One reason why
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is so much more
insightful than
Orwell's 1984 is that Huxley gives his
totalitarian regime a voice, in the person of
World Controller Mustapha Mond.
Towards the end of the story, after the incident at the death clinic, Mustapha Mond sits our heroes down (along with us, the readers) and explains, patiently, why the regime is the way it is. He freely acknowledges the casualties (art, science, religion) of the new order, but he asserts that the gains outweigh the losses. To me, Mustapha Mond is far more terrifying than Big Brother ever was because Mustapha Mond is a reasonable man who created his dystopian nightmare with the best motives and intentions; whereas Big Brother apparently oppresses people just out of sheer cussedness. Big Brother is a caricature; Mustapha Mond is a portrait.
There is a powerful lesson here. The slide into dystopia will not be precipitated by some cackling, moustache-twirling villain. It will be precipitated by the do-gooders of the world who will systematically extirpate all that is noble about civilization, all the while thinking they are doing us a favor by doing so.
Some other random Brave New World tidbits:
- The similarity between the title and Miranda's quote from The Tempest is, of course, no accident. John Savage quotes this line ironically when he sees the modern civilization for what it really is.
- The drug soma comes from Thomas Moore's Utopia
- There's a coffeehouse in Bloomington, Indiana called Soma, which used to carry t-shirts bearing a quotation of the passage in which Huxley first describes the drug Soma. When I was living in Bloomington, it was my favorite place to go for a "half-holiday".
- Brave New World was published in 1932; in 1958 Huxley published Brave New World Revisited, a collection of essays (or one long essay broken into chapters, if you prefer) in which he examines the extent to which his predictions in BNW have come true in the real world and their prospects for coming about in the future.