It's pretty common to hear 'Orwellian' and '1984' nowadays. There's been discussion over the years on who was more accurate in describing the coming tyranny... the drug em' up and keep em' sedated tyranny of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or the newspeak, censorship and thought police of George Orwell's 1984, but these two scenarios are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
There is a world that is in bloom before us, only it's not a spring of tulips and daffodils. It's a beast of a world full of algorithmic tyranny, robotic revolution, genetic experimentation and many more user-unfriendly inventions and discoveries.
Orwell's 1984 is a hard book to read, in my opinion anyway, because there are so many similarities to our world today. Nothing but the Word of God can describe how man can so blithely reverse facts and rewrite history as did Orwell's Big Brother and as we see evidence of all around us today. The surveillance in Oceania from 1984 was probably at one time too unbelievable to even fathom but it would hardly raise an eyebrow upon reading it today. Winston and Julia, godless, are entirely believable as they wander about hating the tyranny they live under but having absolutely no where to go for truth.
There's one passage in 1984 where Winston is desperately trying to find out what London was like before the revolution. He spies a crotchety old man at a pub and fills him with beer attempting to coax information out of him but fails. Thinking back on this I can only add my own passage in which someone secretly, for it would have had to be secretly, comes up to Winston and covertly hands him what in Orwell's 1984 would have been banned and destroyed, a Bible, and then asks of him..."May I tell you of God's Son, Jesus Christ, My Lord and my Savior, and His offer of eternal life if you should but believe in Him?
Aah but George Orwell was an atheist as was Aldous Huxley. It may have been their atheism that enabled them to envision their dystopian worlds, for without God there can be nothing but tyranny. And that is also our problem today.
There is a world that is in bloom before us, only it's not a spring of tulips and daffodils. It's a beast of a world full of algorithmic tyranny, robotic revolution, genetic experimentation and many more user-unfriendly inventions and discoveries.
Orwell's 1984 is a hard book to read, in my opinion anyway, because there are so many similarities to our world today. Nothing but the Word of God can describe how man can so blithely reverse facts and rewrite history as did Orwell's Big Brother and as we see evidence of all around us today. The surveillance in Oceania from 1984 was probably at one time too unbelievable to even fathom but it would hardly raise an eyebrow upon reading it today. Winston and Julia, godless, are entirely believable as they wander about hating the tyranny they live under but having absolutely no where to go for truth.
There's one passage in 1984 where Winston is desperately trying to find out what London was like before the revolution. He spies a crotchety old man at a pub and fills him with beer attempting to coax information out of him but fails. Thinking back on this I can only add my own passage in which someone secretly, for it would have had to be secretly, comes up to Winston and covertly hands him what in Orwell's 1984 would have been banned and destroyed, a Bible, and then asks of him..."May I tell you of God's Son, Jesus Christ, My Lord and my Savior, and His offer of eternal life if you should but believe in Him?
Aah but George Orwell was an atheist as was Aldous Huxley. It may have been their atheism that enabled them to envision their dystopian worlds, for without God there can be nothing but tyranny. And that is also our problem today.
