David Craig, on November 14th, 2019(Thursday blog)
Orwell vs Huxley?
Three of the greatest political novels in the English language are probably George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Animal Farm (published in 1945) was a brilliant prediction of how communist/socialist societies would develop into dictatorships. The novels Nineteen Eighty-Four (published 1949) and Brave New World (published 1932), on the other hand, gave two very different visions of how democratic societies would morph into totalitarian states.
Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, a total rewriting of history and propaganda. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a superstate named Oceania that is ruled by the Party who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Big Brother, the leader of the Party, enjoys an intense cult of personality despite the fact that he may not even exist.
Brave New World: In Huxley’s vision, people would be controlled by providing them pleasure – unlimited trivial entertainment, a constants supply of drugs and total sexual freedom. A distracted and dumbed-down population then lacks the mental resources to resist their enslavement.
Orwell feared the totalitarian government would ban books. Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. Orwell feared that our fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.
Now, more than half a century after the publication of both books, we can see where their predictions were accurate. China, with its plan to rate every citizen by the level of their ‘social credits’, is developing more towards an Orwellian surveillance dictatorship. Though Orwell’s concept of ‘Thought Police’ and people being destroyed for ‘Wrong-Think’ has been effectively used in the West to silence any criticism of the progressive, globalists’ plans to abolish nation states and put us all under the control of large, bureaucrat-run, corrupt superstates. However, apart from wrong-thought being persecuted, the West, with its obsession with entertainment, triviality, narcissism and celebration of ignorance, looks more like Huxley’s future world than Orwell’s.
What neither author could foresee, is that the West would be threatened by an invasion of people whose world view hadn’t changed in over a thousand years – a people who hadn’t gone through an Enlightenment and who therefore wanted to conquer rather than assimilate. Though Huxley did correctly predict that we would be so emasculated by our obsession with our own instant gratification that we wouldn’t have the moral strength to defend our civilisation.
Should the voting age be raised to 30?
And while we’re on the subject of trivialisation, narcissism and the celebration of ignorance, here’s R***, an 18-year-old student, taking part in a discussion about the General Election on something called the Victoria Derbyshire Show on the BBC yesterday.
R*** apparently believes that Nigel Farage is leader of the LibDems. Enlightening us with her youthful wisdom, R*** said Nigel was like a bird because “he was part of the Lib Dems, and I like where they’re going with things, how they’re kind of focussed…”
Weep for your beloved country when we give the vote to intellectual colossi like this young lady. Thank you R*** for providing clear evidence that the voting age should be raised to at least thirty!!!!
Category: 
My opinion is that all democracies are effectively socialist in nature. It is unlikely that the Tories will nationalise anything, but there is not one party that respects private property. They have given themselves the right to take what they want from us and if we refuse to pay they will put us in jail. Democracy is a sham.
The EU and now the British Parliament has shown that they have no respect for referendum results. The are not our servants or our representatives and they never have been, they are there to control us. It is impossible for them to represent us but this is how they promote themselves. They could not represent two people with different views. They are there to use their judgement to make decisions, which because of the party whips, means they do what the party says. What we want is freedom from the state, not control by the state. We should introduce the Roman idea of decimation applied every year until we get them down to a level where they can no longer do anything the state does not have to do. People must support themselves.
When socialist economic policies enter into a democracy it just results in parties using various bribes with our money to buy votes and this is what we are seeing in this election. The money has to come from taxes or debt. One look at the UK current account balance shows that the UK has hardly been paying its way since the last war. The family silver was sold and then we entered into living on debt. No country can have a high standard of living for very long when wealth is not being crested. Politicians cannot create wealth, all they know is how to destroy wealth and demotivate our wealth creators.
Education is the other side of this. We have spent trillions on education over the years and what do we really have to show for it? The video demonstrates the typing level of knowledge today. The media promotes ignorance as being acceptable. Social media gives a voice to idiots and their views travel round the world in an instant to be soaked up by other idiots. All rational thinking and discussion is closed down because political correctness and social justice now dominates. Children are being used to promote political ideas when they should be in school. They think they know better than adults. In that case let them sit around in parks teaching themselves and we can save the taxes to support them. Yesterday the Guardian had an article about teachers leaving to work abroad in private schools, and promoting the benefits of private education. Things are bad when The Guardian promotes private eduction.
Not sure about votes to the over 30’s either. One of the groups I’m in in Facebook is made up of (white) retired folk and when I posted the obvious proposition that their grandchildren/great-grandchildren will be living in a country where Sharia Law prevails, I got a huge amount of stick. I was anti-Muslim, Islamophobic etc – they are in total denial! And this from presumably intelligent, educated white British middle classes. One despairs.
