Are we living the Orwellian or Huxlian dystopia?

Eliška Sedláková, BRIL3

 1984 and Brave New World are both great dystopian novels that came from the era of
late Modernism. With Brave New World and 1984 both written in the first half of the 20th
century, they are considered precedents of what has been going on in the sociopolitical field
until these days. Due to their nature, these novels significantly influenced the general view on
society, politics, and the economy, needless to say how much they are ahead of their time.
Nevertheless, both novels can also be categorised as science fiction literature. However, is it
really fiction?

Orwell is mostly known for his criticism of totalitarian regimes; besides his praised
allegory of The Animal Farm, his most famous novel is nowadays considered almost a perfect
depiction of what life in the Soviet Union looked like. It is fascinating what impact this work
of literature actually has even 80 years after it was written. 1984 depicts a purely dystopian
society with the government having absolute control over it. According to Pepa, 1984 is
nothing more than “an exposition of how society under the iron hand of totalitarian rule
operates“ (2). Despite the absence of any freedom (given in real life and even in people’s
thoughts), another major aspect is the lack of information and, more importantly – censorship.
The people of Oceania get no knowledge of what is going on behind the borders; instead, they
are given “enhanced“ false interpretations through mass media. This is potentially relatable to
the Soviet Union only a few years later, but an alarming fact is that Russia did not leave these
habits even nowadays. According to Unbound, “as it (Russia) emptied public space of
independent media and dissent, the government filled it with turbo-charged disinformation,
and most recently, state media has told endless fictions about the Russian actions and
Ukrainian “responsibility” for the war and for Russia’s crimes“ (142). It is obvious that
Russians (and other totalitarian countries after all) are banning certain pieces of information,
censoring what is coming from the outside world and presenting a “better” version of it,
glorifying the eternal renown of their government, which is a terrifyingly similar scenario to
the 1984  one.

Pepa summarised another crucial point: “citizens are in a state of continual

apprehension and terror all the time as their movements and activities both in public and in
private are constantly being monitored by everpresent cameras“ (2), meaning in 1984, as
much as there is no freedom, there is no privacy as well. This is where Orwell crosses the
border between dictatorship countries and democratic ones. Apart from China being another
totalitarian power, having an enormous amount of data about its people, this is exactly what
began to happen in Europe and U.S. as well, especially with the advent of mobile phones and
social media. No day in a person’s life would go all the way without any device that would
somehow gather information about them, whether it is their location, activity or even
thoughts, as we have artificial intelligence that can predict our behaviour almost better than
we do. 

On the other hand, even younger piece of literature by Huxley sees the future of
people in a not-so-harsh way. Brave New World  (hereinafter BNW) seems rather utopian at
first glance. Society has managed to develop itself so precisely that people are bred artificially
and specifically for their future purpose. However, the world state, in the name of absolute
stability, deindividualizes its citizens and pushes them down to become machine-slaves by
“methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia“ (qtd. in Hamamra
13). But this “absolute stability“ has its drawbacks, as the “perfect“ society is constantly being
brainwashed in order to be happy. Happiness, a positive emotion, is used in BNW as a tool to
keep people productive and beneficial for the World State. This ultimately sounds almost as
totalitarian as Orwell’s reality, so why does it sound familiar to western people as well, even
though western countries are primarily democratic?

The resemblance is, in fact, again related to mass and social media and their usage in
the form of supporting consumerism and modern capitalism. Citizens are becoming products
and properties of the World State, and their value as human beings is lost. As already
mentioned, thanks to new technologies, particularly mobile phones (that were supposed to
make our lives easier), people’s phone activities are constantly being tracked, resulting in
“consumer profiles “that indicate our potential demands. Commercing has never been this
easy (Sam Carr claims that “the average person is now estimated to encounter between 6,000
to 10,000 ads every single day “). Based on these factors, personalised advertising parasites
on society and consumer profiles have become a literal commodity as certain companies pay
actual money to gather these data. Other than that, modern media also provide a massive
amount of various pieces of information, either official or user-created, in terms of social
media. This leads to the overwhelming exposure to “more than we can take“ every day.
Huxley was afraid of this “informational overflow“ scenario, unlike Orwell, whose dystopia
lacks it. The more people consume, the more they are happy, or are they?

Moreover, BMW mentions a certain drug called Soma. Soma is initially “a substitute

for religion used by the world state as a guarantee against any disruptive ideas “(qtd. in
Hamamra 15). However, as much as religion is concerned, Soma applies to today’s system as
a literal drug, too. Recently, there has been a massive breakout of various mental illnesses
throughout the population (and in the U.S. mainly, with almost 20% of adults experiencing at
least one mental disorder) (Rubyat 2); these are treated with a wide range of medications from
sleeping pills to antidepressants, so easy to obtain. Soma is no longer an idea of Huxley’s; it is
a standardised procedure to keep the population as happy and productive as possible.

There is no definite answer to whether Orwell or Huxley predicted the future more
precisely. Ultimately none of the dystopias is universally applicable since there are various
political systems and regimes over the world. According to Google Ngram, the word
“Orwellian “is used three times more nowadays than it used to back in the 1970s when the
Soviet Union was at its peak. Nevertheless, there is no proof that modern society is (or will
be) – in fact – Orwellian, although there appear to be certain patterns. As far as western
culture and development are concerned, Huxley could be considered a “better “prophet in
terms of consumerism and “blissful ignorance “as people are so preoccupied with being
“global citizens “, they lose themselves internally. Even though not totalitarian, modern
society is more and more affected by the very same aspects as in BNW, and it is debatable
whether this kind of “modern totality “is about to happen any time soon. However, the
similarities are unmissable; therefore it is safe to say the world population is prone to living in
a rather “Huxlian" dystopia.
 References

PEPA, Ruel, 2015. Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World [online]. Dostupné
z: doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.4224.6883 Accessed 18 Jan 2023

Kaye, David. (2022). Online Propaganda, Censorship and Human Rights in Russia's War
Against Reality. AJIL Unbound. 116. 140-144. 10.1017/aju.2022.24. Accessed 18 Jan
2023

Rubyat, Asma & Amherst, Umass. (2020). US Mental Healthcare in the Age of COVID-19:
Obstacles and Recommendations. 10.13140/RG.2.2.23271.16806. Accessed 18 Jan
2023

Hamamra, Bilal. (2017). A Foucauldian Reading of Huxley's Brave New World. Theory and
Practice in Language Studies. 7. 12-17. 10.17507/tpls.0701.02. Accessed 19 Jan 2023

List of used literature

Bolulu, Zeynepnur & War, Soldiery. (2018). Elements of War and Futurism in ‘1984’ by
George Orwell.

Mohr, Dunja. (2007). Transgressive Utopian Dystopias: The Postmodern Reappearance of

Utopia in the Disguise of Dystopia. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. 55.
10.1515/zaa-2007-0103. Accessed 19 Jan 2023

“Google Books Ngram Viewer.” Google Books, Google,

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?
content=orwellian&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-
2019&smoothing=3#.

Elflein, John. “Sleeping AIDS Reported by Adults U.S. 2022.” Statista, 1 June 2022,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1310940/sleeping-aids-reported-by-adults-us/.

Carr, Sam. “How Many Ads Do We See a Day in 2023?” Lunio, 19 Jan. 2023,
https://lunio.ai/blog/strategy/how-many-ads-do-we-see-a-day/.