In recent times, it has repeatedly been argued that the more accurate prophecy of the totalitarianism we have been experiencing is to be found not, as has often been suggested, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, published nearly twenty years before in 1931. Whereas Orwell anticipated a world dominated by torture and terror, Huxley foresaw humanity imprisoned by seduction, sedation, and diversion.
From the mouth of O’Brien, the torturer of his chief protagonist, Winston Smith, Orwell spells out the ultimate destination of society as he saw it:
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
Huxley, though coming before, seemed to take a more sophisticated approach to the potential of the future. Set in London in A.D. 2540, Brave New World anticipated subsequent developments in sleep-learning and psychological manipulation being used to impose the will of the few upon the many. In the “brave new world,” there is no such thing as marriage or sexual fidelity. The society is a “benevolent dictatorship,” and the subjects are maintained in a state of pseudo-contentment by conditioning and narcotics—a drug called “soma.” Huxley describes the ultimate oxymoron, a benign dystopia, a society in which children are mass-produced by in vitro fertilization and allocated to different castes which correspond to the various future production needs of industrial society, being conditioned for their future roles. Visiting the United States was a major influence on Huxley, who when he first went there was perturbed and fascinated by the way consumerism and advertising had rendered the population supine and docile. He also feared that the world would come to be dominated by the ideas of the technological philosopher Frederick Taylor, who devised the principle of mass production first successfully utilized by Henry Ford to manufacture the Ford Model T.
One of the symptoms of our post-sixties actual utopianism is that, whereas many of our real freedoms are being increasingly circumscribed, these constrictions are simultaneously being defined and understood as new freedoms. Many of the technologies we use to “increase our freedoms” are doing the precise opposite: locking us into a grid around which we move as though in house arrest, wearing ankle bracelets.
We live in a virtual world, hiding from the real one. This feels free, but only because we have increasingly unreliable models with which to compare it. Reality begins to fade from our memories, and gradually we are enslaved to the will of those who wish to exploit us more effectively by reducing our expectations to next to nothing. The citizen can have everything except his freedom, but mostly he does not miss this, having no clue what the word means.
The choice, by Huxley’s persuasive logic, was always going to be between two forms of despotism, and it now seems clear that the choice has been made: in the future, human beings will live in a supranational plutocracy, sustained in a kind of peace by drugs, technology and welfare, with the jackboot laces slightly undone, as though at the end of a hard day’s kicking, but ever-ready for the morrow.
In fact, these circumstances are not particularly new to human reality, and their imminence has been mooted in literary mutterings for decades, in fiction and out of it. The playwright, essayist, and sometime politician, Václav Havel, found himself confronting such fundamental conundrums in the actual Soviet dystopia of his native country, Czechoslovakia, in the 1970s and 1980s. Traditional parliamentary democracies, he insisted, offered no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for these niceties of liberal society, too, were being dragged helplessly along by these phenomena, which had become the enslavers of man by exploiting his weakness for comfort and ease. Thus, Havel identified a novel form of tyranny, which “oppresses” man by cosseting him—Huxley rather than Orwell, or perhaps the Orwellian fist in the Huxleyan glove; or perhaps the Orwellian boot in the Huxleyan sock. People, he wrote in his most famous essay, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), are manipulated “in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies,” but the processes of capitalism, materialism, advertising, commerce and consumer culture all combine to repress in the human being the questing for the “something” that defines the human. In the communist system, fear of repercussions led to a quiescence that was usually enforced without external evidence of violence; in the twentieth-century West, he added—47 years ago—the “oppressor” had become the human unwillingness to sacrifice material benefits so as to retain spiritual and moral integrity.
To call this a tyranny might until recently have risked ridicule, but now, it is clear, only such a word is capable of adequately capturing the nature, scope and implications of what our societies are turning into. On the evidence of the events of the past five years in what was once the “‘democratic’ West,” it is clear that the option of applying science to the project of nurturing a race of free humans has been abandoned, and that the world is moving towards a default reliance on coercion as the preferred mode of governance. Science, it appears, has moved to the dark side. What we experience, as a result, is unlike the classical tyrannies in that the application of force is covert and contingent. For the most part this nouveau tyranny protects itself by enabling the distraction or anaesthetization of its subjects. In the minority of cases where this fails, it summons up a mob to denounce, shame and ostracize. After this, for the determined dissenter lies banishment and, where necessary, the threat of criminalization and all this entails. Here, then, the Huxleyan and Orwellian visions tend to converge.
