Brave Aldous Huxley — Remixed
“And now for something completely different”
The article below is the second half of a paper I wrote for a Rhetoric course. If you missed the first part, A Series of Idiosyncratic Events, I recommend reading that first.
A brave 1984
I recently finished reading a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. As a huge fan of George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, I was very intrigued by Postman’s reference to another dystopian world — a Brave New one at that.
Afterward I felt compelled to read A Brave New World in order to compare it to Nineteen-Eighty-Four in light of Postman’s pronouncement that Huxley was right and Orwell was wrong.
Postman argued the public has been “amused into indifference” and “it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public narcoticized by technological diversions”. As Dr. Jason Hannan sums up nicely in his book, Trolling Ourselves to Death, Postman believed we were becoming “so absorbed by trivia […] we would risk losing any semblance of a free and democratic society”.
If you prefer, there is Robert MacNeil’s idiom “Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World”, or my personal favourite, “Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody”.
