The following post is a few years old:
It's pretty common to hear the word 'Orwellian' and '1984' nowadays. There's been discussion over the years on who was more accurate in describing what they saw as 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, drugs, censorship, thought police and many 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. Only the Word of God can explain how the heart of man is so "desperately wicked" that it can so easily and blithely....without guilt....reverse facts and rewrite history as did Orwell's Big Brother....and we see evidence of just this all around us today. The surveillance in Oceania from 1984 was probably at one time too unbelievable to even really fathom but it would hardly raise an eyebrow as to being impossible or unbelievable upon reading it today. Winston and Julia....both 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 ale attempting to coax information out of him....but fails. Thinking back on this....and letting my imagination go a little bit...I can come up with my own passage in which someone secretly...for it would have had to be secretly....comes up to Winston and hands him what in Orwell's 1984 would have been banned and destroyed....a Bible....but he has a different set of questions...."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. Ironically it may have been their atheism that enabled them to envision the dystopian worlds they wrote about....for without God there can be nothing but tyranny. And that is also our problem today.
It's pretty common to hear the word 'Orwellian' and '1984' nowadays. There's been discussion over the years on who was more accurate in describing what they saw as 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, drugs, censorship, thought police and many 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. Only the Word of God can explain how the heart of man is so "desperately wicked" that it can so easily and blithely....without guilt....reverse facts and rewrite history as did Orwell's Big Brother....and we see evidence of just this all around us today. The surveillance in Oceania from 1984 was probably at one time too unbelievable to even really fathom but it would hardly raise an eyebrow as to being impossible or unbelievable upon reading it today. Winston and Julia....both 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 ale attempting to coax information out of him....but fails. Thinking back on this....and letting my imagination go a little bit...I can come up with my own passage in which someone secretly...for it would have had to be secretly....comes up to Winston and hands him what in Orwell's 1984 would have been banned and destroyed....a Bible....but he has a different set of questions...."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. Ironically it may have been their atheism that enabled them to envision the dystopian worlds they wrote about....for without God there can be nothing but tyranny. And that is also our problem today.
