Saturday, January 19, 2013

Huxley vs Orwell

People often talk about George Orwells book Nineteen Eighty-Four as a despairing vision of the future, however,  Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is in fact a far more insightful.  Some time ago I found this comic strip by Stuart McMillen which its self is an interpretation of the book a book Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public disclosure in the age of show business by Niel Postman.  Postman shows that Huxley is far more accurate in it's premonition of the future than Orwell.  A future that is now not in the future any more, it is in fact the present day!  Huxleys Brave New World was published in 1932, Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949.
 
Lets see how they compare through Stuart McMillens comic strip...
 
 

So there you have it. Huxley was the visionary, Orwell just gets discussed more because Nineteen Eighty-Four is in all the high school reading curriculums, almost no one has read Brave New World these days. See Huxley was right again.
 
If you want more go see Stuart McMillen here or Neil Postman here.
 
 

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