The Personal Website of Mark W. Dawson


Containing His Articles, Observations, Thoughts, Meanderings,
and some would say Wisdom (and some would say not).

O Brave New World

Introduction

“O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.”
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206

Shakespeare's use of the phrase is intended ironically, as the speaker (Miranda) is failing to recognize the evil nature of the island's visitors because of her innocence. Indeed, the next speaker replies to Miranda's innocent observation with the statement, "They are new to thee..."

Three books of modern English literature and a ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ storyline examine this brave new world and its consequences. They are:

Brave New World

In Brave New World (1932), human society has evolved into the World State. The following synopsis is extracted and edited from the Wikipedia Articles on Brave New World and World State in Brave New World:

Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society that is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. The main concepts of this Brave New World are:

Society is tiered into castes in decreasing order; Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. The Alphas are in control and are the intelligent members of society, while the Epsilons are the beasts of burden with little intelligence. Society is promoted by the ready availability and universally endorsed consumption of the hallucinogenic drug soma, and by the promotion of recreational sex, often as a group activity. Emotional, romantic relationships are obsolete; chastity and fidelity are causes for disapproval or mockery; and marriage, natural birth, parenthood, and pregnancy are considered too vulgar to be mentioned in polite conversation. Spiritual needs are met by mock religious services in which twelve people consume soma and sing hymns. The ritual progresses through group hypnosis and climaxes in a sex orgy porgy.

As to the apropos of Brave New World t to our modern American society, the following are how I see us slouching toward this result.

Educating children to mold the child's self-image appropriate to their caste is occurring in today's public education system. The importance of self-esteem, group identity, social awareness, and peaceful interactions are now more important than obtaining basic knowledge and critical thinking skills and are all present in today's public education, as I have outlined in my Article, “Public Education”.

The Discouragement Of critical thinking is rampant in today's Colleges and Universities. My “Pet Peeves” of Micro-Aggressions, Safe Zones, Gun-Free Zones, Politically Correct Thought, and Perversion of the English Language are all present and prevalent on college campuses today. And most higher education today is based on educating students on what to think and not how to think as in my Chirp on, "02/07/20 What to Think and Not How to Think".

The Discouragement of Individual Action and Initiative results from Groupthink, group action, and doing what everybody else is doing that is all the rage in today’s society. No rocking the boat except to implement group think and group policies is much of which that occurs today. Any deviation from groupthink and group policies is not to be permitted or tolerated. When groupthink and group policy has been established, there will be no more individual action and initiative allowed.

An Abundance of Material Goods is reflected in all the "Entitlements" people expect from the government. If the government supplies everybody's basic needs, then there will be less self-reliance and more government control of your life. Nobody will be interested in government interference in their life, as they do not wish to endanger the entitlements they are receiving.

Abolition of natural reproduction, replace by artificial insemination and incubators, with genetic selection, is not currently possible. Current medical technology does not allow for insemination through birth by artificial means. However, I expect that this medical technology will become available in the 21st century. At that point, will people give up natural reproduction due to its risks to the mother and the child and opt-out of natural reproduction for safety reasons? Or perhaps opt out just because of the inconvenience, discomfort, or disruption of your life that a natural reproduction implies. And when this happens, will the government also bear the responsibility of raising the children as well? However, we are currently controlling our population growth through the indirect results of abortion and the economic disincentives of childbearing and child-raising, as well as the current social and economic forces that discourage marriage.

In Brave New World, the population is kept in line through the use of the drug soma, entertainment by feelies, and by the orgy porgy. An argument can be made that marijuana is the soma of today. With the increased availability and usage of marijuana, we are allowing the general population to zone out of everyday life and become more compliant and dependent. The entertainment by feelies is in the form of the advancement of today's Virtual Reality. At some point in the 21st-century Virtual Reality will stimulate all the senses, and you will be able to go anywhere, see anything, and feel anything from the comfort of your living room couch. What will be the social impact when this occurs? I do not know, but I do know that it will be very large. As to the orgy porgy, we see this today in the promiscuously of which young people engaged in sexual activity with each other.

The only major difference between Brave New World and our future society would be that in Brave New World, the Deltas and Epsilons are the manual laborers in society. With the rise of intelligent robotics in our society, I can foresee little need for Deltas and Epsilons in our future society, as this labor will be replaced by intelligent robots, with the lower-class Gammas managing the intelligent robots.

