Brave New World, 1984 and Dystopian Political Footballs

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Brave New World, 1984 and Dystopian Political Footballs

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Cobalt-60 posted:

It's harder to make a reference to Soma or Epsilons than to Big Brother or...what other references are there from 1984?

Newspeak, Thoughtcrime, memory hole, Two Minutes Hate, 2+2=5, "We have always been at war with Eurasia," the title of the book

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Jun 13, 2020

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 22:20

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Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I think that We is more interesting and meaningful than either because it presents an overtly utopian society with no cost but adherence to it.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 22:58

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

It's rich to see Orwell bag on the plot in We when his book somehow ended up with the exact same drat plot.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2020 00:09

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Dammit. Eurasia, not Oceania. :negative:

MathMathCalculation posted:

That said, my favorite point in 1984 was the concept of taking away words as a way of limiting thought. I really wish it was brought up more in discussions because it plays a really crucial, underrated role in the other themes. And, perhaps best of all, I've always heard people throwing the term "Orwellian" around to the point where it's become one of those words that means whatever you want it to at the moment.

That's an interesting case, adding words as a way of limiting thought. (Of course, the book has a place on that page.)

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jun 13, 2020

# ¿ Jun 13, 2020 05:51

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Duck Rodgers posted:

It's been a while since I read it, but I don't remember it being overtly utopian, or am I misunderstanding you? As I remember it, the workers days were strictly regimented and monitored, with no time left for personal or creative endeavour. It took the concept of Taylorism to the logical extreme, and is not something that I think would be seen as utopian by the majority of non-capitalists/engineers in the employ of capitalists.

I'm not sure what this business about capitalists is; Taylorism was enthusiastically adopted by the Soviets too, which is why the book exists and why it was banned. Or are you arguing that the Soviet Union was merely "state capitalism"?

In any case, this is the adherence that I mentioned. The One State is a clean, prosperous society of beautiful, classless people who live among glass and greenery and are reaching out into the cosmos with a crystal ship bearing the prizes of their culture, all described (with great irony) in joyously poetic prose. It is, in fact, a utopia; moreover, it is the ideal that human society fundamentally grasps toward: people helping each other and working toward a common good, having (ostensibly) left behind "nature, red in tooth and claw". Unlike Orwell's book, whose bleak gray war machine any idiot can say will happen if "the other guy" gets his way, We shows what happens if even someone who's right actually gets their way, in as much as getting everyone to go along with their plan. Utopia necessarily precludes dissent.

We raises two moral questions. Is the perfect society that it portrays (drawing directly on the "crystal palace" that Chernyshevsky idealized � and Dostoyevsky decried � in the previous century) worth the human cost, and if not, what is? And is the human cost only a "cost" because we're all selfish animals deep down, something that actually should be abandoned? (Here is an interesting short story on that theme, a more positive spin on the ending of We.) I was reminded of this question recently when a C-SPAM poster happily self-described as an "eco-Stalinist", pointing out that we're too far gone for climate crisis to be averted without brutal coercion. We asks the reader to draw lines that 1984 doesn't (and that Brave New World presents much less compellingly). It engages with fewer distinct issues than its successors, but it surpasses them in its thematic elegance.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Jun 17, 2020

# ¿ Jun 17, 2020 02:47

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Silver2195 posted:

Going back to Orwell's review of We:

We predates Stalinism, but it does not predate Taylorism after the Revolution.

Duck Rodgers posted:

When you refer to the society as portrayed as a 'perfect society', do you mean internally? As in, the characters within the society see it as perfect? I don't think the reader is meant to see it as a perfect society (or at least I certainly don't), or something to strive for by casting aside the selfish animal inside.

Chernyshevsky wholeheartedly posited the crystal palace as a perfect society. We (like Notes from Underground before it) argues that perfection does not have room for humanity. I don't think that the One State is something to hope for (and Zamyatin clearly didn't either), but I do think it represents an ideal that all human organization "strives" for on some level. (D-503 argues as much directly.) It highlights a tension inherent to human society, safety and order versus freedom and chaos. Absolute safety may not be worth the absolute rejection of freedom, but short of that, things get murkier. What gives We weight in this is that freedom is traded not for the spiteful cruelty of Airstrip One or the grotesque cartoon in "Harrison Bergeron" but for something openly, grandly beautiful.

