Huxley vs Orwell: whose picture is more reflected in today's society?

I read in an opinion in a book called The Net Delusion a week or two ago that suggested Huxley's Brave New World is a better comparison with the West in the modern day than Orwell's 1984 because it examines the flaws of democracy, where Orwell examines totalitarianism. Overall, in the West, a semblance of democracy is winning. Brave New World is a land of conditioned submissiveness, where everyone is happy in their subservience, each individual a functional and uncomplaining unit in a homogenised population, where Orwell considers a land where its citizens cower before their masters feeling repressed dissent, under a state that reads people's thoughts to keep them in line, and tortures them back onto the straight and narrow if they stray.

In a letter to Orwell, Huxley wrote: "My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World." The pair quibbled about the nature of the future because Orwell was drawing on oppressive governments who would stamp on their citizens' rights, where Huxley was drawing on liberal societies where the lack of suffering would lead to mass complacency about political ideology.

This strange semi-fictional mock-up interview with Orwell presents Orwell's view on the future, based on his comments on 1984, showing up the differences between the two books: you could not say of Brave New World that it was comparable to 'a boot stamping on a human face forever'. Brave New World is a picture of a smiling face on a soma holiday. The differences are nicely summarised in a lovely, patronising cartoon here.


Having said this, both books address collectivism. In both, the individual means nothing, and the state and population mean everything. However, Huxley's considers collectivism in consumerism, a world built on consumption: everyone is equal in that they must use lots of stuff and be resigned to infantile pleasures. Orwell's world is built on under-consumption: everyone must be kept on the breadline in order to preoccupy them with their basic needs, filling their hungry stomachs with hatred, distrust and misdirected anger at a shared enemy. Looking at it from this angle, it is clear which more represents our Western world now: we are overeating, consuming vast amounts of goods, using alcohol and cigarettes prolifically. Even during an economic crisis, we have a lot more to lose than our chains - enough, in fact, to be comfortable, and spending. The power we have submitted to is the highstreet shop, not the government - indeed, it only takes a hasty Google to find that 80% of British voters say they do not trust politicians. This is the World State, not Oceania.

Orwell's book is also harder to compare to the modern day in its technological advances because a lot of the information you'd need to compare it to is incredibly confidential. No government body is going to publish how many of our internet histories it spies on - we can only ever guess, or invent (often hilariously hyperbolic) conspiracy theories. CCTV cameras are deliberately covertly placed, or they'd get vandalised; phone hacking is not something you find out about until, maybe, your arrest (or when you see your dirty linen across a double page of the Daily Star). Places where torture and execution are carried out definitely exist, but Guantanamo Bay and similar prisons are shrouded in mystery, their true conditions glimpsed only occasionally, to temporary public horror.

However, we can make some everyday comparisons. We can carry out two way video calls (see Skype) on machines which function very like telescreens, even if we can turn our computers off, where citizens of Oceania are subject to permanent scrutiny. There is a kind of permanent scrutiny of our public behaviour, through CCTV, though we still have private lives. Then again, sometimes what feels private isn't: Google keep a log of everything that has been searched, personal or not. Even if it is not for the government, corporations govern behaviour too, through targeted advertising and censorship. It's all spying, after all. There is even a trickle of research into mind-reading, the primary aim of the Thought Police (unrealistically efficient as they are in 1984). On the other hand, this usually requires probes of some kind, and so it has a long way to go before a fluttering thought of dissent could be picked up from a screen on a far wall.

All in all, I felt that 1984 was a masterpiece, if not a realistic presentation of the modern world as I know it. I'm sure there are states which are utilising modernity to Orwellian ends, but they could never achieve it. The human race's aims are too disparate for that; Orwell's Oceania relies on the complicity of Eastasia and Eurasia. Ironically, to achieve such a dictatorship, the whole world would have to work together, and I just can't see that happening. If anything, the impossibility of a unified totalitarian world is more of a sad reflection on humanity than if it were achievable.

Maybe. Actually, no.