An old friend sent me this to ponder. She wrote: I did not quite understand this one…
Orwell was obviously right-on, tyrants always ban words, ideas, discussion, books, history, science and call it all something else, like Project 2025’s “Big Beautiful (mass murdering) Bill!” . Huxley was famously insightful about society, I don’t think I ever read more than a few pages by him, I’m not really familiar with his philosophy. I recall reading something he wrote about psychedelics that I liked.
About the author of this excellent analysis:
Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed digital technology, including personal computers and mobile devices, and was critical of the use of personal computers in schools.[1] He is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education, including Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1970), The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995). source
I took away from the Postman piece that Orwell saw oppression and violence as the way to break people to totalitarianism and that Huxley saw seduction and the ready, unhealthy satisfaction of every base desire as the way totalitarians get control. These views are two sides of the same insightful coin, tyrants always do both. The ones you can’t win with bread and circuses, and playing to their favorite passions, you lock them up, publicly torture a few of them, burn their books, murder their leaders.
I took from this that Huxley saw the corruption of meaning, the incoherence needed for a police state, as a function of narcotizing citizens, rendering them senseless with an ever more tempting smorgasbord of overwhelming distraction and weirdly engrossing unreality that catered to their unquenchable desires. Giving the masses what they love, what they crave, junk food, violent sports, titillating “reality TV”, pornography, the internet, twitter, instagram, youTube, NETFLIX, ICE, DOGE, “The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”, mind altering substances, hatred of others (many, apparently, love to hate), it all feeds into the same insatiable appetite for oblivion that drives everything else in out of control capitalism. Constant distraction and the ease of access to pleasures, often in unhealthy, addictive forms, makes citizens complacent and apathetic while the fascists go to work without interference from more than a tiny, easily manageable handful — at first, anyway, until, after enough senseless atrocity, masses start shaking themselves awake (hence the far-right’s eternal war on “wokeness”).
Both of these thinkers (and Neil Postman, too) seem like very profound prophets at this hideous moment in human history, as global oligarchs’ stage their determined march to totalitarianism. Tyranny on a mass scale always depends on the destruction of coherence and eliminating the possibility of meaningful dialogue. There appear to be at least two equally effective routes to the goal of mass incoherence that is the foundation of the Nazi state,
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