Foreseeing the Future
Have you ever tried to predict the future? Many people have struggled to foresee the future; however, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell seemed to have incredibly appealing thoughts of what our world was headed towards with many of their ideas. The main idea behind Huxley's Brave New World was to portray how technology and the government could influence the state of happiness among the people. Orwell's 1984 focused more on the way war and dictatorship in a society can shape a world into a place where its citizens live in constant terror and paranoia. In this passage, social critic Neil Postman compares and contrasts both authors' beliefs. I agree with Postman in that the Utopia depicted in Brave New World has numerous similarities to today's society, while the Big Brother-dominated society created by Orwell, is simply obsolete.
When searching for relevance in both writers' predictions, it is necessary to compare the goals of the government when the book was written with the goals of the governments in the stories.
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Brave New World Start
1st UK editionOrwell wrote 1984 in 1948, during a time where communism was gaining extraordinary influence and the Cold War was just beginning. The world was just beginning to realize the horrifying truths about how destructive technology could be. A Brave New World was written in 1932, just as America was pulling itself out of the Great Depression. Inventions were rapidly putting end to manual labor and making life stress-free. Many of Huxley's ideas were influenced by the depressed lives of Americans at the time. It seems as if both writers depict extremes of the worlds that they were living in at the time they wrote the books. The story took place 600 years into the future when the primary goal of the world leaders was ensure happiness among the...