The more accurate prophecy of the emerging totalitarianism, I would suggest, is to be found not, as is often suggested, in Orwell, nor yet in Huxley’s, but in a such a mixture of the two —fist and boot in velvet glove and sock—but with Orwell shading the soothsaying contest between them because he read human nature slightly better. The choice, by Huxley’s persuasive logic, was always going to be between two forms of despotism, and it now seems clear that the choice has been made: in the future, human beings will live in a supranational plutocracy, sustained in a kind of peace by drugs, technology and welfare, with the jackboot laces slightly undone, as though at the end of a hard day’s kicking, but ever-ready for the morrow.
There are those who remain convinced that both Orwell and Huxley were privy to insiders of the establishment and not prophets and thus were relaying factual information rather than imaginative visions.
Huxley certainly had an inside track on the future, being the younger brother of Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and the first Director General of UNESCO—the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. UNESCO, according to some critics, is an internationalist body masquerading as an instrument for peace and unity, when its real intention is the fomenting of an international collective communism, the dominance of science and the introducing throughout the world of “common core” education, so as to indoctrinate the young with an impoverished education. We can imagine that Julian Huxley might have occasionally brought his work home with him. In some of his own writings he essentially sets out the whole scenario of Brave New World with a straight, matter-of-fact face.
Orwell was less visibly an insider. One narrative has it that, as a member of the socialist Fabian Society, he used his novels to warn mankind about the concrete plans of that society, for which his employer, the BBC, worked as a key propaganda organ. The title-year of his novel, 1984, resonated with an old Fabian boast that it would take 100 years—since its founding in 1884—to utterly turn Britain on its head.
Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four more or less on his deathbed—an amazing feat of human endurance in which he was as though driven by visions. He wasn’t a religious believer—not a literal one anyway—but he had a finely tuned ethical perspective and a fundamental belief in the notion of the dignity of every human being. He got things slightly “wronger” than Huxley, but not, I mournfully observe, the essence of the future we’re now facing.
Fourteen years on from its first publication, Aldous Huxley wrote a new Foreword for the 1946 reprint of Brave New World, in which he explained that his main interest was in the effects of science as directed at mankind. The advance of unrestricted and poorly regulated technological progress, he believed, would make totalitarianism not merely inevitable, but actually essential. The people governing the brave new world, though not exactly sane, were not madmen either, he insisted. Their aim was not anarchy but social stability. If the tyrants could be given what they wanted by lesser means, he postulated, they would probably go for it. “It is in order to achieve stability that they carry out, by scientific means, the ultimate, personal, really revolutionary revolution”—which is required to occur “in the souls and flesh” of human beings.
Remember, he wrote Brave New World between the wars, a time of dissolution and rising insanity. Reconsidering the book after WWII, he placed sanity as his highest value. His comments are largely particular to their post-war moment, touching on war, atomic energy, the nuclear threat, Bolshevism, fascism, inflation. He says very little that resonates with the world of the third millennium. Like most seers of the pre-1989 era, he saw nuclear obliteration as the defining threat. The nearest to a general prediction is this:
To deal with confusion, power has been centralized and government control increased. It is probable that all the world’s governments will be more or less completely totalitarian even before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be totalitarian during and after the harnessing seems almost certain. Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism. At present there is no sign that such a movement will take place.
There was, he noted, no reason why the new totalitarianism should resemble the old. Government by terror and violence had become not merely difficult to sell, but actually inefficient. To overcome this, it would be necessary to make people love their servitude, rendering coercion unnecessary. This, he believed, was some way off, due to the crudity and unscientific nature of the available techniques of propaganda, as channeled through media and education systems.
This was also to be his essential response to the 1949 publication of his former pupil, George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, conveyed to the author precisely three months before Orwell’s death from tuberculosis in January 1950. This episode accentuates a strange incongruity: the two books, 18 years apart, appear to be in the wrong order. One might have expected the boot-in-the-face dystopian story to emerge first, followed sometime later by the account of the tyranny-by-pampering. Huxley’s—perhaps due to its author having the inside track—came first, by nearly two decades.
In this letter, Huxley used an interesting phrase for what both he and Orwell were anticipating in their respective works: “the ultimate revolution.” Incidentally, in 1962, Huxley would deliver a lecture at U.C. Berkeley titled “The Ultimate Revolution: Getting People to Love Their Servitude,” in which he defined this process as “a method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which by any decent standard they ought not to enjoy.”
