Let's compare the two (paraphrased from wikipedia):
HUXLEY FEARED
There would be no one who wanted to read book.
Those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
The truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
We would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."
In Brave New World, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
In short, Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.
ORWELL FEARED:
Those who would ban books.
Those who would deprive us of information.
That the truth would be concealed from us.
WE would become a captive culture.
In 1984, people were controlled by fear of pain.
In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us.
I FEAR
That we have been on the Huxley path for a long time which will lead us onto the Orwellian Path. The technology is almost in place for a totalitarian/fascist force to take control, and I don't say this lightly.
If we are honest, we have to admit the so-called War on Drugs has really been Many Wars Providing Drugs. Drugs, addictive and mind altering, have killed more Americans than the Many Wars. A loathsome dystopic tool.
We are coming out of the Shop til You Drop Decade. Millions are jobless, lost their homes, and are the nouveau poor. Fear of an even worse fate could prompt people to lose themselves in different ways. Violent, self-destructive, alienated, lost hopes.
The Occupy Movement is offering a better alternative.
Becoming a unified community can heal the dystopia we fell into. It's time to reconnect with ourselves, others, and what is true and real.
It's time for it to be cool to Love Thy Neighbor as much as we love our Self.
Freedom is not individuality, self-focus. Freedom is being a member of a wholesome, interconnected community. When one falls, others can help pick them up. We we fall, there will be others to help us up. If some are sick, they can be cared for in healthy ways that still protect the community. COMMUNITY not alienation. Alienation is not freedom.
We are entering a new time, a new way, and I know we will get there as long as we join in and keep up what we are doing. The small Occupy Communities can become the centers for an extended family.
Occupy Everywhere.
Peace
1984, Animal Farm, and Brave New World full movies below.
Churchill said: Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
Animal Farm - Orwell
1984 - Orwell
Brave New World - Huxley - Corporate Control
If you're not so inclined to read that history, and most aren't, here are the 5 principles of neo-liberal economics which are guiding the economic policies today, sadly.
See if you can recognize any of these at play in America. I certainly did. It's a wake up call, if you have ears that can hear:
There are five cardinal points of "neoliberal" economic agenda.
The supremacy of the free market.
The market was to rule supreme, unrestrained by the intervention of government, labor unions, or anything else (other than corporate monopoly power) that constrained the operation of market forces, regardless of how much social disorder, suffering or exploitation results.
Any undesirable effects are to be ascribed simply to "unidentified interventions" which, when they were identified, could be eliminated, and the problem solved thereby.
Monopolies were simply assumed, against all evidence, to be self-limiting (though no one ever managed to explain how DeBeers Consolidated Mines had managed to create and maintain a worldwide monopoly on the diamond business for more than a century).
Cutting, and eliminating when possible, expenditure for social services.
Again, in the name of reducing government interference in the market, it was not necessary for government to involve itself in social welfare programs.
To explain the obvious suffering that results, it is therefore claimed that when the poor suffer, it is due to their own laziness that they do not better themselves.
That the accumulation of money was equivalent to the accumulation of power, with its attendant distortion of the functionings of the market, was not a concern.
That this led inevitably to the disempowerment of the poor was not a concern - the poor were blamed for their condition by claiming their "inferiority" or "bad decisions." Social justice was a non-issue.
Deregulation.
If government is interfering in the market, it will only lead to a loss of profits, and therefore, government regulation had to be assumed to be bad.
Therefore, it has to be reduced or eliminated, even in monopolistic situations.
One neoliberal, Grover Norquist, an official in the George W. Bush administration commented that he wanted to reduce the size of government to the point where he "could drown it in the bathtub" - and then go on to do so.
Privatization.
Since government is assumed, as a given, to be inefficient, lazy, bloated and uneconomical in the provisioning of goods and services, it was only reasonable to presume that private enterprise could and would perform the delivery of services in a more efficient manner, and hence any activity that delivers goods or services to citizens should and must be privatized.
Never was an explanation offered for the contrary incentive of capitalism - that the capitalist's basic profit-driven incentive is to charge as much money as possible for providing as few goods and services as possible.
Elimination of the concept of "Community" or the "Common Good."
Since this is antithetical to the notion of privatization and "rugged individualism," the concept of the commons (the air we must all breathe, the water we must all drink, etc.) to them, reeks faintly of Communism, it is assumed to be bad, wrong, and hence is oppositional to the "neoliberal" agenda.
Such notions as public health, public education, etc., are to be replaced by private initiative, as anything else is simply considered to be a manifestation of lassitude, indolence and governmental dependence.
Maybe I just have a flare for the obvious, but don't these five principles pretty much describe how the middle class in America has been eviscerated.
And now there is a great deal of noise to privatize Social Security, we just privatized health care, and the push to vilify public educators in order to privatize K-12 education is loud.
It helps to learn where the Talking Points originated: Milt Friedman.
Legislating on behalf of, deregulating, and refusing to curtail corporations full freedom to police themselves is a nice way to describe what others have described as fascism:
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
The merger takes place when the state is a complicit partner with the corporations by refusing to regulate them and protect the general welfare of the state's citizens from the powers of the corporations they refuse to curtail. Predatory lending is a good example