Aldous Huxley's letter to George Orwell after reading 1984

George Grant discusses what have become the two main expressions of a future dystopian western society, you can find this in Grant's Lament for a Nation (1965); these two concepts of our collective western future are found in George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell's vision in 1984 is frightening, it is the division of the world into conflicting sectors that maintain power by oppressing and controlling their citizens. It is Huxley's idea of the future, equally dystopian, that Grant thought we were moving toward; it is control of the population by psychotropic drugs, compulsive free sex, and instant gratification and constant pleasure. We already have constantly changing technology and inexpensive consumer good that keep the public satisfied, complacent, and docile. The entertainment industry is a main component in keeping people complacent and ignorant; entertainment isn't art, it is mind control; not many people are interested in contemporary "art" which promotes contemporary liberal values. While many commentators agree with Huxley's idea of a hedonistic future, and not with Orwell's future of government micro-managing everyone's thinking and behaviour, it seems most likely that our future will be a combination of the two dystopias; this is our future.

Here is Aldous Huxley's letter to George Orwell written after reading 1984.

Note: I have just been flipping through my copy of George Grant's Lament for a Nation and I can't find this reference to either Huxley or Orwell. I must have read it elsewhere but I still believe it was Grant's opinion. 30 March 2026

Wrightwood. Cal.

21 October, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sincerely,

Aldous Huxley

The illusion of progress and Vincelli`s Garden Centre in late July 2021

If I remember correctly, in Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley writes that the main problem for the world is overpopulation. So many of the world's problems can be traced back to there being too many people; people are everywhere and they're destroying the planet with garbage, pollution, climate change, building houses on farm land, forest forests, destroying rivers, and causing the extinction of thousands of species of wild life. We are destroying the world with our own species. People are everywhere and it's not a pretty sight. 

I suppose there will be a resolution of this problem of overpopulation as more women are educated, there is a relationship between women's education and the number of children they have; women with careers generally have fewer children. As people become more affluent they have fewer children. This seems the only solution to overpopulation. As well, although the world has almost eight billion people we haven't had an increase in the number of gifted people, we don't have dozens of Newtons or Einsteins, nor do we have a few hundred Leonardos or Michaelangelos, or fifty Shakespeares cranking out works of genius. We are destroying ourselves as we proliferate; what will be left of the natural world by 2100? Will it be like J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World? That seems one possible scenario...

There have been some extreme visions of a post-apocalyptic world; after the apocalypse the population is reduced, mankind is almost extinct. Yesterday, when I walked by Vincelli's Garden Centre, I was reminded of an old television show about what happens to civilization without people; for instance, they might show New York City and then, through computerized special effects, they show New York City in ten years, twenty years, and further off into a future without people. The asphalt streets are cracked and overgrown with weeds, windows are broken, buildings are beginning to collapse, the city is abandoned and overgrown with vegetation. It doesn't take long for coyotes and wolves to be walking along Fifth Avenue and the Empire State Building to collapse. Look at Chernobyl where, in 1986, there was a nuclear disaster, today wild life has returned, the place is overgrown with lush vegetation, and animal life has returned despite high levels of radiation. Tourists are visiting Chernobyl to see how a city that was once full of people going to work, spending time with their families, and enjoying life, has become a ghost city. It took just thirty-five years for nature to reclaim the abandoned city of Chernobyl but it won't be safe for permanent human habitation for many years, possibly for centuries. 

More of anything does not necessarily increase the value of that thing, it might even diminish its value. It has been said before that we are not as moved by the suffering of a million people as we are by the suffering of one person, for instance a child's dead body on a beach. More of a thing seems to diminish its value, and one recalls the photographs of Spenser Tunick in which he invites hundreds of people to pose naked, standing or lying down on a city street. I always found these photographs disturbing, the pink naked bodies remind me of the dead naked bodies of Nazi victims, bodies thrown into mass graves before being covered with dirt. It is all highly disturbing. I don't like Tunick's photographs but I can still recognize their message; his photographs remind us that too many human beings in one place has not made the human race more attractive, it has made it something less attractive, more vulnerable, more expendable. I would add that overpopulation is dangerous to the long-term survival of humanity.  

These photographs of Vincelli's Garden Centre taken in late July 2021,

Vincelli's Garden Centre a month after closing for good.

When I used to visit Vincelli's Garden Centre I never thought it would end up like this . . .