Having assured Orwell—whom he had taught French at Eton—how excellent and profoundly important his book was, Huxley went on to engage it in what reads in retrospect like an unfavorable contrasting of the book with his own prophetic work of 18 years earlier. He identified in Orwell’s novel a strand of thinking that placed sadism rooted in sexuality as the psychological mainspring of the tyranny but doubted whether this “policy of boot-in-the-face” could continue to be useful indefinitely. New ways would be found, he reasoned, by which ruling oligarchies would be able to satisfy their lust for power, and these, he said, would be more likely to resemble the ways of ruling outlined in Brave New World. He believed that animal magnetism and hypnotism would provide more practical means of achieving control over human politicians, and only an ignorance of these areas had delayed the “Ultimate Revolution” by several generations. Freud, for example, by his failure to master the technique and his resulting disparagement of hypnotism, had delayed its application to psychiatry for at least 40 years.
Within the coming generation, he anticipated, the leaders of the world would discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis—a combination of hypnosis and barbiturates—were more efficient as instruments of government than coercion and violence and would ensure the emergence of generations of humans who had come to love their servitude without any necessity for flogging or kicking. This, he said, would ensure that the world would move towards the vision he had outlined in Brave New World, and away from Orwell’s ostensibly darker prognosis.
Education was the key, he opined in that 1946 Foreword, to the assertion of ultimate control over humanity—refusing to educate, that is: to persuade people that servitude amounted to contentment and they should accordingly accept the redefinition of human happiness. The love of servitude, he wrote, required firstly economic security, but then, and more importantly, a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies.
The Ultimate Revolution would require, inter alia, much improved techniques of suggestion, starting in the cradle, and later an enhancement of these by drugs—something both less harmful and more enjoyable than alcohol or hard drugs. It would also require a more sophisticated hierarchy of humanity, so as to enable each individual to be allowed his or her proper place in society and the workplace, as well as a system of eugenics capable of standardizing the “human product.” He guessed that the real-life equivalents of soma, hypnopaedia and a scientific caste system were by then probably no more than three or four generations away. He thought the sexual promiscuity of Brave New World, judging by the fact that American divorces were already on a par with marriages, was within reach.
In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time. As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
By 1946, Huxley felt certain that the world was moving inexorably closer to his vision of its future. He referred to this vision as both a “horror” and a “utopia,” which, in any event, he believed might arrive within a century—500 years before he had anticipated at the time of writing his book. He briefly gestured towards the possibility of an alternative course for society: the development of science not as the end of human progress but as the means to producing a race of free individuals. Otherwise, he saw a choice between an assortment of independent militarized, localized totalitarianisms, or a single supranational kind, as the sole means of managing the chaos arising from untrammelled technological progress, finally arriving at “the welfare-tyranny of Utopia.”
Although what has happened now appears superficially to adhere more closely to the Huxleyan blueprint of tapping into human desires, instincts and vices in order to draw humanity into an essentially digital/cultural prison and keep it there, it is the Orwellian model that has remained uppermost in human consciousness and apprehension. This is because of Orwell’s depiction of both the potential for authoritarian state violence and the psychological reality that emerges in response to its presence or threat—i.e., the constant actuality of the fear of violence, which is, as he also conveys, even more powerful than violence per se. In O’Brien’s electrical torturing of Winston Smith, it is clear that once he has established the potential of the technique for imposing pain, Winston’s will falls to pieces, and any residual resistance is swept up by the mere threat of “the worst thing in the world”—a different fear for each person—in the dreaded Room 101.
It will be contested that it is inappropriate to compare the violence depicted by Orwell with anything happening at the official levels of our societies today. This is in large part because of the normalization of the radical alterations of our societies by the false version of reality that has been successfully peddled by a mainstream media dedicatedly corrupted for this purpose, resulting in the suppression of facts likely to give the game away, and of the kinds of discussions which might result in a blurting out of actual truths.
A profound and yet simple question: is there really any moral distinction to be asserted between what happened in the formerly democratic countries of the West during the Covid tyranny and the violence depicted by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Think of those extraordinarily imagined scenes in the Ministry of Love,—when Winston Smith is waiting, following his arrest—which read like episodes from an extreme horror nightmare. Orwell describes in graphic detail the countenance of a prisoner who is brought into the room, his appearance sending “a momentary chill through Winston.” The man is emaciated, his face that of “a skull,” the eyes “filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or something.” The man, Winston realizes, is dying of starvation. Another prisoner, overcome with pity, takes his life in his hands by trying to pass to the skull-faced man a grimy piece of bread he has secreted in a pocket of his overalls. A voice roars from the telescreen, and two guards, one an officer, enter the room. At a signal from the officer, his underling lets loose a savage blow to the face of the man who has offered his last piece of bread to the dying man.
The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor. His body was flung across the cell and fetched up against the base of the lavatory seat. For a moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from his mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering or squeaking, whỉch seemed unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolled over and raised himself unsteadily on hands and knees. Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth.
