I just finished Huxley’s Brave New World. I like it.

Especially the beginning with the authors challenge of the readers assumptions of right and wrong, and then controllers tales of our society’s ideals of family life which the audience find disturbing to the point of nausea. This juxtaposition is repeated again with John the Savages encounter with the “brave new world”.

This book is a perfect complement to Orwell’s 1984 – but the totalitarian government is not enforced by any “thought police” but by preconditioning and persuasion. This is repeated in a smaller scale in Philip K Dick’s “The Mold of Yancy”. The characters who are considered deviant are not taken away and tortured/killed (as in 1984) but are simply pressured to conform. Failing that, they are deported.

“Still shouting and sobbing Bernard was carried out.
‘One would think he was going to have his throat cut’, said the Controller, as the door closed. ‘Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he’d understand that his punishment is really a reward. He’s being sent to an island. That’s to say he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Everyone, in a word, who’s anyone. I almost envy you, Mr Watson.’”

It is 1984 but touchy-feely and just as effective.

Anti Citizen One