Jeffrey Wasserstrom: prediction

Transcript context

…Yes, he did. Right. That’s in And he mentions China there. He says that in Mao’s China, they’re combining the two things of this. And I’m really fascinated by that, because they published in China, on the Chinese mainland. It was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong too. It’s called the Dystopian Trilogy, and it’s a box set where you have Zamyatin’s We, who then inspired both Orwell and Huxley to some extent. That’s one book. And then there’s Animal Farm and 1984 is the second book. And then the third volume is Huxley’s Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. And it was published in complex characters. You can buy it in Hong Kong. But I compared it to the book you can buy on the mainland, and it’s all the same except the parts in Brave New World Revisited that refer to China are scalpeled out. And this, I think, shows the subtlety of the censorship system. You can buy these books and you can read about them, but the parts that really show you how to connect the dots, that gets taken out. I think with China I was feeling it was definitely moving more toward Brave New World, except Tibet and Xinjiang being more the crude boot-on-the-face, 1984 style of control. But then during the Covid lockdowns, when people were being so intensely monitored and controlled, even places like Shanghai that had seemed much more the Brave New World style had their Orwellian moment. So now, I think there are more 1984, more Brave New World parts of the country, and there are also more Brave New World, more 1984 moments. I see why it could give a sense, after you’ve thoroughly internalized the fear, that you have complete freedom of speech, just don’t mention the government. So you can talk about totalitarianism. You can talk about the darkest aspects of human nature. You can even talk about the government in a metaphorical, poetic way that’s not directly linkable, but the moment you mention the government, it’s like a dumb keyword search.…

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