{"id":102187,"date":"2026-05-01T04:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T08:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=102187"},"modified":"2026-04-30T12:44:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T16:44:58","slug":"we-are-much-more-brave-new-world-than-1984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/05\/01\/we-are-much-more-brave-new-world-than-1984\/","title":{"rendered":"We are much more Brave New World<\/em> than 1984<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Culturally, we had lots of warning from George Orwell and Aldous Huxley about their future — our present — and while we have had some success avoiding what Orwell feared for us, we’ve had much less success<\/a> avoiding a Brave New World<\/em> culture:<\/p>\n

As the curtain of totalitarianism descended across much of the globe, in the mid-twentieth century, the Western intellectual class pointed to George Orwell’s 1984<\/em> as a blueprint for societal ruin. <\/p>\n

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I’m sure many of you are familiar with Orwell’s magnum opus<\/em>, but for those who don’t know the gist: Orwell envisioned a dystopian future governed by a panoptic state, where an externally imposed oppression would ruthlessly strip humanity of its autonomy, its history, and its capacity for critical thought.<\/p>\n

It is a great novel and many believe it was prophetic (I certainly believe parts of it ring true), but, as the cultural critic Neil Postman astutely observed in his foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death<\/em>, it was not Orwell but Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World<\/em>, who accurately mapped the specific destiny of the modern collapse.<\/p>\n

Huxley recognised a far more insidious threat:<\/p>\n