Their underlying message is the same: mankind will mechanize humanity in the name of humanity.
In Huxley Brave New World (B. N. W.), the cataclysmic event that rocks society is the “Nine Years War, the great Economic Collapse” (Huxley, 43). This is the historical turning point where “there was a choice between World Control and destruction” and the utopian society of B. N. W.
Is born, or rather, it is “hatched”. In this world, reproduction is a matter of technology. The family unit and marriage relationships are abolished: “Everyone belongs to everyone else” (Huxley, 38).Sex is for pleasure only, and reproduction is canonical. The population is grown in hatcheries, genetically manipulated and heavily conditioned, so that they will mature into perfectly content, contributing members of their specific social caste. The Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre explains, “Bookmaking’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability! ” (Huxley, 5). Happiness is stability according to the world’s leaders.
“Scalability,’ said the Controller, stability. No civilization without social stability.No social stability without individual stability'” (Huxley, 37). Every precaution is made to maintain stability at every level. As the Controller explains in the hatchery, “No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy 0 to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all” (Huxley, 39).
People are given “soma” as a generic pacifier. These are a tube of tablets that have “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects” (Huxley, 48). All world religions are removed and replaced with Forbids – the reverence of mechanism.The Controller explains, “God isn’t compatible with machinery ND scientific medicine and universal happiness. Civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness” (Huxley, 214).
The Controller justifies all actions based on the perceived happiness of the population. The governing powers proclaim that “history’ is bunk” (Huxley, 30) and close all museums and hide all pre-war literature (Huxley, 45) in an attempt to have people live only in the moment, ignoring the past and the future. But all is not perfect in Brave New World. Hellholes Watson, a member of the B. N. W.
Society, attempts to articulate his inner struggles, “Do you ever feel as Hough you have something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? ” (Huxley, 62). Hellholes goes on to say that he is stifled by the type of literature he writes and teaches and that he wants to write “piercingly”, but how “can you say something about nothing? ” (Huxley, 62-63). Huxley uses two other central characters to articulate the flaws in this utopia. Bernard Marx experiences some very urn-utopian feelings.
He rejects the soma (Huxley, 54), he is individualistic (Huxley, 60), and he doesn’t appreciate promiscuous sex (Huxley, 57).Eventually his feelings betray him o his superiors and he, and Hellholes, are banished to islands where they will not disturb the happiness of civilization (Huxley, 206-209). The third character which clearly sees B. N. W. As a disappoints civilization is John.
He is a “savage” who Was raised on a reservation which rejected the World Control system. He is completely
counter-cultural and mystified by the society he finds in London. This is symbolized by his fascination with the “ancient” writings of Shakespeare. John believes in marriage and families. He believes in personal satisfaction by overcoming adversity.He believes in reiterative and individuality, and recognizes that without these man is less than human.
“Art, science C] you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness” John comments to the Controller (Huxley ,210). He challenges them that they have degraded man with their utopian control: “Haven’t they used his pleasant vices as an instrument to degrade him? ” But the Controller explains that the truth is relative: ‘Degrade him from what position? As a happy, hardworking, goods-consuming citizen he’s perfect. Of course, if you choose some other standard than ours, then perhaps you might say he was graded.But you’ve got to stick to one set of postulates” (Huxley, 215).
Eventually John is overcome by the irreconcilable differences between his view of life and the view of life propagated by the Controllers. In despair, or perhaps as his last expression of individual freedom, he hangs himself. Like Huxley, George Orwell creates a controlling utopian society in Nineteen Eighty-Four which degrades humanity.
In this novel, the shift in civilization occurs following the “Revolution”, another movement that was based on economic control, (Orwell, 38). Like Brave New World, Orwell presents a giggly controlled caste society.In B. N. W.
The world is at peace, but in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is in a constant state of war and militaristic control. Marriages are allowed for procreation purposes, but emotional attachments are strictly forbidden. Sex is seen as a necessary evil, unlike B. N. W. Where sex is used as a emotional placebo (Orwell, 68).
Soma is replaced by ‘Victory Gin Where Huxley keeps the humanity under control with sensory overload, Orwell creates an existence stripped of its senses: tasteless and colorless. Again, world religions have been removed.This time they are replaced with devotion to Big Brother and the beliefs of INNING SOC.
Likewise, history, art and fine literature are neutralized. The only art allowed are posters of Big Brother and the enemy. All old books and documents are destroyed.
Formula novels are written by giant machines. History is re-written and constantly being altered to align with present day reality. Language is altered with “Newsweek’ where descriptive words and ancient meanings are systematically erased from cultural memory (Orwell, 53-54). Conformity is enforced through intimidation instead of B. N. W.