A Brave New World also requires an authoritative government to control society. Liberty and Freedom are constrained to the boundaries that government dictates. There is no movement between the classes, and the class you are born into is the class you shall remain in your entire life. Only the Alphas are permitted to exercise authority and be free to become what their talents allow. It is a sterile and static society where the advancement of humankind proceeds at a snail’s pace. It is definitely not a world that I would like to live in, even if I were an Alpha.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), society has evolved in the following manner, as I have extracted and edited from the Wikipedia Article on Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The Class Hierarchy Has Three Levels:

As To the Government, The Party Controls the Population with Four Ministries:

Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, one of three inter-continental superstates that divided the world after a global war, with each superstate organized in the same manner. Posters of the party leader, big brother, bearing the caption "Big Brother Is Watching You," dominate the city, while the ubiquitous telescreen (transceiving television sets) monitors the private and public lives of the populace.

As to the apropos of Nineteen Eighty-Four to our modern American society, the following is how I see us slouching toward this result.

As to the Class Hierarchy having Three Levels, this is already happening. We see our society stratifying into the upper class composed of politicians and the rich who receive special considerations and privileges, and in some cases, seem to be above the law. The middle class is currently shrinking to contain only those people who have the knowledge, skill, abilities, and desire to become the upper class. It seems less likely, due to government laws, regulations, and taxes, that you can live a ‘normal life and achieve middle-class status without working continuously and expanding great efforts to keep your middle-class status. As such, many middle-class people are slowly descending into the lower class. The lower class seems stuck in their status and seems to be only interested in more government entitlements. And if they get these entitlements, they will be content in their lower-class status if the government supplies their basic needs.

As to the Government in 1984, the party controls the population with four ministries; while we actually have 15 departments of the US executive branch (The Cabinets), but they are all working in concert with each other in regard to groupthink and group policies. The politically correct speech emanating from their spokespersons is designed to provide "Obfuscation, Smoke, and Mirrors" and "Torturous and Convoluted Reasoning" to obscure people's understanding, leaving them baffled or bewildered, and thus more tractable to the governmental policies. Political Correctness, Virtue Signaling, Cancel Culture, Wokeness, Identity Politics, Equity and Equality, and Greater Good versus the Common Good are common features of these departments.

The Ministry of Truth (Propaganda) is occurring with the actions of the Mainstream Cultural Media, Mainstream Media, Modern Big Business, Social Media, which all propagandize the unconstrained vision of society as in my Chirp on, ‘08/09/21 A Conflict of Visions or O Brave New World”. They also appear to be interacting with the government to advance this propaganda as I have Chirped on, “07/30/21 Social Media and Free Speech”. Public Education also appears to have morphed into the teaching of ‘truths’ rather than the teaching of knowledge, how to think, and the skills that can be utilized as a productive adult, as I chirped on, "03/24/21 Is it Time to End Public Education?".

The Ministry of Plenty (Rationing and Starvation) is those U.S. government departments that deal with hunger, housing, and "Entitlements". Our government seems more concerned with providing for Americans rather than promoting an economy that allows Americans to provide for themselves and their families. Indeed, our current government has a socialistic economic approach rather than a capitalistic economic approach, as I have written in my Article, “Socialism is Acceptable”.

The Ministry of Love (Torture and Brainwashing) appears to be the main thrust of our current Justice Department. With the release of a blueprint on “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” as I Chirped on, "07/08/21 It Appears that I am a Domestic Terrorist", and the investigations and prosecutions for that they deem as ‘hate speech, they seem determined to constrain Free Speech to what they determine is acceptable speech, thus brainwashing Americans into their beliefs. They also seem to be concerned more with words than deeds, which is antithetical to our American Ideals and Ideas of investigating and prosecuting crimes and not persons. To investigate and prosecute persons rather than crimes is a form of psychological and financial torture.

The Ministry of Peace is our Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. And these departments now seem to be more concerned with the ideology, readings, and social media interactions and practices of their service people and employees than defending us against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Indeed, the society of 1984 is structured around the modern-day concepts of Political Correctness, Virtue Signaling, Cancel Culture, Wokeness, Identity Politics, Equity and Equality, and Greater Good versus the Common Good, as I have written in the "Terminology" webpage.

Animal Farm

In Animal Farm (1945), a revolution has replaced the farm owner with the collective rule of the animals, as outlined from the Wikipedia Article on Animal Farm:

This book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon.

The original commandments are:

  1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
  2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
  3. No animal shall wear clothes.
  4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
  5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
  6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
  7. All animals are equal.

These commandments are also distilled into the maxim "Four legs good, two legs bad!" which is primarily used by the sheep on the farm, often to disrupt discussions and disagreements between animals on the nature of Animalism.

