Was it really a dystopia?
Brave New World
Dominic Price
Nicholas Kelly
1984 was a dystopia. BNW was a utopia that happened to be populated with morons.
Jordan King
If humanity does not advance to space, if humanity does not guarantee it's own survival by mastering the heavens and the stars, then it is always a dystopia.
Case in point, our liberal democracy is a dystopia as well.
Cooper Murphy
Epsilon minus semimoron detected.
Yes but in the Nietzschean sense, in that it wasn’t a dystopia due to people being misery, but due to them becoming stagnant, unthinking, etc and thus losing their humanity.
Dylan Cox
Isn't capitalism already doing this?
Leo Cook
Braindead and reactionary take.
Jaxon Butler
Brave New World is basically modern capitalism.
Elijah Richardson
That's the thing the world's in such a shit state that BNW seems better than the present day in some ways:
Jose Thompson
Yeah but in BNW everyone is a sex obsessed furfag.
Wyatt Bennett
Yes, and?
Andrew Cruz
Brave New World is incomplete without Huxley's Island
Justin Baker
BNW seems a lot more plausible though.
Brandon Bennett
You tell me, OP.
Asher Williams
Julian Watson
Pick one and only one.
Jayden Foster
Yeah, people forget Huxley hated unmitigated capitalism (hence the societies creator and original controller being Ford and "by Ford" being a saying) and that his perfect society was a Georgist/Kropotkin based communal society in which everyone had sex and did shrooms all day. He's by no means a communist in the traditional sense, and he openly was against the USSR and Marxism, but he definitely was more of a utopian anarkiddie than a defender of capitalism.
If anything Brave New World is a good example of a SocDem or Technocrat society in which the people are made so drugged and complacent by their own volition that no one questions or has a desire to change their condition. The whole thing is a Camatte-esc nightmare in which humanity is an aspect of capital and is unable to escape. To steal from the wiki for that who don't know Camatte:
If that isn't BNW with it's whole "village natives good, Ford society bad" message, I don't know what is.
Justin Russell
BNW isn’t really designed to oppose any particular system, rather it’s a critique of the notion of social progress as the endless rationalization and increased “efficiency” of society. If anything it’s a critique of some aspects of the enlightenment.
Jackson Peterson
Jackson Cooper
You wouldn't notice the difference though, because you'd be one too.
your entire personality and conception of life is engineered from birth.
Juan Diaz
Did you miss the point about Ford?
Elijah Cox
Dystopias are always more plausible than utopias.
Justin Flores
The Soviets took a lot of inspiration from Ford's production methods as well, you can do so without being a capitalist.
Lincoln Jenkins
the Soviets became profit-seeking exploitative bureaucrats from the second War "Communism" was established.
Joseph Flores
Wtf does war communism have to do with anything? Do you even know what that was?
Nicholas Barnes
I don't remember these parts.
Lincoln Taylor
War communism and the pressures of the civil war in general laid the foundations for bureaucratization, revisionism, and alienation of the state from the people. This was largely not the fault of the Bolsheviks however, although I’d argue that Stalin’s attempts to combat it only made it worse.
Joshua Lee
Yes because it still had hierarchies. It was essentially the tower of Babel. The savage was the only sane man in the book.
Charles Williams
Because there is only one truth, one good, and a way to be happy. But lies, evil and ways to be miserable are infinite.
Joshua Hernandez
This is a lie. War Communism was pretty good, it was the NEP that caused bureaucracy.
Christian Harris
The main character is surnamed Marx, his romantic interest is named Lenina.
Lincoln Robinson
Yes, but they have these names because Huxley didn't like Marxism and the USSR as well as capitalism, not because the society had Marxist origins (the origins of the society are from Ford). Again, utopian anarkiddie
Jordan Anderson
The society could have been repurposed though to be a socialist utopia if Huxley didn't see the planning of the USSR as a negative.
Sebastian Bailey
Even Lenin admitted it was a mistake m8.
Eli Price
Huxley posited that positive reinforcement could be just as effective in the creation of a totalitarian regime as Orwell negative reinforcement could be.
If everybody is too busy fucking, taking soma and being distracted by an endless stream of entertainment they will not care or even notice when an elite takes over.
Adam Roberts
BNW honestly depressed the fuck out of me as a teenager because to be completely honest, my interpretation of it was a story about a guy who wants friends to bullshit about Shakespeare and stuff with, but everyone he meets is a genetically modified wage slave who's happy screwing lightbulbs in all day, figuratively or literally, or the drug-addled version of social climbers trying to be the coolest dude at the party forever
Brody King
That's a bummer, bro. But that's the world we live in now. So get to it! Kill yourself like the savage, wage slave or become a drug addled social climber; the choice is yours.
Perfectly expresses how hopeless I feel about the situation. Reminds me of how Debord killed himself after long before proclaiming that the choice was "revolution or suicide".
There is no hope any more, no hope no hope NO HOPE.
THERE IS NO HOPE YOU'D BE A FOOL TO THINK OTHERWISE