Brave New World v. 1984

[Last Conformist]

Where's Fahrenheit 451? I liked that one better than either.

[RGBVideo]

Have you noticed how the BNW society si forced to sacrifice science in order to create a "utopic" stagnant society. What I don't get is why don't they use the "unused" inventions to reduce or even eliminate the need for Gamas or even as up as the betas and then install a society of alphas (possibly democratic and non-stagnant) whare there are only "prime" jobs thus eliminating the posibility of a disaster, like the Cyprus incident.

This is because a huge percentage of society is slave underclass without social mobility and it's presumed to do all the real work; people who have the time and resources available to innovate don't innovate since others do all their work and thus they have no need to spend their lives to anything but pleasure. The way how Alphas and Betas don't truly give a **** about the workload of Gammas altough it could be easily more than halved may seem shocking and unbelievable at first, but here's a fun fact: the ancient Roman Empire had exactly the same problem 2 000 years ago.

Let me explain: Since the agricultural and mining jobs were made by slaves who couldn't advance their interests by making their jobs easier since their amount of work hours would be kept at the maximum no matter what would be invented, none of them saw necessary to invent anything which would make mining or agriculture easier and thus more productive. The rich people who had the best schooling in the capital city got free grain and had free access to water no matter what would be invented, so they saw no need to spend time in inventing anything either. Thus, rate of research dramatically stagnated during the first centuries of AD.

[Kropotkin]

Since the agricultural and mining jobs were made by slaves who couldn't advance their interests by making their jobs easier since their amount of work hours would be kept at the maximum no matter what would be invented, none of them saw necessary to invent anything which would make mining or agriculture easier and thus more productive.

Well, some scholars disagree with that conclution and argues that the ancient world did produce a lot of technical innovations.

[Last Conformist]

Can't say I can offhand think of a technological innovation from the early Empire.

[RGBVideo]

Well, some scholars disagree with that conclution and argues that the ancient world did produce a lot of technical innovations.

"Ancient world"? Why yes. A stable, large Empire with a permanent slave population taking care of all the jobs? No. My subjective impression based on all I've read about the subject is that the Roman Empire was technologically exceptionally stagnant.

[Elok]

Aside from what's already been mentioned, science is destabilizing just because it introduces new ways of looking at the world, and for it to be effective at all it has to be so uncontrolled that there's no way to prevent a sudden revolution in ideas. Major scientific discoveries almost always introduce tough questions of some sort WRT how to implement the huge changes they cause into the old society which discovered them. E.g., supposing they'd discovered immortality, at the very least there'd be a gigantic overhaul of their society as the cloning facilities and hospitals shut down.

Also, the Alphas are very bright, but that's part of the problem--it's exceptionally bright Alphas like Bernard and Helmholtz who start chafing at even the light constraints of their society, because they can think outside superficially imposed limitations. Preventing them from being inquisitive about the world would require work of very high sophistication and complexity, i.e. something pioneering and bold. They do their best to smother it with sensory pleasures and teaching work instead, but there's still a danger to the society that can't be eliminated, because you need some minority that's got the brains to see how it all fits together in order to have a safe and working civilization.

The risk is that, since they have the cognitive power to see the whole picture and make value judgments about it, they'll see their jobs and not want to do them, as occurs in the book. They don't succeed precisely because there's a colossal critical mass of people who no longer possess the ability to look further ahead than the very next day and their dose of soma. They freak out at the slightest possibility of change or self-denial. Without those idiot Deltas and Epsilons (and to a lesser extent Gammas), society would be totally unstable.

[Kropotkin]

Don't make gross generalizations. Look at the water wheel, the gear (as in toothed wheel) and a lot of simple machines derived from that, the screw, concrete, glasblowing.

Note that I'm not saying that a slave-based economy didn't have an effect on technological development and their implementation. I'm just pointing out that there's quite a few historians that don't agree with that simplified point of view. Just as it's no longer common practise to oversimplify the dark ages.

[Ramo]

Orwell is a better writer, but he more or less rehashed half of Homage to Catalonia in a less interesting style, making 1984 somewhat redundant. So BNW wins.

And Brazil is easily the best cinematic rendition of a totalitarian dystopia.

[Jon Miller]

Brazil rocked!

JM

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by nostromo
I'm not sure the point of 1984 was to predict anything. IRC, it was meant first and foremost as a satire of totalitarian regimes like Hitler's and Staline's.

Actually, it was a satire of post war Britain and the Cold War.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
But The Handmaid's Tale is better written and scarier than either.

QFT. And this one also, in some ways, is coming true.

[Kropotkin]

Kallocain is really the best of the lot. At least from a strictly literary point of view. In my humble opinion that is.

[Nostromo]

Actually, it was a satire of post war Britain and the Cold War.

That too.

[chequita guevara]

Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon and Victor Serge wrote Midnight at the Century, both distopian novels based on the Stalinist period in the USSR. These are both very 1984ish.

[Nostromo]

Anybody read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_%28novel%29