Nothing like that, it will be claimed, has happened in any Western country arising from the Covid episode or subsequent shifts in political culture, and nor could it ever happen in “our democratic societies.” Is not totalitarianism a matter of violence, of brutal repression, of industrially generated terror? Ergo: Orwell’s vision has no relevance for us today.
But there are differing forms of violence, just as there are differing forms of pain. Is there any true moral distinction between smashing a man in the mouth and condemning an elderly person to die by stress, misuse of sedatives and/or ventilators, while depriving him of the attention, affection, and care of those most dear to him—his spouse, sons and daughters, grandchildren? Is this somehow morally preferable?
We need to be mindful of something about licensed state violence that has always been true but is not obvious in the quotidian context: that its very existence in the background is in the vast majority of cases sufficient to do the heavy lifting of coercion. With most people, even the ones who have seemed to be indomitable, the very capacity or exclusive entitlement of the state in the exercising of democratically sanctioned coercion and force is itself, in all but the rarest of cases, sufficient to break the dissident or refusenik will. It is rarely necessary to turn up the dial on the shock treatment more than once or twice for the fear of its potential to do the rest in what appear to be relatively “civilized” conditions.
As Sally Minogue beautifully exposes in her Introduction to the 2021 Wordsworth Classic edition of Orwell’s novel, the two central relationships depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four—between Winston and Julia and Winston and O’Brien, are both “affairs of a sort”—both of his “lovers” seeming to seek Winston’s ultimate wellbeing: Julia through affection, O’Brien through torture. Both “relationships” start with a meeting of eyes, and both operate at a level of intimacy Winston has not experienced before; both figures grow in his imagination as “revolutionary comrades.” In fact, of the two, he is “attracted” to O’Brien much more immediately than he is to Julia, whom at first he believes to be spying on him on behalf of the Thought Police.
Although Orwell does not imply the term, there is an intimation in Winston’s relationship and interactions with O’Brien of something that was to surface as a strong subtext of the Covid coercion from the spring of 2020: a kind of sadomasochistic insinuation in which Winston’s “treatment” by O’Brien consists in an alternating of torture and morphine, a process in which he—superficially, perversely—comes to trust and even love O’Brien: “He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain.”
This vaguely familiar syndrome seems to work on the imputed guilt of the suspect, and is perhaps a quality of the newer forms of tyranny, which have at their cores some perverted sense of the “common good,” in which the coercive authorities-without-authority purport to act not merely on behalf of power and the law, but also for the “good” of the suspect, who has been led woefully astray by the enemies of order. In this scenario, the jailer/torturer becomes, simultaneously, a “reluctant” administrator of state coercion and violence, and also a benign figure who administers punishment for the betterment of the victim. In this sense, the modern forms of totalitarianism differ from tyrannies involving an individual dictator, becoming a form of “conspiracy” between the oppressors and the oppressed—indeed, a form of sadomasochistic “game” in which both participants seem to crave that which they experience, and the victim most of all.
In the course of the Covid coup, the entire panoply of rights and freedom accumulated by democratic societies across multiple centuries were obliterated overnight, as peoples beyond number were compelled to comply with a series of absurd and irrational measures based on a fundamental lie and a contorted version of the “public interest.” These were not technical infringements, but fundamental assaults on the very sovereignty of human beings, as police forces arrogated to themselves an entitlement to menace and brutalize in ways that would hitherto have been regarded as criminal and tantamount to despotism. People were dragged from their homes for posting message on social media, or from trains and buses for declining to wear useless and dangerous but compulsory masks. People lost their jobs because they refused an untested “vaccine” (an untested form of gene therapy, not a vaccine).
Were these not denials of mercy? Was this not violence? In what sense can the perpetrators of these obscenities claim to be better than the thugs imagined by George Orwell?
And what about premeditated killing by poison injection? Might we call this manslaughter? Democide? Genocide? In Ireland, the level of excess deaths in 2024 increased to 19 per cent, bringing to approximately 20,000 the number of additional deaths in the period from the “vaccine” rollout in the spring of 2021—i.e. multiple orders of magnitude over and above what would have been regarded as a serious health crisis just five years earlier.
Meanwhile, Ed Dowd’s latest international research indicates that one in five people worldwide who took any kind of Covid “vaccine” has been adversely affected. Approximately five billion people on the planet accepted a vaccine of some sort. Applying the scale of the death rate in the US to the wider world, Dowd estimates that deaths from these injections globally is somewhere between 7.3 million and 15 million. By the same measure, disabilities arising directly from the injections are estimated at between 29 to 60 million globally, and sundry forms of injury at between 500 million and 900 million. For the avoidance of doubt, all these people received at least one of some kind of Covid-related injection; most were of working age. The level of slaughter has not yet reached the level of a demonstrable attempt to obliterate a particular population, but overall it amounts to a level of homicide that has no parallel since WWII—which ended just four years before Orwell’s most famous book was published.
