Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…ere they focused on the part of 1984 that’s the two minutes of hate, these rituals of denunciation of people, for some people in China, it seemed like it was about their past, not about their present. And then by the ’90s, 1984 is a very bleak culture of scarcity, a place where people just aren’t having fun. Some people would read 1984 and say, “Look, this is the world we’re living in. It’s a Big Brother state.” But others said, “Well, that has some similarities to us, but he wasn’t talking about a country like ours. Look, we’ve got supermarkets. We’ve got McDonald’s. We’ve got fast trains. We’re living so much better in some ways than our grandparents did, and this isn’t like that bleak world he was imagining.” Yeah. You’ve actually spoken about and described China’s more akin to the dystopian world of Brave New World than 1984, which is really interesting to think about. I think about that a lot. I’ve recently, over the past couple of years, reread Brave New World a couple of times, and also 1984. It does seem that the 21st Century might be more defined to the degree it is dystopian, any of the nations are, by Brave New World than by 1984. There are mixed elements. I think there are moments when it can seem more one than the other, and there can be parts of the same country that seem more one than the other, I think. And if we just think about control through distraction and playing to your sense of pleasure… One thing that people forget sometimes, or don’t know, is that Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, taught Eric Blair, who became George Orwell, when he was a student at Eden. And they were rivals. And in fact, in 1949, Orwell sent his former teacher a copy in 1984 and said, “Look, I’ve written this.” Basically, it’s almost a little Oedipal. “I’ve written this book that displaces yours.” He didn’t say that. He just said, “I want you to have this.” But he had criticized Brave New World in reviews, having imagined a world of capitalism run wild like before, realizing the totalitarian threats of the middle of the 20th century. But Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in October of 1949, same month the Communist Party took control in China, not that he mentions China, and he just said, “It’s a great book and everything, but I think the dictators of the future will find less arduous ways to keep control over the population,” basically saying, “More like what was in my book than in yours.”…

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