How many times have you used or heard the phrase “1984-esque” or “Orwellian nightmare”? So many believe something is being censored, kept back, or some variety of loaded game is being played at the expense of the wider population. Others are convinced that they alone are in sovereign possession of the unassailable Truth. From the intellectual elite, we expect to hear them assail the “foolish, stupid, ignorant, primitive, uneducated, and pitiably misguided.” From the moral elite, the God-and-Country crowd, you’ll hear charged language like “seditious, morally bankrupt, un-American, evil and godless.” Both groups, yes, most of us, languish about the rims or depths of the great canyon that is current American discourse, and we hear these labels; maybe, regrettably, in our own voices.
The combined knowledge of the human race is floating a few keystrokes from the hands of nearly all. Everyone has a voice, and the voices are raised. Therein, regrettably, is the problem. The proliferation of sources and explosion in accessibility make not languishing difficult.
We may have different metrics for assessing sources. Some of us rely upon peer-reviewed sources. Some of us don’t trust the peer-review process, and go with the Ancients. Some of us trust affiliated news, but others only third-party, unaffiliated.
The issue isn’t that the truth doesn’t exist. The issue is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to assess where to find it. In the modern era, an “appeal to the facts” is laughable, when each party suspects the other of tampering with the evidence. The pursuit of truth has been occluded by the shouting, arguing, hysteria, and proliferation of sources that mask, obfuscate, bend and reinterpret. We are not, I’m afraid, in the business of shaping our opinions to fit the facts. We are in the business of seeking the pleasure of being right over the difficulty of seeking what is true.
Aldous Huxley has the distinction of being one of the three pillars of dystopian literature: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 by George Orwell and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin -- the triumvirate of the poisoned future. While the control of thought and discourse in society is the great interest of every elite, Huxley was specific regarding how that control would occur. Unlike other dystopians who saw the method of control flowing from heavy-handed tactics like fear, historical erasure, and torture, Huxley saw societal control in a single word -- pleasure. He believed that instant gratification, drugs, a life of ease, free love, the accessibility of diverting activities, and pornography would prevent all but the staunchest dissent.
His brave new world is summarized neatly in a scene wherein Mustafa Mond, the “Controller of Europe,” engages in a philosophical debate in his office with the “Savage” on the subjects of god, morality, and social place. The “prop” used in this scene is important: Mustafa Mond opens his safe, and takes out several of the “banned” books. The metaphor is transparent: the truth, locked away, is in the hands of the knowingly complicit elite.
But the means of greater understanding is the willingness and ability to expand the mind and encompass as much of the world as possible. I wonder if we haven’t entered unknowingly an artificial limiting of scope. Consider the following from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis:
[It’s] the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips all the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.
When there is data to suit every persuasion, every iteration of human motivation—from atheism to Christianity from holocaust denial to White supremacy — is not the truest metric of morality in the 21st century, the driving notion behind Aldous Huxley’s most famous work, as simple as personal decision? The machinations of society bend us toward the pleasure of being right and “othering” the opposition, but the fastest way to avoid Huxley’s vision of a society controlled by pleasure and the burying of the truth is to bow out. Ignore society. Vastly overcomplicating an issue with an infinite series of tailor-made sources has hardly bought any one of us peace of mind.
The appeal to the intrinsic morality of the human spirit, “I know it’s wrong, so I won’t do it,” is more powerful than finding excuses for our behavior. In literary fiction we see truths by navigating with the heart and the instincts. A careful study of the immediate, actual repercussions of our actions tell us more than a thousand opinions. I’m making a conscious decision to limit my scope to things upon which I can have an immediate impact, to reduce the scope of decision making all the way back down to an egoistic “myself and my immediate kin or neighbors.”
The best way to avoid Aldous Huxley’s projected future is to walk out of the canyon of howling voices and focus on individualistic notions of happiness. It is everyone’s duty to nail their ninety-five theses to the oaken doors of power and disregard the faux authority of the bloated establishments. We are responsible for our lives and our choices. Leave the argumentation and the accusations to others. After all, sometimes the fastest way to win a fight is to not start one. Or, failing that, walk away from it. In the deepest of ironies, Huxley’s Brave New World may ultimately be prevented by nothing more than a little personal bravery.