"In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher. Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley, who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th-century dystopian novel."
"Huxley starts off the letter praising the book, describing it as "profoundly important." He continues, "The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it." Then Huxley switches gears and criticizes the book, writing, "Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.""
In 1949 Aldous Huxley, formerly a French teacher, wrote to George Orwell after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley praised the novel as profoundly important and characterized its ruling minority’s philosophy as sadistic, taken to the point of denying sex. Huxley expressed doubt that perpetual brutal repression could persist indefinitely. Huxley predicted elites would adopt less wasteful, pleasure-oriented methods of control akin to Brave New World, using drugs and permissive sexuality to pacify populations. Huxley concluded that a superficially pleasant, consumerist form of totalitarianism was more plausible than constant overt terror.
Read at Open Culture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]