Huxley v. Orwell

Huxley v. Orwell

I had a short epistolary interchange with Peter Kreeft on this very issue after he contended that Huxley was the better predictor of trends, and I contended that there were elements of both dystopias that we had come to accept and even to embrace.

Comments

  1. FredDecember 14, 2010 at 11:41 AM

    Steven,

    I would agree with you. Governments, any ruling bodies, are still keeping information from us and when it does get out, it's buried in trivia.

    I'm sure some in the government are glad that the wikileaks people are so brainless that they released thousands and thousands of messages at one time, thereby mitigating what could have been far more embarrassing if selected messages had been released individually.

    For someone to say that fear isn't motivating us today is just not in touch with reality. It's fear, not pleasure, that's slowly taking our civil liberties or freedom away from us.

    However, one also can't discount the effect of the trivialization of news today. The first indicator of this was several decades ago when ABC placed its news department under the control of the entertainment VP. News is entertainment, not the fourth estate anymore. I wonder what Ben Franklin or the framers of the constitution would have thought about this.

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