Perspective: DystopiaScience Fiction Has Become Dystopian Fact

Published 23 September 2019

So which dystopia are we living in? Most educated people have read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. So influential have these books been that we are inclined to view all disconcerting new phenomena as either “Orwellian” or “Huxleyan”. If you suspect we shall lose our freedom to a brutally repressive state, grinding its boot into our faces, you think of George. If you think we shall lose it to a hedonistic consumer culture, complete with test-tube designer babies, you quote Aldous. “My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power,” Huxley wrote in a letter to Orwell in 1949. Niall Ferguson agrees: “As I reflect on the world in 2019, I am struck by the wisdom of [Huxley’s] words. In Xi Jinping’s China, we see Totalitarianism 2.0. The boot on the face remains a possibility, of course, but it is needed less and less as the system of social credit expands, aggregating and analyzing all the digital data that Chinese citizens generate.”

So which dystopia are we living in? Most educated people have read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. So influential have these books been that we are inclined to view all disconcerting new phenomena as either “Orwellian” or “Huxleyan”. If you suspect we shall lose our freedom to a brutally repressive state, grinding its boot into our faces, you think of George. If you think we shall lose it to a hedonistic consumer culture, complete with test-tube designer babies, you quote Aldous.

Niall Ferguson writes in The Times that a superior work of science fiction to both is the earlier masterpiece We, by the Russian satirist Yevgeny Zamyatin. Written in 1920-21, in the early, turbulent years of Bolshevik rule, We is astoundingly prescient. In the “One State”, individual humans are mere “ciphers” clad in standardized “unifs”, with numbers instead of names. All apartments are made entirely of glass and curtains can be drawn only when one is having state-licensed sex.

The secret police, the Bureau of Guardians, are ubiquitous. Unlike in Orwell’s Soviet Britain, where there are ways of dodging the telescreens, surveillance in the One State is incessant and inescapable. Unlike in Huxley’s eugenics-based utopia, pleasure is mandatory and joyless.

Ferguson quotes a letter Huxley wrote to Orwell in 1949, after reading Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion,” wrote Huxley (who, by the way, had taught Orwell French at Eton many years earlier). “Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power . . .

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

“As I reflect on the world in 2019, I am struck by the wisdom of those words,” Ferguson writes. “In Xi Jinping’s China, we see Totalitarianism 2.0. The boot on the face remains a possibility, of course, but it is needed less and less as the system of social credit expands, aggregating and analyzing all the digital data that Chinese citizens generate.”