Amusing Ourselves to Death by Stuart McMillen (May 2009)
Aldous Huxley (Author: “Brave New World”) vs. George Orwell (Author: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Precisely why I love Aldous Huxley so fucking much.
I need to read this Brave New World book now.
Why it’s been one of my favorite books since the 9th grade.
I’ve only just started reading it this weekend, and I think I’m going to wind up needing to read it twice to catch half of what the author’s trying to say.
But what I do understand scares me.
It terrifies me, too; that’s why I love it. I find people in my classes tend to be more scared by 1984 because the idea of too much control is so against what we’ve been raised to believe in, but the fact that they don’t find Brave New World as shocking shows how like it our own society has become. We take the soma and the feelies and the conformity all in stride because that’s how our world works. But it is scary, how people can become slaves to their own passions, will be controlled by their own bodies and minds. We forget that freedom has as much responsibility in it as it does liscence.
