Response

"Huxley's book is the better written of the two." This statement, along with "Orwell's is the timelier of the two" I feel neglect to look at many aspects of the books. In my opinion I feel the opposite is true. Huxley's book can be related to America today in so many ways, I made many comparisons in my in-class essay two weeks ago. Things are becoming so easy for the American public, and the average person is no longer really trying to advance their own knowledge of the world around them, they are being neutrilized by their own contentment, which is what happens in Brave New World. " In Brave New World the standardizing force (apart from conditioning) is pleasure." We find this very true in our American society. However, 1984 uses terror to induce the cooperation of its citizens. We do not relate to this very directly, but many other countries probably do. I began to look at the human rights in North Korea today, to see if it can be related to that in 1984. I did not get very far before many terrifying parallels were able to be made. Citizens of North Korea are not allowed to leave and the conditions there are hard to determine because foreigners are rarely allowed to enter, and when they do they are kept under extremely close watch, so accounts on the conditions there are gathered from refugees. People there are not allowed to speak their minds, which is something we see in 1984 and thus is the use of doublespeak, to narrow the range of thinking, so it becomes impossible to even think something out of the ordinary. I may be going back on what I said earlier in this response, but I feel both of these books are equally relevant. They both encompass different aspects of the world today, some societies we are tamed by pleasure and convienience, and others people are kept by force and terror. Huxley, and Orwell had very different visions, but they were both very accurate.