Mrenda posted:

How many people have read Island, Huxley's "utopia." It values more "primitive" culture, but it runs with the ideas of dystopia from the opposite side of things, something you seem to be presenting with We SBB.

I haven't read Island; I probably should. As a teenager, I wrote it off out of hand, but I think I would be more receptive to it today.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jun 17, 2020

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Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I apologize for being unable to respond to this yesterday; I didn't have the books handy.

Duck Rodgers posted:

I guess I don't understand what in We is "openly, grandly beautiful". Is it the society itself or the building of a spaceship?

"[i posted:

We[/i]"]It's spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from the savage, invisible plains, the wind carries the yellow, honeyed dust of some kind of flowers. This sweet dust makes your lips go dry � you're continually passing your tongue over them � and all the women you encounter must have sweet lips (and the men too, of course). This is something of a hindrance to logical thinking.

But then the sky! Blue, not spoilt by a single cloud (how savage were the tastes of the ancients if their poets could be inspired by those absurd, sloppy, stupidly jostling heaps of vapour). I like � I'm sure I won't be mistaken if I say: we like only such a sterile, irreproachable sky as this. On days like this the whole world is cast of that same unshakable, eternal glass as the Green Wall, as all of our constructions. On days like this you can see the very bluest depths of things, their various hitherto unknown, astounding equations � you can see them in something of the most customary, everyday kind.

"[i posted:

1984[/i]"]The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

It's night and day. D-503 rhapsodizes about the harmonious arrangement of Cube Square and the exhilaration of flying in an aero; Winston trudges through unending squalor and brutality, the trash-strewn streets occasionally cratered by the bombs of a deliberately perpetual war. One is a world of glass and gold; the other, of concrete and steel.

Duck Rodgers posted:

Factory discipline is not enforced primarily through cruelty, but through exclusion. Workers that don't adhere to the factory rules lose their job, which often means starvation etc. Lack of open dissent is not necessarily consent.

You seem to have misunderstood my opposition of We's order to 1984's "spiteful cruelty".

"[i posted:

1984[/i]"]Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy � everything.

"[i posted:

We[/i]"]Now, I can't make sense of that at all. I mean, however limited their reason, they ought nonetheless to have understood that such a life was the most genuine universal murder � slow murder though, from day to day. The state (humaneness) forbade the killing of one person, but did not forbid the half-killing of millions. Killing one person, i.e. reducing the sum of human lives by fifty years, that's criminal, while reducing the sum of human lives by fifty million years, that's not criminal. Well, isn't that ridiculous? Here, this mathematical-moral problem will be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old number; there, they couldn't do it � not all their Kants put together (because not one of the Kants had the sense to construct a system of scientific ethics, i.e. one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).

"[i posted:

We[/i]"]And again, as this morning at the dock, I saw everything as though for the first time in my life: the straight immutable streets, the glittering glass of the pavements, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent houses, the square harmony of the gray-blue ranks. And I felt: it was not the generations before me, but I � yes, I � who had conquered the old God and the old life. It was I who had created all this.

These ideologies could hardly be more unlike each other, and it's absurd to raise questions about "lack of open dissent" when D-503 (by all appearances a representative number; if he is an outlier, it is in his susceptibility to deviation, not his faith in the One State) eloquently, ecstatically praises the unity of the One State and is horrified when he finds himself being led astray.

Duck Rodgers posted:

Does everyone benefit in the One State, or are they controlled for the benefit of others?

There is no "Low" underclass of proles supporting the "High" in We as in 1984. There are only equally prosperous numbers and the Benefactor who oversees them, and there is no indication that the Benefactor exploits the numbers for any personal gain � he is merely the high priest in the worship of the One State, not deified himself. All individuals act in service to the whole, not the few.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Jun 19, 2020

# ¿ Jun 19, 2020 22:06

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Brave New World, 1984 and Dystopian Political Footballs