Aldous Huxley's Letter to George Orwell

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5. I think we agree. The point is that Huxley got it right that people would be doped, distracted,

and mesmerized into a state of acceptance of tyranny by a small cabal of world leaders, and that western society would become a stratified, regulated system, largely because most people couldn't imagine an alternative. Orwell made largely the same point about how the point of totalitarian system is to make the imagination of alternatives impossible by the control of language and communications.

Even in 1984, most of the actual brutality was carried out in secret within the walls of the Ministry of Love, but the real violence to humanity was part of Smith's job as a propagandist/history eraser at the MOT. The image of a boot crashing down on a human face, over and over again, forever, is largely a secret reserved for the Thought Police torture chambers and the odd occasional drunken prole who gets unruly.

I think we've embraced both dysutopias, and effectively surpassed them in America and Britain in 2012. Our protests are just an impotent way of blowing off steam that is tolerated because it's closely monitored and maintains the fiction believed by most that regular people are still free to change the system. That's the ultimate tyranny Orwell tried to warn us - the belief that Slavery is Freedom.