Postman’s Forward places before us a contrast between the equally chilling prophecies of two of the twentieth century’s earlier writers. George Orwell wrote in his novel, 1984, of a totalitarian society that burned books, of a Big Brother who militantly deprived the people of their autonomy, maturity and history. On the other hand, Aldous Huxley’s vision in his Brave New World foresees the day when “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” To quote Postman more extensively on this contrast,

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

As the ramifications of the last election are slowly (or not so slowly, depending on your level of consciousness) dawning on this country, I want to propose an expansion to Postman’s hypothesis that extends his predictions further into the 21^st century in which we now find ourselves.

My hypothesis is based on the fact that both dystopias envisioned by Orwell and Huxley share a common denominator: the death of critical thought, indeed, of any thought, where “Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think.” The difference is the executioner and his methods, but the result is the same.

Orwell’s version of history is rather more obviously oppressive in that it is an overt tyranny, however slowly it may have entered into the system. But a thinking man has a tendency to recognize and take action against tyranny just as a functional immune system recognizes and attacks disease organisms. In the past, overt Communism and fascism were discerned and opposed almost immediately by other free countries and eventually by at least some in the subject population even when they were overcome by the military might of such totalitarian regimes. It is no accident that one of the first steps after coming to power in these forms of government has been, and is, the persecution and elimination of the thinking educated class. Thus, Postman is correct in that Orwell’s dystopia would not have been successful at the time he created his work.

Postman’s thesis that Huxley was right has been born out by history: we have become (note the past perfect tense, which for those readers who have had the misfortune to have been edjumacated in the current public school system, denotes an action started in the past and continuing into the present) a culture whose thought processes have been slowly shut down by a shift to the worldview that the visceral is superior to the cerebral, that feelings trump fact, and that the image is more important than the content of the message. All too many train wrecks along the cultural landscape, not the least of which being the most recent election, hinge upon the departure of average American’s neural material as he/she narcissistically gazes ever more longingly into his own navel (pay my mortgage, Mr. President!).

So if Postman is correct and Huxley is the correct model over which we should be troubled, what is my new hypothesis? Simply this: because of the cognitive decay created by the Brave New World, a 1984 becomes possible. Said another way, the common denominator in the death of critical thought creates first a trivial culture that is then ripe for becoming a captive culture. When one reads Postman and Huxley, one sees the later part of the Twentieth Century clearly described. Ladies and gentlemen, I submit that it has already happened. We’ve become a trivial culture, steeped in a narcissistic pursuit of our own pleasures, adopting the posture of entitlement while abandoning responsibility with abandon.

I further submit that when one reads Orwell, one sees what the liberal Left is actively trying to do in this country now in the first part of the Twenty-first Century. Their success to date is merely a product of the encephalopathy that permeates and plagues our culture today. They are attempting to make us a captive culture, and the immune system of critical thought is compromised to the extent that the cancer is metastasized and slowly eating away at our freedoms. Some of the data for these conclusions I will now present, and to do so, we only have to look at the key concepts used to control society in Orwell’s textbook, 1984, and compare them to what we see in the news around us every day. (All emphases in the following quotes are added.)

Probably the most vital of these concepts is

...the labyrinthine world of Doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “Doublethink” involved the use of Doublethink.

…

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word Doublethink it is necessary to exercise Doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of Doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

Does any of that sound familiar? This goes way beyond hypocrisy to deliberate self-deception. Just look at the statements made during the last election season. This process is clearly active in how the liberal left maintains its double standards, vilifying conservatives for behavior and positions that are virtuous when held by, evidenced in, and applied to members of their own class. Thus, the Pelosi/Reid/Obama triumvirate can denounce corruption in Republicans and pledge to clean up government, all the while blithely ignoring, indeed, even propagating, much worse illegal and scandalous behavior in their own party, and believe in their own virtue in the process. It explains how Steve Guilbeault of Green Peace can get away with uttering nonsense like:

"Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter; that's what we're dealing with."

and still be considered rational.

Now, consider the following in light of the abysmal ignorance evidenced by the post-election surveys, or the “man on the street” segments of talk shows such as Sean Hannity, where simple questions like “who is the vice president?” are greeted with blank stares and vacuous guesses:

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

This willful ignorance permeates our culture and the MSM.

Consider the following in light of how Democrats such as Joe Lieberman are treated when they have the audacity to side with the Republicans on any issue whatsoever:

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.

Consider the street language of many of today’s youth, particularly in black neighborhoods, (both major voting blocks specifically courted by the Democrats) and compare the current state of illiteracy with the following characterization of Newspeak (that’s new-speak, as contrasted to old-speak), the spoken language of Doublethink:

Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all.

…

The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.

In other words, the goal of Newspeak is to reduce the “natural” state of affairs of all communication to putting the mouth in motion with the mind not only not in gear, but totally missing in action.

Consider the way American history is distorted in alleged higher education institutions today by the Left and compare with:

This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love. The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc [English Socialism]. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version IS the past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now.

…

“Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it: in Newspeak, “Doublethink.”

And lastly (for now), consider how malleable words have become for such leftists as the homosexual activists who label any opposition, however emotionless, as “hate,” and then spew a heretofore unimaginable hateful vitriol at those who oppose them, in the name of “tolerance,” and compare this to the principles of Newspeak:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

…

This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatsoever.

…

Newspeak was designed not to extend but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Rich Galen recently tabulated for us some additional examples of how the One is deciding we should be “creatively relabeling” various and sundry of his efforts to give a more “positive” impression (translation into oldspeak: lying through the teeth to mask the true goal of such endeavors).

It is not as if we have had no warning. Huxley, Orwell, and Postman have all sounded the alarm. An even earlier alarm was recently noted in the keen observer, Alexis de Tocqueville. In his essay entitled “What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear,” in Democracy in America (translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop), he writes [comments added]:

I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. . . . [the Huxley model]

Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate [Big Brother…big government]. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves [the Huxley model]. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? [A Brave New 1984!]

…

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole [the Orwellian model]; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd [the death of excellence]; it does not break wills but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd. . . .