Dystopian Origins: The Importance of Brainwashing

So I have finished reading two of the great dystopian novels, George Orwell "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". One of my bookworm friends told me that it’s a love-hate relationship between the two: that you hate the one and love the other. She was looking forward to seeing which of the two I preferred more (she liked “1984”), and was a little confused when I got back to her with my answer.

I hated them both.

“1984,” the one I read first, was a novella about a man named Winston, who is unhappy and living in what seems to me to be an ugly, sanitized world. He works for the government, “Big Brother,” and in a sense, is the government, for although Big Brother has a face and a voice and almost a personality, we never meet him, and are led to assume that Big Brother is dead and his role has been overtaken by the Party (Ingsoc, or English Socialism). 

Orwell does an excellent job illustrating how his world works, and how the Party is divided roughly into three classes: the higher-ups, who live in mansions and have a modicum of privacy, and the lower class, of which Winston is one. Winston lives alone in a boring little apartment, with what I can only call a two-way television—a huge wall made up of a television that can never be turned off or put on mute,  that watches him the way we watch our own telly. The third class I mentioned is not so much of the Party, they are the proletariats (“proles”) and have little to no function in society. Winston somewhat sees them as animals in the beginning of the book. They are the great mass of subordinates who are perfectly content to just simply be.

Winston is not simply content to be. He and his girlfriend, Julia, seek the help of an upper-class Party member named O’Brian, who tells them he can get in contact with an underground group led by Emmanual Goldstein, who is the face of the rebellion against Ingsoc. 

In contrast, Huxley’s “Brave New World,” does not have that sense of fear and watchfulness prevalent in 1984. There are no two-way televisions and no spies. It is a happy, bubbly, “pneumatic” world. (Pneumatic, a word that Huxley uses frequently to describe one of the characters, is as far as I can tell, meant to mean bubbly, light, airy. According to my friend Webster, it pertains to mechanics and air and wind and science.)

Everyone is happy in Huxley’s world. There are a little over five different social classes, all named for Greek letters: the Alphas, who are the smartest and the most unique, the Betas and Gammas, who are more middle-class, and then the Deltas and Epsilons. The lower letters are stunted mentally to enjoy menial labor, and are actually the futuristic version of Octomom gone wrong: there are factories who create hundreds of identical twins. All of these twins are conditioned to like the same things, and hate the same things. They all work at the same place and love what they do—and for any worries they have, there’s soma, a drug that makes everything better for days. 

The main character appears midway through the book, and he is called John the Savage, because he is naturally born through a mother and a father instead of in a tube. Raised on an Indian reserve, he is brought back to modern London to be showed off as the civilized savage. 

Surprise surprise, he hates modern London. He hates the soma and he hates how freely everyone has sex.

So off the top, it doesn’t seem like these books have anything in common. Orwell delights in fear and suspicion. Huxley creates a dreamy world where everyone is happy. Nothing in common, and my bookworm friend is right in saying readers prefer one over the other.

Not so. 

Huxley and Orwell focus on human sexuality. In Orwell’s world, sexuality is distained; there is even an Anti-Sex league. Huxley’s characters have sex nightly, and even have a pseudo-religion that focuses on orgies. Yet in each case the sex is controlled. Winston and Julia have to hide their actions, while John suffers from not being able to have a monogamous relationship with Lenina. Lenina too has monogamous tendencies, and is lectured sternly by a friend, reminding her that her body belongs to everyone. 

There is also a strong class structure. The Inner and Outer Party is as different as night and day in “1984” and the five different letters in “Brave New World” chooses your intelligence. 

In each case the government owns your body and your mind. You think the thoughts that you must, because you are made to think so. You do the work you are meant to do, because you must. 

So why do I hate these books, so similar and so thought-provoking and really quite brilliant?

I hate them because Orwell goes on and on and on in tight prose, boring me half to death. I hate them because Huxley uses words almost superfluously, and because the characters are really very one-dimensional, with the exception of John the Savage. I also really hate when authors do not introduce the main character until the book is halfway through. 

But I liked them, too.

I liked them because they made me think. “1984” showed me how complicated government can be, and how very important “the masses” are. I also liked how the rebel leader was named Emmanuel Goldstein, a Jewish name. On one hand, this is positively and truly anti-Semitic; yes, another evil man denounced as a Jew. But then again, he’s working to save the world. That makes him a hero, doesn’t it? 

I liked them because Huxley died on November 22, my birthday, and because he quoted Shakespeare in “Brave New World”. If you want to make me a happy person, you will quote Shakespeare to me.

I liked them because they’re all, on some level, true. Class is a huge problem; look at India, look at America. We pretend not to see it, but it’s there, isn’t it? Class is a huge deal. So is sexuality. There is a huge war over which is better; pre-marital sex, or abstinence until marriage? Many wives and husbands, or just one? (Yes, you read me correct: many wives and husbands.) These are all real issues.

 I liked them because there is some semblance of humanity still. 

But mostly I hated them. 

Yet most people do not think about how these books were written, or my feelings for Winston or John, or God forbid, how I would have written these two books. What people want to talk about is which one is most likely to happen, which book is the most similar to our own world; in a sense, what message was the author trying to impart? 

 “1984” is already here. The government watches our facebooks and our twitters and whatever internet media we have; my university can log into my school e-mail whenever they so choose. The suspicion Orwell wrote about is already here, was here with McCarthy and with Bush, with the Patriot Act, with Obama.

“Brave New World,” is coming. Will the government ever go to the extreme of getting rid of the family unit and repopulating the world with tube babies? Probably not. But the government will try to keep us entertained and try to prevent us from looking analytically at law and how this world is run. Look at what television we watch, and how the world spends their time now. 

One of the most poignant scenes in “Brave New World” was at the very beginning, when a tour is being given of a factory that produces children. As the tour progresses, the president explains that at night a voice talks to the sleeping children and fills their mind with maxims that become internal law. The president literally spells it out, saying, “We tell our children these things so that they grow up to believe it,” and yet none of the people on the tour say, “We’re brainwashed, then!” 

All of this made me think of a church I used to go to that preached creationism. For awhile I believed it—I couldn’t tell you why, now. But I believed that humans and dinosaurs were hanging out together, and it’s only now that I see how wrong I was. 

What I am trying to say is that we do not recognize when we are brainwashed or not. Each of these dystopias are inherently frightening, because neither our bodies nor our minds are our own. And in turn these books make us look at ourselves, and we are forced to ask the dreaded question: 

Are we brainwashed, too?