Genetic manipulation and conditioning. Deprivation, threats of violence and deadly force are used in Nineteen Eighty Fourth keep the comrades obedient to Big Brother. Everything is created to fit with Big Brother’s deification. Even the laws of mathematics are challenged and altered: “TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE” (Orwell, 290) to express the complete power of Big Brother.
Like Huxley, Orwell uses individual creativity to suggest dissonance in Nineteen Eighty- Four. Winston Smith is a simple worker in the great Big Brother machine, but he has counter- cultural tendencies (O’Neill, 18-19).He as smuggled a journal into his apartment and keeps a personal diary (Orwell, 8).
He wakes one morning from a dream with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips (Orwell, 33). In his dreams he realizes some fundamental truths: belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. [..
. ] Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows” (Orwell, 32).This analysis echoes the findings of John in Brave New World when he sees that civilized man been euthanized. Like John, Winston rebels against the world he finds himself in and is found out by the authorities. Because Big Brother cannot tolerate any deviation from conformity, they capture him and break him.
At the end of the story, having been released from the Thought Police, his spirit is broken. When confronted with memories of his childhood, he dismisses them as false and when presented with more of the endless war propaganda, he embraces it as truth.With the imagery of a bullet to his brain, he surrenders his intellect to the mind control of Big Brother. ‘The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
.. ] He [Winston] had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother” (Orwell, 31 1). Although Winston death is not literal, it is just as powerful as John’s in B.
N. W. Because what has made him an individual human is just as dead. The cataclysmic event that alters the course Of society in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Electric Sheep), is a World War. Similar utopia elements exist in Electric Sheep as in the other novels.
Love is dismissed and sex is regulated (Dick, 143). Emotions are controlled by a “mood 3) which artificially stimulates the brain (Dick, 7), but unlike the other two ovule, the characters of Electric Sheep exercise a measure of personal choice of what they feel. Iran explains, “l can’t dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! Don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive can imagine” (Dick, 7).Universal conformity is more subtly portrayed in Electric Sheep. There is the ever-present social consciousness; in this story he is the untiring TV personality, Buster Friendly, who is broadcast “live” continuously. Because of he world-wide devastation and decreased population, people are nervous about solitude and keep the TV turned on to keep the sound of silence at bay.
“As he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive” (Dick, 20).Unlike the other two novels where governments ban solitude (Huxley, 214; Orwell, 85), in Electric Sheep solitude is a reality of the decimated earth and the characters reject it, craving to be together. World religions are replaced by Mercers where the sacredness of all life is indoctrinated. By using an “empathy box” individuals merge into a collective unconsciousness with their icon, Wilbur Mercer: “He had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion; physical
merging accompanied by mental and spiritual identification C] with Wilbur Mercer had reoccurred.As it did for everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either here on Earth or on one of the colony planets.
He experienced them, the others, incorporated the babble of their thoughts, heard in his own brain the noise of their many individual existences” (Dick, 22). Emotional contact and empathy are the distinctive of being human in Electric Sheep. Any inability to experience this is a sign of either mental disease (becoming “special” through radiation poisoning) or being inhuman CLC an android imposter.
As in the other two novels, history, art and literature are being eliminated.This time though, it is entropic decay and not governmental controls which erases man’s creations. Books are still considered valuable as stated by one of the characters interest in “pre-colonial fiction” (Dick, 160). Art is highly prized as illustrated in the main character’s favorable reaction to the opera The Magic Taut and its star performer, even though it is proven that she is an android. The most dramatic difference between Electric Sheep and the other two novels is in Philip Dick’s approach on De-humiliation.
In Electric Sheep, Philip Dick blurs the distinction between man and machine with the creation of the Nexus 6, an android so perfectly replicating all of mankind’s traits that it can effectively replace humanity. The central character, Rick Declared, is a bounty hunter employed to hunt down androids, “Andy”, that are masquerading a humans and “retire” them. Declared is supposedly able to determine whether someone is human or an Andy by administering an empathy test, but by the end of the book more questions are raised than answered as to what is a machine and what is really “alive”.In another interesting twist, creating life-like androids is elevated to an art form, not just an work-saving device or replacement pet. Mercers encourages humans to hold all life forms as sacred and personal status is measured by the type of pets one owns. Those who cannot afford the genuine article, buy mechanical animals to keep up a appearances (Dick, 8-9). At the end of the story, Declared has been so completely fooled by some android animals that he bouts his ability to distinguish the genuine from the fake.
He even attributes to them life and thus, through Mercers, demanding sacred protection: “The electric things have lives, too. Paltry as those lives are” (Dick, 241). Unlike the other two novels, the central character is not killed or removed from society, but neither does he appear to triumph. During his hunt for some renegade Andy, Decker’s senses and instincts are fooled sufficiently to leave him doubting the validity of his job and even his own humanity (Dick, 230). Through three different logical systems, each author presents societies that succeed in dehumidifying humanity by the very mechanisms they use to preserve it.