew one other thing: This author was not in favor of what he was writing about. I knew this because I could sense the author’s terror in writing it; I sensed his turmoil; I sensed his tears. We literature teachers call this the tone of a book. Morons like Jones know nothing of such subtleties.
Then, too, I remembered: I grew up with a father who had been influenced by friends or coworkers—I’m still not sure which—who’d been John Birchers. My father, too, I then remembered, had once or twice mentioned to me this strange book called 1984, which had been written by a member of the Illuminati, George Orwell, and in this book, the author threw it in our face what the Illuminati was going to do to the world. Dad thought like Jones. The Birchers thought like Jones.
With my father recently passed away, I remember wanting dearly to tell him how mistaken he’d been about this guy Orwell. Anyway, sure enough, I’ve since heard other ill-read patriot types dissembling the same ignorant lie that Orwell was one of them.
Well, all of that led me down one heckuva deep rabbit-hole of a research project: I would listen to or read everything Orwell had ever written, or darn near it, and then I’d listen to or read it all over again, and sometimes again and again. Then I’d read what some of the biographers and others had to say about him. You know, just to see where this guy was coming from. And what I found was that Orwell was a good guy; true enough, he had been an insider for a time—specifically, a Fabian Socialist—but that he bucked the system and didn’t go along with the plan. A lifelong socialist but a thoroughgoing decent man at heart (at least by worldly standards), when shown at some point what the global socialists really wanted to do with the world once they’d gained power, he’d reacted, in his own words, “like a horse sneezing when it has smelled bad hay.”
Put it this way: If Orwell had been a bad guy, he never would have submerged himself for extended periods of his life as a homeless tramp; an impoverished miner; a harried, impecunious dishwasher; and an anarchist, trench-dwelling freedom fighter, in order to later tell the world of the plight of these respective groups—to raise consciousness as goes the modern phrase. He never would have suffered the “miner’s buttons”—scabs along every vertebrae of his back from bending and stooping in hot, low-roofed tunnels without a shirt; the holes in cardboard-like clothes; the squalid baths in beyond-filthy water; the foul food or lack thereof; the crazed cuts on fingers from the long, arduous days of hop picking; the vermin in his room, in his bed; the lice on his testicles; and Orwell surely would never have been sniper-shot in the neck and have missed death by a millimeter had Orwell been one of them.
Orwell was an idealist. Like Che Guevara, he thought the revolution would be popular and would be genuine. Unlike Guevara, Orwell at some point figured out that it wasn’t. And so he wrote 1984.
So, you see, I know Orwell. Some things I don’t know so well, but this guy I know. This brings me back to the conversation with my colleague on Orwell vs. Huxley. I don’t know Huxley like I know Orwell, but I know enough and I’ve read enough of Huxley to know that he really was a bad guy who really was in favor of what he was prophesying about. Oh sure, Huxley meant well: He was an elitist with a heart, if there is such a thing. Huxley believed that the horrid things he wrote about were really in the best interest of the great bulk of humanity. Like the guards who kept Cool Hand Luke in line, it was only to be meant for their good.
But enough at last about the respective characters of these men, let’s cut to the chase: How did their powers of prescience match up?
From 1984 alone (not even including those found in Animal Farm) I have counted over 30 predictions of Orwell that have come true for us today. They are all around us; we are now exposed and subjected to them constantly; they profoundly affect our daily existence; and they’re only getting worse, metastasizing onto the laws we see passed and the language we use and the liars we watch.
From Brave New World I have counted around, oh, 12 or 15. And of these, some of Huxley’s predictions, though they’ve certainly come true enough, are, to date, rather limited in scope. Such as when Huxley predicted what he called hypnopaedia, i.e., the brainwashing of individuals while they are sleeping via the use of such devices as pillowspeakers, which constantly repeat certain commands or slogans or mantras. We’ve seen something like this come true in the hellish forms of Dr. Ewan Cameron of Canada and Dr. Jolyon West of UCLA, who, in later decades, did similar things to innocent victims—mostly mental patients. These North American Nazi doctors in white coats didn’t call it hypnopaedia. Cameron called it psychic driving. But, call it whatever, this can hardly be said to have affected the lives of the vast bulk of humanity the way that language manipulation and media monopoly and perverted patriotism has—and these latter are purely Orwellian prophecies.
But the bottom line is really this: It’s safer to say that Brave New World has come true more than 1984. Brave New World’s warnings are so much more clinical and antiseptic; scary, but not so scary, basically. And it helps to not be scared, especially when you’re an intellectual who’s never fired or received a shot in anger, never administered or taken a beating, and most particularly when you’re an intellectual who, in professing himself to be wise, has instead become a fool and has rejected the truth of Jesus Christ and the biblical worldview.
There is another way it is safer nowadays to assume that Brave New World was more prophetic than 1984. Like the old adage says, “ignorance is bliss”; and to maintain that Brave New World has been proven to be more prophetic in our day is to remain blissfully ignorant of what is really happening around us now, and to miss entirely a key component of Orwell’s message in 1984. For there is a crucial paragraph in 1984 where Orwell lets the reader know—indirectly, as all good writers do; indirectly, but unmistakably—that the bombs that are exploding all around the main character, the attacks from the supposed enemy with which Oceania is at war, are in fact being fired by the government of Oceania itself on its own populace in order to foment bloodlust among the man on the street in Oceania and thereby perpetuate the war (and thereby perpetuate the profits of the true Oligarchs of Oceania, the Inner Party). In this singular passage, Orwell establishes himself as a dystopian prophet without peer.
Here is a litmus test: Ask any proponent of the Huxley-was-a-better-prophet school what happened on 9/11. Invariably, he’ll tell you about 19 Muslim hijackers and boxcutters and asinine, impossible pancake theories. He’ll probably tell you, too, that Timothy McVeigh acted alone in blowing up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, that is, McVeigh and a big batch of cow manure and a great big truck. This is what I mean by ignorance. The only way these people can perceive that Aldous Huxley was more prophetic than George Orwell is by first caricaturing Orwell’s message (such as when they claim that the rulers of Oceania maintained power purely “by torture and brutality”), and then by flat out ignoring what is actually happening around us today.
Ironically, Orwell’s nightmare vision was so dead-on accurate that these intellectual clowns are now living it, they’re now acting it out, and they can’t even see it. In their obtuseness, they are facilitating all that Orwell warned would come about. This is what makes me want to hide my head in my hands, or alternately want to pull my hair out, every time I hear one of these intellectuals pontificate that Huxley was the better prophet. (Are you reading this, Paul and Phillip? Probably not, right?)
