[ExI] 1984 and Brave New World

ablainey at aol.com ablainey at aol.com
Thu Jan 28 16:58:39 UTC 2010


 

 I havn't read 'A brave new world', but if I understand what you have said about the comparison. Doesn't it come down to the age old dichotomy of carrot vs stick?
The political currencies for the two societies being pleasure and fear; the strongest of human emotions. Each book being a warning of the logical outcome when the 
ballence is lost one way or the other.


 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:30
Subject: [ExI] 1984 and Brave New World



On Jan 27, 2010, at 5:55 AM, Stefano Vaj wrote:


The alternative is probably to part altogether with the idea of

"safety and happiness for the largest number" as exclusive societal
goals and takes one's risk with progress and change, isn't it?




Well sure, but how likely is it that we will choose the path of progress especially when we can receive the pride of making great progress while sitting on our ass and without progressing one inch. If you think this is a debasement of the human spirit then all you need to do is change your mind, and I do mean CHANGE YOUR MIND. Now you think the idea is downright noble. 



What is especially curious, and indeed quite sadistic, in the 1984
ideology is that in that context suffering is the only conceivable
parameter of the party's influence, since, as O'Brien says "if
something is pleasurable, one might be doing it simply out of its own
interest/will" (quoting by heart). In fact, *real* influence is rather
measured on one's ability to determine what one considers pleasurable
or at least desirable.




In Brave New World only happiness was important and nothing else, in 1984 only power was important ant nothing else; if you accept that as an axiom and add the further one that power is the power over minds and nothing else then what the inner party did in 1984 was quite logical.



a Brave New World require that change, conflicts, progress, etc. be frozen and disposed of.




A Brave New World would be totally static, if you looked at it in 10,000 years things would be almost identical to what they are now. 1984 is not static, it is devolving; once newspeak became the primary language the wretched inhabitants could hardly even be called human. 


Stathis Papaioannou wrote:


But if we had complete control of our brains we could arrange it so
that the happiness is coupled to some activity we consider
intrinsically interesting 



But if you want to make progress you can't get pleasure just by glancing at that interesting thing, you must accomplish something significant in it; but doing significant things in interesting fields is hard and rare, and that means you won't be at maximum happiness very often. But who among us wouldn't want to be a little happier? No matter how happy we are we could always be a little happier, and that happiness slide switch is very easy to get to and would only take a slight movement of my finger to move it just a little way to the right, and then a little more, and then a little more, and then....




We could also arrange it so that we are not tempted to pervert this mechanism.



Well sure we could, but would we? I really don't know the answer to that.


 John K Clark 




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