@A Thorpe.
I particularly like your last paragraph. How true it all is. Promotion of ignorance plays right into the hands of our masters. The millennials (particularly from minorities) appear to be well endowed with ignorance as witnessed in the video here and their over-representation on our media.
There’s an argument for giving young people the vote. After all, it’s their future. However, unless they have a good knowledge of how the world works, they would be voting for their own demise.
With regards to Brave New World/1984 – it’s years since I read either book and I don’t remember specifics but in general I don’t think the two books are mutually exclusive. I can see the wealthier among us living in Brave New World, attention diverted into submission by entertainments and social pleasures/pressures. 1984 is for the lower class.
This creates a gulag (and I’d argue that this is already happening), people in the BNW class justifiably terrified of losing their jobs/money/social credit and being socially demoted, thus guaranteeing compliance. This extends to the ‘rewriting history’ aspect of 1984 – few people would want to risk being labelled a dissident by being known to question what they’re told to think. It’s not too hard to look at the last few years and wonder if poorer areas are intentionally being made into hostile places for this purpose, fear of losing your job, being made unemployable etc.
I should maybe add that my vision of ‘1984 as gulag’ probably differs from the book in that I see cultural divisions, crime and degeneracy being actively promoted (and the results constantly made available to the BNW class in order to terrify and disgust them).
With regards to voting, it’s quite normal for voting to be seen as some sort of celebratory act of democracy-endorsment, rather than a (theoretically) crucially serious act of collective decision making. If we were lost in the jungle or defusing a bomb we wouldn’t encourage anyone to take part in voting for which direction we walk in or which wire to cut. We’d directly understand the seriousness of the issue and actively discourage the clueless from taking part – and, faced with immediate and easily understandable danger, it’s unlikely they’d want to anyway.
I’m starting to ramble but one more point that’s winding me up with regards to under-18 voting – an individual vote is not all that democracy is about. If I can win two other voters over to my point of view then I’ve achieved more than my own single vote could have done. It should always be made clear to under 18s that they are not excluded from democracy, they can learn, they can hone their arguments and they can talk. If I had to give up either my own, personal eligibility to vote or my ability to speak freely I’d give up my vote.
One more: to be 16 and think that you’re a clued up as a 60-year old is extremely unhealthy – what motivation do you have to grow and develop if you think that age and experience does nothing but wear out your body? We hear a lot about the mental health of the young (and I take most of it with a pinch of salt) but if this attitude is common I can see how it would make life seem very hopeless.
1984 and the re-writing of history the BBC does this by put black people (not Asian Indians ) into most of its historical drama example here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VOr-2K9PN4
someone should make a video compilation of these dramas.
Winston Smith worked at the Ministry of Truth whose job was to rewrite history to what every the party policy was.
I think -Decline of the West written almost a hundred years ago is a more probable future.
DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER
We must oppose giving “Brainwashed” kids the vote. Personally i would be in favour of a voting age of 22 years old, so they will be hopefully working, or have a serious academic qualification, and therfore have some “skin in th game”!!
But we have reached the absurdity of “world leaders” listening to a manipulated young Sweedish kid
Well it’s all very simple. If you are working and paying taxes, you should be allowed to vote because you are contributing to society financially. If you are not working and not paying taxes, why should you have a say in how that money is spent?
At present 8% of the House of Commons and 6% of the House of Lords is comprised of foreigners and people of foreign extract. I cannot stand for the Pakistani administration because I am not Pakistani and not a Muslim. There is no reason to have representatives of the people who are not basic white English men and women. In other parts of the world, if you move there you must accept you will be under the control of the natural local people. It should be the same here. The Welsh, Scots and Irish have devolution. They control themselves. The English it appears are controlled by everyone except the English. This has to stop before we are being controlled by immigrants with no link or knowledge of our history. I have no problem with anyone coming here to work. Not working; go home. It was only intended to be temporary; we never intended to give you our souls. We are leaving Europe to regain control from foreigners. We are not doing that to hand over control to another bunch of foreigners, many of whom are living on benefits and British charity. we have to sort this out. It appears Enoch wasn’t far wrong. Knives, drugs, violence, rivers of blood?
Perhaps Bertrand Russell is right. I found this quote from his book The Scientific Outlook:
“The society of experts will control propaganda and education. It will teach loyalty to the world government and make nationalism high treason. The government, being an oligarchy, will instil submissiveness into the great bulk of the population…It is possible that it may invent ingenious ways of concealing its own power, leaving the forms of democracy intact, and allowing the plutocrats or politicians to imagine that they are cleverly controlling these forms…whatever the outward forms may be, all real power will come to be concentrated in the hands of those who understand the art of scientific manipulation”