1984 Or Brave New World?

 When I was in high school, we were required to read both "1984" and "Brave New World".

When we were done, the teacher asked which of the two do we think most likely to make itself real. Most of my classmates felt 1984 was the likely candidate, whereas my answer was "both". Being the odd man out, the teacher demanded I defend my position. I'd come to the suspicion that our immediate future was to have the face of BNW, but that its black heart, which was precisely the same as that of 1984, would become less candy coated, and thereby more 1984-like, with time.

At the time I was unable to articulate why it would be so, but I believe my instincts have proven themselves correct over the decades since. The face has mutated from that of a bright future full of wonder, to that of a vacuously inane clown where the superficiality of life becomes caricatured in itself. This is reflected everywhere we turn in the outward behaviors of far too many young people these days. Huxley's depiction of the idiotic mantras of BNW's dopey "alphas" are made manifest in the meme culture that has arisen as one result of the network technology we now "enjoy".

The standards of assessment for what it considered knowledge is now so low as to leave me wondering at times how it is that the human world does not come flying apart, though we appear in some ways to come closer to it by the day.

The emphasis has run wildly away from the classic virtues of individual freedom, learnedness, mutual respect, honor, love, and self control, to that of utter self indulgence. The manifestations of this are everywhere made apparent, particularly on the network, which has become a major source of influence in the ways that young people come to see the world, and their places in it. Aided and abetted by "media" and the so-called "educational" system, all former senses of the world appear to be slipping away as the fog of what was once pure relativism has been transmogrified into what I will call the New Absolutism. This has taken place either by the wildest set of coincidences, unimaginable, or by some very clever artifice. It mirrors most perfectly the absolutism of our religious past, and against which it continues to rail and shriek to this day. Anyone failing to subscribe, subordinate, and prostrate themselves to the new Absolute Truth as doled out by the Oracles of Eternal Progressive Wisdom, is to be condemned for heresy. This is most literally the case now.

Could anyone of a now-older generation have imagined a time where "men" who swear that they are not homosexual, publicly proclaim, nay brag, that their girlfriend's "peg" them? If you do not know what that is, look it up. It's hilarious and miserably sad and pathetic all at once.

What passes for knowledge in what seems a vast horde of humanity, is something at which one can only marvel whilst shaking his head as if to wake himself from a goofy dream of killer klowns, soon the turn into a black nightmare.

As I suspected, the cancerous heart of this innerly rotten apple, has become ever more apparent in time, with the once nearly latent tyrants now having made their presence and position most painfully apparent to anyone taking but a moment to notice. In 1984-style, we are seeing a reversal of everything. Good is bad, evil is virtue, up is down, yet the candy-coating of BNW persists, even if it becomes more gossamer-like with each passing year.

It's the old stick-and-carrot act. People have been bent toward the weakness that arises through excessively indulgent self-centeredness and the pleasure seeking that arises most predictably therefrom. The ready availability of the most base forms of self-seeking, namely that of the sexual variety for example, is universal in the "west", with porn sites more popular than ever, acting as a primary source of indoctrination of the young. Make no mistake, I am not on a diatribe against sex - far from it. But when it is made a focus out of proportion such that other life considerations of equal import take a far back seat to it, it requires no feat of rocket surgery to figure out that something is not quite right in the world.

Concomitant with the carrot of strongly advocated self-worship and gratification, is the stick of ever more draconian results for those who fail to adopt the new orthodoxy of obedience to naked, bald-faced evil. Do not question anything, lest ye be stricken from Facebook and Twitter, heaven forbid!

And so in time, my suspicion that with the years we would see an ever expanded edging of encroachment upon the rights of the individual has come to pass and continues to wreck its way through the lives of every man on the planet, the exceptions representing a vanishingly small subpopulation. My perception of the tyrant's nature proved close enough to correct in that he cannot contain and control himself, such that he is no different from those over whom he presumes to lord, save in the dint of his having landed into some seat of power that enables his rot and corruption to be realized in ways the mean man will never know for himself. The tyrant is ill-disciplined in his apparently insatiable lust to exercise ever greater management authority over increasingly minuscule details of the lives of those over whom his tyranny reigns.

The question that arises is whether the tyrants, having perfected their system of domination, will be able to contain themselves over the longer term to the metes and bounds of prudence in the administration of that system. Or will they themselves fall to the perennial human failing of never being satisfied, thus creeping or even leaping over that hazily defined line that would give the now utterly cowed dullards cause to rebel? My suspicion is the latter, if left to their devices. But our technologies stand as the wildcard predicators in that question, and here I speak very specifically of artificial intelligence. If Theye (those in material social power) are smart, and I cannot with certainty attribute their successes thus far to intellect, versus pure determination, they would endeavor to cause the contrivance of an AI sufficient to the task of general, central governance. Were Theye to hand their prerogatives largely over to such a system, elevating it to the effective status and function of an oracle, they might be able to hold on to power indefinitely into the blue future.

The problem with tyrants has always been a lack of self-control in the respects to which I here refer. Having the correct measures programmed into a system which would then be trusted to maintain the proper balances between tyrannical interest and the boiling point of the proletariate, could become the near-guarantee of dominance with no foreseeable end.

Only time will tell, and we old geezers will likely not live to see the longer term outcomes. But it would be quite interesting to be a fly on the world's wall, witnessing how this all pans out over, say the coming century or two, assuming we don't send ourselves to hell in a nuclear fireball, the prospects of which have been recently revived from their former states of rest.

But if you defocus your gaze and zoom out to a broader view of things, the one thing that stands out in all this is the eternally immutable principle of change. Things always change, and so bearing that in mind, it is no wonder that that which we knew and accepted as right and proper is swept away in the currents of time. This may be the only real hope remaining to us: that the need for change is so embedded in the very fabric of our existences, even the most technologically enabled tyrannies must eventually transform, replacing themselves with... well, what exactly?

It seems I have wandered adrift from my original purpose... or have I? You decide.

Be well, be prosperous, and until next time, please accept my best wishes.