Add to this the new forms of violence engaged in by former democratic regimes using proxies such as Antifa, BLM, and LGBT goons to impose their will without the outward appearance of direct state involvement—the farming out of state coercion to achieve deniability. Add also the constant mood of menace generated by related concepts of cancellation, censorship and constant surveillance, the depiction and labelling of mere dissenters as extremists and domestic terrorists, the washing of whole cultures in propaganda and multiple modes of psychological manipulation, the suppression of free speech in every formerly “democratic” jurisdiction. These too amount to forms of violence against human beings, often the most frail and vulnerable. And all under the pretense of “saving lives.” We look back at these events and surely realize that they deliver into our time and our spaces a total vindication of Orwell’s darkest visions.
In a certain light, it becomes clear that the existence of dystopian fables and legends in a culture can serve to inoculate that culture against their detection in actually existing reality. If Orwell, instead of choosing 1984 as the dateline of his book, has opted instead for, say, 2054, would the world have remained so inert in the face of totalitarian’s early-stage manifestation in 2020? Big lies rely on scale to retain the sense of improbability that enables them to blossom and propagate in circumstances where smaller deceptions might well be rumbled and extinguished, and this sense of implausibility is likely to be augmented by the added inconceivability of a long-established fable of tyranny suddenly manifesting as reality. When this happens, it remains in a sense invisible by virtue of seeming far-fetched.
When we say that our system is as the Orwellian fist in the Huxleyan glove, we intimate that the regimes of our post-democratic societies have projected or foisted onto their citizens the blame for their abuses, implying that, in defense of our comforts and securities, we demand the satisfaction only of our basest instincts, and cannot demand also the frills of liberty, “a far right obsession.” But this is, ultimately, folly. In this regard, the Huxleyan hypothesis is, of its essence, a misreading of human nature, for it assumes that human beings can be rendered permanently satisfied with material distractions, sensations, pacifiers, and reliefs, whereas even the most rudimentary psychological or anthropological framework betrays a radically different picture. Man, as Václav Havel prognosticated, requires a “something” that the material world cannot supply. To deprive human beings of spiritual nourishment is violence, just as to deprive them of love, affection, company, friendship, culture or mental sustenance amounts to torture.
In succumbing to our basest instincts, we misread our own natures, as well as our capacity for freedom, and so carry out the tyrants’ work for them, anaesthetizing ourselves in pleasure and diversion, pursuing only what is selfish and short-sighted. This, being governed by the demon of addiction, is a trap from which the possibilities of escape are rare and risky. If we try to restore our correct perspective on freedom, we end up willy-nilly where Orwell predicted: under the boot of the enforcer, unleashing against ourselves the full wrath of the regime. In the process we learn that the Huxleyan model is a mere decoy, a false facade to allow the regime to rely on our debasement so as to continue to appear “democratic.”
This is why they push sex so much, and from so many angles: to draw people down to the lowest level of engagement with reality, so that they will remain in the most debased and derelict state of existence, forever looking for satisfactions of unsublimated instinct and unmoderated lusting, gorging and grasping. These are essential accompaniments of the Huxleyan model of “soft” tyranny, but this too is ultimately underpinned by the constant threat of coercion by violence. The brave new world only appears not to have this element; it’s just better at hiding it.
In psychoanalytic theory, as defined by Freud, sublimation is a defense mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses, including especially sexual and aggressive ones, are channeled into socially desirable behaviors of a productive or creative nature. In the brave new world, these priorities and mechanisms are reversed, with all the inevitable consequences: submission of the masses to the shadow of the lurking boot, but also an incremental destruction of the culture of the implicated society, which in the absence of the sublimated energies, begins to deteriorate in precisely all the categories which had led to its attainment of civilization in the first place. This is the ultimate destination of a society elevating promiscuity, homosexuality, abortion, transgenderism and drag queen story time, a society which relies on the degradation of its population and which, in its extreme and cumulative state, will be manageable only by the boot poised over every human face, this reserved, in particular—as a source of salutary examples—for those spirited ones who insist on resisting, and who will be accused by their contemporaries of “spoiling our fun” and “threatening our freedom.”
This, then, is where we are, in our onetime “Free West”: trapped between the binge and the boot, the orgy and Room 101, the ultimate instrument of the Ultimate Revolution.
