The Pigs Are in Charge
19th November 2024
A useful rhetorical power move in any conversation about the future is to nod sagely and say, “Well, of course, Huxley’s vision was more accurate than Orwell’s”. Not only does this tell your companions that you have read at least one book which does not feature regularly on the GCSE English syllabus, but the “hedonist nihilism” (in Christopher Hitchen’s words) of Brave New World permits plenty of opportunities for sneering at the less sophisticated with their diet of fast food and reality television.
But books from the past do not need explicitly to aim to describe the future to tell us something about the present. History may not repeat, but it does rhyme. What was relevant in decades past may still be relevant today. And so, allow me to offer an uber-power move for future dinner parties, “Neither Orwell in 1984 nor Huxley were particularly accurate, but Animal Farm was pretty bang on.”