Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ Rightists have spent the last couple of days freaking out and invoking Orwell’s 1984 in response to something their political enemies are doing in Ameri…
Brave New World always felt like the more prophetic dystopian novel, from the perspective of imperial core liberals. Everything is spectacle in media. Intoxicants both placate the masses and serve as a moral crisis to which we are forever fixated on solving. The institutionalized caste system insulates leadership from dissent by disguising nepotism as meritocracy. But the system self-perpetuates efficiently and exiles dissidents in such a way as to continuously provide stability forever.
1984 was just so much harder to swallow as a kid, because the perpetually collapsing economy and chronic human misery struck me as unsustainable. Like, how could a country that is on the brink of starvation and industrial collapse, with the majority of its workforce seemingly focused entirely on policing itself, possibly persist year to year? And yet... here we are. In a country where the next war is the only thing people care about, dissent is seemingly manufactured for the purpose of high profile prosecution, and the collapsing economy never seems to pry loose anyone in a position of authority.
Maybe 1950s UK just put the writing on the wall a little clearer for Orwell than 1990s America did for me. But I thought for sure we were headed into a neoliberal dystopia rather than a fascist one.
I thought the neoliberals could maintain the flow of treats indefinitely. I did not expect them to go hog on military spending at the expense of the bread and circuses.
I'd say it's not even a "decay" but a symbiotic parallel existence. There's nothing incompatible about neoliberalism and fascim. We can have both (:agony-deep: ). Some of neoliberalism's core positions (e.g. privatization) came out of Nazi Germany. Neoliberalism covers the "economics" while fascism covers the outright and direct state violence (militarized policing and borders, surveillance, concentration camps, etc.).
Reminder that Orwell wrote 1984 after working for the BBC and getting a first hand look at how the anglo media apparatus works
Brave New World always felt like the more prophetic dystopian novel, from the perspective of imperial core liberals. Everything is spectacle in media. Intoxicants both placate the masses and serve as a moral crisis to which we are forever fixated on solving. The institutionalized caste system insulates leadership from dissent by disguising nepotism as meritocracy. But the system self-perpetuates efficiently and exiles dissidents in such a way as to continuously provide stability forever.
1984 was just so much harder to swallow as a kid, because the perpetually collapsing economy and chronic human misery struck me as unsustainable. Like, how could a country that is on the brink of starvation and industrial collapse, with the majority of its workforce seemingly focused entirely on policing itself, possibly persist year to year? And yet... here we are. In a country where the next war is the only thing people care about, dissent is seemingly manufactured for the purpose of high profile prosecution, and the collapsing economy never seems to pry loose anyone in a position of authority.
Maybe 1950s UK just put the writing on the wall a little clearer for Orwell than 1990s America did for me. But I thought for sure we were headed into a neoliberal dystopia rather than a fascist one.
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:p
I thought the neoliberals could maintain the flow of treats indefinitely. I did not expect them to go hog on military spending at the expense of the bread and circuses.
deleted by creator
I'd say it's not even a "decay" but a symbiotic parallel existence. There's nothing incompatible about neoliberalism and fascim. We can have both (:agony-deep: ). Some of neoliberalism's core positions (e.g. privatization) came out of Nazi Germany. Neoliberalism covers the "economics" while fascism covers the outright and direct state violence (militarized policing and borders, surveillance, concentration camps, etc.).