Posted by milton rosenberg on August 19, 2001 at 15:17:56:
While Orwell was a more admirable figure and a more forceful writer (in his essays if not in his novels) it does appear that Huxley had a better sense of how technology threatened to reduce us to "happy robots". That is to say, he saw us being seduced into mindlessness through "pleasure" rather than through intimidation. Of course, both autors saw the growing power of mass communication and how "propaganda" would reshape, for the worst, the very nature of hunman beings--absenting them from any capacity for critical thought and any serious aspiration toward finding meaning beyond their compelling biological needs.