This article by Gustavo Jalife at TCW opened up a new line of thought for me. He starts off by quoting Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death:
‘Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.’
Jalife continues:
Over the last two decades the expansion of police society – across both capitalist and non-capitalist systems – has intensified, fueled by online minorities and off-line majorities that cry out for protection and assurances.
…the ghastly Covid restrictions on personal movement and social intercourse being an excellent example.
In the Bad Old Days — inhabited by people like George Orwell — oppression was simply a function of the State, whether post-Revolutionary Jacobin France, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union or the MiniTrue of WWII British Government. It was, if you like, a brutish system wherein the various police forces arrested, imprisoned, or executed anyone seen as resistant (“counter-revolutionary”), non-compliant or (to use the word beloved by oppressors) deviant, if not “treasonous”. We can call it the “Orwell” model, and while it lasts, it’s reasonably effective.
Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, took a different view. Huxley based his thesis on the old Roman panem et circenses (bread & circuses) philosophy, whereby people in general will almost always take the easy and more pleasurable option when it comes to dealing with life. In that, people are distracted from opposition to the ruling diktat by drugs (soma), spectacle (Olympic Games) or immersive entertainment like the “feelies”. What’s mistaken about Huxley’s thesis is thinking that the State would create such diversionary pursuits — in most cases, such technology is beyond the capacity of the State to create — whereas we all know those pursuits could only be created by private corporations, a.k.a. Big Tech.
It would appear that modern Western society is operating more on the Huxley model, whereas the Orwell model is being used by the North Korea / CCP regimes, as well as the religious autocracies like Islam. But there’s another twist to this.
We all know that the “ruling diktat ” (sometimes called The Narrative) differs between the West and the Rest.
For the Rest, it’s simple: dogma, whether political (Marxism) or religious (Islam) forms the diktat and prescribes the actions to be followed.
In the West? Well, that’s not so simple. In the absence of a strict political- or religious foundation, there are many other contenders: political correctness, multiculturalism, environmentalism: you name it. People need a flag to follow, and the power-seekers and social controllers are only too pleased to provide them.
And as long as there’s enough soma to go round to deaden the senses, it doesn’t matter how silly, impractical, illogical or even destructive those flag-standards are. Let’s be honest: without all the in-home distractions provided by streaming movie services, Zoom calls and the like, the Covid restrictions wouldn’t have lasted longer than a few days. Even more ironically, when the Covid crackdowns were ignored or actively opposed, the State (in whichever nation) used some very old-school methods to punish or suppress.
Gustavo Jalife poses the question: “Do we actually like being controlled?”
I would phrase it rather differently. “Do we actually care about whether we’re being controlled or not?”
“More soma?”
Sure, why not. Let’s go shopping on Amazon, doomscroll, play a video game, watch some porn or scroll through the options on Netflix for a few hours until bedtime. Adderall and Xanax are for losers, dude. We can munch on some “edibles” while we play — it’s not harmful, really: all the studies point to that.
