2011: A Brave New Dystopia

[Harry Monroe]

2011: A Brave New Dystopia
Monday 27 December 2010
by: Chris Hedges

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

http://www.truth-out.org/2011-a-brave-new-dystopia66307

[RandomThoughts]

1. That last phrase is the last stage of complete burn out.

Total acknowledgment of no love, that would be a flame out.

Some might think that way, and I really think a spark can relight flames, but that statement is the transition from love to power. And it never fills a person up, since it is to try to compensate for love.

The worst of it is if someone goes that direction, their flame gets dimmer and dimmer, and they actually feel less and less as they move down that path.

It really is thirst for power, versus feelings of love.



I have also postulated that it is a feeling of something trying to hang on that can not feel love, translated through a person, hence many concepts on sharing love to heal. If something wants you to crave power, and you share love with someone instead, it is possible you could respark or reconnect the non feeling thing with love and help them back. If you take the route of that lass paragraph, then they would control you, by removing feeling.

I would guess it would depend on the sociopath, most have self love more then no feeling, so that last case can be an attempt to rationalize that also, if it is thought to aswage feelings that say such thoughts should not be the choice a person makes.

Basically that last statement is a decision to embrace dark side completely, although the need to acknowledge it, by someone thinking it, may be still a struggle taking place.

[snot]

2. Brilliant, as usual from Hedges -- I hope everyone here will read it.

For anyone not familiar with him, he's a Pullitzer-winning journalist who lost his job at The NYT after he let it be known that he opposed the invasion of Iraq.