An interesting behavioural change in the year 2020 was a slight shift in people’s preference for book genres. One category that suddenly became more popular is religion. Another is thrillers and horrors about uncanny themes such as viruses and zombies. Significantly, there was also an interesting spike in dystopian novels.
One book that stands out in this genre is Aldous Huxley’s classic, Brave New World, written in 1932. In the South African context, with the ruling ANC’s discriminatory approach to equality (contradictory, I know), we frequently see people quoting the famous line from George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Given Orwell’s immense and well-deserved popularity in our time, we also regularly see people comparing the current mainstream blend of neo-liberalism, Marxism and post-modernism with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. With this piece, I intend to argue that the dystopia sketched in Huxley’s Brave New World is closer to our reality than Orwell’s in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell described his dystopia as comparable to “a boot stamping on a human face – forever”. The question is would such a dystopia actually be sustainable? In a letter to Orwell Huxley suggested that it wouldn’t be. The dystopia in Brave New World, written in 1932 (17 years before Nineteen Eighty-Four), is one in which people are not oppressed against their will, but in which people have enthusiastically participated in the destruction of their own freedoms. It is an oppression that people support because it is in the interest of a world order that ensures stability.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a world in which people are banned from reading books or distributing information that does not support the government’s ideology. In Brave New World, this isn’t necessary for the ruling elites to stay in power, because society have embraced the elite’s ideology to such an extent that people who express dissenting views from the mainstream are shunned and cancelled, not by the government, but by the mob. People don’t read books and don’t engage in behaviour other than that which is regarded as acceptable by the “world controllers” because they regard it as counterproductive to the new world order, for which they are so grateful.
Brave New World takes place in the World State city of London in the year A.F. 632, that is 632 years “After Ford”. In this world, God has been replaced with Henry Ford, who of course is credited for the creation of mass production and the assembly line. Religious crosses have been broken to represent a T, a reference to Ford’s Model-T and a celebration of consumerism. The government is stable, because the world controllers have recognised that stability can only be ensured at the expense of truth and that truth can only be maintained at the expense of stability.
In Huxley’s world, people aren’t interested in ideas or the pursuit of wisdom, because the world controllers already have the only ideas that should be regarded as acceptable. For this reason, people are conditioned (brainwashed) from birth to play a particular and predetermined role in society, for the sake of stability. One of the methods of conditioning is to encourage indecent “erotic play” between girls and boys. Because, by the way, people must be reprogrammed to abandon backward ideas like family values, parenthood and monogamy in order to achieve and sustain this brave new world.
In Huxley’s story, this order is disturbed when a “savage” from a distant reserve enters their world and starts questioning their way of life. It is a world in which the things that people once regarded as unnatural and immoral have been transformed into a new normal. Sexual debauchery is actively encouraged, love in the context of marriage and family is despised, drugs are readily available and are regularly used to suppress the depression that people experience in this new world order. Also, people are continuously reminded of the wars of the past and how the ruling elite liberated them. To be against the government is to be against the liberators and to be against liberty itself … Sounds familiar?
As far-fetched as this might seem, we can see some alarming comparisons to our world. The idea that stability is the overarching goal to be achieved in society – and that this requires sacrifices to be made, especially regarding the suppression of truth – is also the position of the Chinese government. It is also evident in other societies in which criticising the ideas of the ever-centralising state is regarded as cross-grained and worthy of contempt. A particular low-point in this regard happened in 2020 when well-meaning people reported their neighbours to the police for contravening the most irrational lockdown regulations imaginable.
In the current era the atrocities of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis are often blamed by the mainstream on everyday conservative values that have been part of human interaction since the beginning of time. The solution is then put forth: We need to change human nature. To do this, we need to abandon our sense of community and “group think” and embrace the fact that we are primarily individuals.
The solution is then put forth: We need to change human nature. To do this, we need to abandon our sense of community and “group think” and embrace the fact that we are primarily individuals.
At this point some readers might raise their eyebrows: Brave New World is not about embracing individualism but destroying it! This is true. However, the destruction of individualism was preceded by the embracing of a particular type of individualism that required the destruction of the community (i.e. cultures, values etc.).
We are told that we must embrace “enlightenment” and abandon our backward and “irrational” ideas about God, community and family. We are told that we are world citizens before anything else.
For this reason, we need to embrace individual rights as the only acceptable way of governance – at the expense of community institutions and values cherished in group context. In the mainstream ideology of our world, a person is regarded either as merely part of an economic class (Marxism), a detached individual (liberalism) or as whatever they regard themselves to be (post-modernism). Either way, the sense of culture, community and values has been thrown out with the bathwater.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was regarded as a major victory in this regard. In the months that followed, commentators were quick to make declarations about the “end of ideology” and the “end of history” as a way of announcing liberalism as the global status quo. On 11 September 1990 (a day referred to as “the other 9/11”), U.S. President George H.W. Bush enthusiastically declared that mankind is on the verge of establishing a New World Order.
This New World Order is not some Illuminati conspiracy, but simply a credo for a new synthetic globalist identity that will rise from the ashes once we abandon our current (authentic) identities. Those who reject this new synthetic identity are increasingly cancelled, vilified as morally inferior, and labelled fascists or Nazis. The enforcers of this new morality are not just states, but media and intellectual elites too. Sadly, they are blind to the irony that their methods constitute the real tyranny.
To achieve this, society must accept this new idea of how the world should operate – with force if necessary. And if you find yourself attacked by the enforcers of this ideology, don’t worry, it’s for your own good.
This approach has mostly – but especially in the Middle East through the American invasion of Iraq etc. – led to massive bloodshed and minimal success.
In many other places, bloodshed wasn’t necessary, because people have embraced the idea, albeit at their own expense.
Around 2010, a global backlash against liberal democracy started developing. In a way, the backlash sprouted from the Arab Spring from where it spread to the West in the form of conservative populism. It culminated in 2016 with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President. What followed was a series of conservative movements popping up and gaining surprising levels of support, all over the globe.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán achieved massive public support by actively campaigning against liberal democracy, to name one example. Dissenters who felt that something about this New World Order wasn’t quite right was quickly branded with derogatory terms like nationalist, racist, backward, or even fascist.
Their views should not be entertained; they shouldn’t be engaged or debated but cancelled, it is argued. But here’s the twist: It’s not the government doing the cancelling, but private companies who are cheered on and celebrated by the mob.
If you are concerned about a dystopian future, please read George Orwell, but consider the possibility you might be reading Orwell from your couch which is already halfway into Huxley’s Brave New World.
Ernst Roets is head of Policy and Action at AfriForum.
https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/our-brave-new-world
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