Later, Napoleon and his pigs secretly revise some commandments to clear themselves of accusations of law-breaking. The changed commandments are as follows, with the changes bolded:

  1. No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.
  2. No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.
  3. No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.

Eventually, these are replaced with the maxims, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", and "Four legs good, two legs better" as the pigs become more human. This is an ironic twist to the original purpose of the Seven Commandments, which were supposed to keep order within Animal Farm by uniting the animals together against the humans and preventing animals from following the humans' evil habits. Through the revision of the commandments, Orwell demonstrates how simply political dogma can be turned into malleable propaganda.

The six-word sentence ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ is one of the two widely known lines from George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm – the other being ‘all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others’. In many ways, these two quotations neatly encapsulate the central plot: what begins as a noble (or noble-sounding) ideal and plea for equality descends into self-contradictory, and deliberately deceptive language, the sort of double-talk Orwell would himself make central to his next work of fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four, through the concept of ‘Newspeak’. Over time, the power of the pigs grows. They eventually learn to walk on two legs, mirroring the humans that used to control the farm before the revolution. Their teaching of the sheep the new chant of "Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better" is another reminder of how the sheep are used to consolidate the pig power over the farm.

And such it is with the noble-sounding lofty words, self-contradictory and deliberately deceptive language of; talking points; sloganeering; platitudes; banalities; generalities; clichés; bromides; inanities; hackneyed statements, and trite expressions, that seem to be de rigueur for Progressive/Leftists activists and Democrat Party Leaders which are then parroted by their supporters, as I have Chirped on, “07/24/21 The Modern Democrat Party”.

The ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ slogan is equivalent to Progressive/Leftists and Democrat Party Leaders attitude of ‘Democrats and Progressives/Leftists Good, Republican, Conservatives, and Trump and his supporters Bad’. This allows them to "Demonize, Denigrate, Disparage (The Three D's)" their opponents with pejoratives of Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, or Bigoted, etc., instead of utilizing rational arguments when engaging in "Dialog & Debate".

As to "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", this has already occurred in society as I have Chirped on, “07/31/21 A Two-Tiered Justice and Governmental System”. It can also be seen in the ‘Rules for Thee, But Not for Me” attitude of Democrat Party Leaders exhibited in the COVID-19 Restrictions and in many cases of sexual harassment by Democrat Party politicians.

The Leftists and many Progressives in American seem to be dedicated to this revolution and these commandments. And such it is with today’s Progressive/Leftists and Democrat Party Leaders with their commandments of Political Correctness, Virtue Signaling, Cancel Culture, and Wokeness. For these terms can only be instituted in a society that is ruled rather than led, as I have written in my Article, "To Be Rulers or to Be Leaders".

The Borg

I am also a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which had as one of its foes 'The Borg’ who first appeared in the second season (1988). The Borg are a fictional alien race that appears as recurring antagonists in the Star Trek franchise. The Borg are a collection of species that have been turned into cybernetic organisms functioning as drones in a hive mind called "The Collective" or "The Hive". The Borg use a process called assimilation to force other species into the Collective by injecting microscopic machines called nanoprobes. They then do prosthetic replacements for various body parts. As such, they become part machine and part living organisms, and they are all in constant communication with each other and can hear each other's thoughts. The Borg are driven by a need for 'perfection’ and assimilate other races to further that goal. The Borg have become a symbol in popular culture for any juggernaut against which 'Resistance is Futile'.

As to the apropos of The Borg to this article, I can foresee the future increase of information technology that is embedded into our bodies and the prosthetic replacements for our body parts. We can already see this in the ubiquitousness of cell phone technology in our society and our dependence on cell phone technology for information retrieval, decision-making purposes, and our social interactions. And as "Modern Big Business" and "Social Media" are in control of this technology, we can expect that this assimilation will have a decidedly Progressive/Leftists and Democrat Party orientation.

But we will not be assimilated; we will assimilate ourselves.

Conclusion

Today, in America, we seem to be drifting toward an amalgamation of the ideas of these three books. While the specific forms and details in these books are not being implemented, the general thesis of these books is coming to fruition. During the 20th century, there has been a slow drift down a slippery slope to these ideas, which has accelerated in the 21st century. Indeed, with the inauguration of the Biden Administration, we are in a full gallop towards these ideas. And these are not the American Ideals of ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’ as exposed in our Declaration of Independence, nor the Ideas of our Constitution to implement a government to preserve our "Freedoms, Liberties, Equalities, and Equal Justice for All".