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Mark Bisone's avatar

While I understand and somewhat agree with the premise here, I think the missing piece - touched on near the end - pertains to the importance of heroes in our stories and their mimesis.

Dystopias are "hells without heroes." This is as true in art as it is in life. An artist is free to observe and convey any nightmarish vision of hell. But if he fails to cast any heroes into that hell, to do battle with its demons and their thralls, then he has sketched a nihilistic map to it as you claim.

In fact, I think that *does* describe the theosophy-adjacent Huxley's work (if not quite Orwell's, though an argument can be made). You might say that Brave New World wasn't a dystopia but a utopian playbook, even in his own conscious thoughts. And I suspect that's a danger inherent to "utopian" visions as well, because heroism demands the solving of problems in linear spacetime. There are no heroes in heaven either, and no need for them. We immanentize the eschaton at our peril, as usual.

Moreover, a human life will contain much tragedy, so it's true we should set our minds on how to improve conditions for ourselves and others. But if we, as artists, draw those plans too rigidly or hubristically, the painting we end up with could be like the rabbit-duck illusion. We'll swear up and down we made a portrait of a rabbit. But others might only see the duck, and pursue their dire duck strategies just as they would in the hero-less hells.

But when the heroes are cast into these "perfect" hells (or duck-heavens), we are drawn back to the truths of our condition and purpose in the world. We understand that the situation can get very dark - midnight black at times - and that these times are when we'll be tested in the crucible. A hero may or may not relish such tests. But he knows he must face and overcome them, and he does. The harder the test, the greater the hero.

And so, Winston Smith escapes O'Brien's machinations, gathers the forces of the Brotherhood, rises up like Paul Atreides on the hellscape of Dune... none of that happens, of course. But if it did, then the dystopia that Orwell crafted becomes all the more a translation of the Divine for the horror of its monsters and structures.

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Contarini's avatar

Have not read Huxley. Orwell is a lifelong favorite, and I have read everything by him except for one early novel. I don't agree that he was conjuring up the world of Oceania and Big Brother, or if so only inadvertently. The book is a reimagining of the world he actually lived in, Soviet Russia and its torture chambers, the Western Communists who would change their beliefs and their public statements in the blink of an eye, and who would justify any malicious action to advance their fanatical ideas, the wartime BBC where he worked, where facts were ignored or fabricated for the war effort, the ignorance of the proles who just got on with things no matter what the regime was, or what it did, the disintegration of liberties under war conditions, the fading away of religious belief and its replacement by political cults. All of this was lightly glossed realism; it was a dramatized version of his own lived and observed experience. He wrote 1984 while he was dying, and it was written in despair and as a warning. And in fact we mostly did not get the world of 1984, a world of overt government violence and cruelty, possibly, in part, because Orwell scared us away from it. The world of Huxley, however, seems more like what we have now. People are apparently less afraid of being rendered comatose by drugs and sexual stimulation than they are of having their faces eaten off by hungry rats, which is not surprising.

Your final point is well taken. Stories about better alternatives are sorely needed. I'm not sure that utopias are the answer, though if someone writes a good one I may read it. I would suggest instead plausible stories of overcoming the current chaos and malice, which provide a hopeful foundation for action. I am currently writing something which I believe is in that category, but it is slow going.

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