Episode 110: Brave New World vs. 1984 (round table discussion)
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Blue: Hello out there. This week, on the Theory of Anything podcast, we once again try to get together some of the smartest people we know for a discussion that hopefully gets into foundational issues, this time in the form of the classic battle between the dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World. But it was really much less of a debate than a discussion, in line with Popper’s defining principle of critical rationalism. I may be wrong and you may be right. And by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth. I definitely got a lot out of this and I hope someone enjoys this out there. Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. How are you doing guys? Hey, how’s it going?
[00:00:54] Red: Great. Happy to be here. Doing well.
[00:00:56] Blue: We got a full house today for our another round table discussion. This time, Orwell’s 1984 versus Huxley’s Brave New World battle of the dystopian novels. I’m excited for this. Obviously, this is a debate that has occurred many, many times, I think for a good reason. The deeper I’ve got into this debate, the more it feels foundational to me. What I tried to do with our last round table discussion, successfully or not, was with that Jonathan Hyte one about the rider and the elephant metaphor for what a human is, is to try to get more into something like first principles to go beyond more superficial, oh, Trump versus wokeness or should phones be allowed in schools? That kind of thing, I wanted to really get into what a human is. Maybe we can try to do something similar here. We’ll see. One of the things that appealed to me about this debate is that it goes beyond a more normal left versus right divide. It seems like conservatives, leftists, liberals, libertarians, whatever, they have their own reasons for preferring the one novel or the other, the dystopian visions in it. So what I’m going to do here is try to introduce both novels, briefly contrast them, and then by way of introducing my guests, I will ask you all to weigh in on first which novel you find more artistically successful, and then also which novel you find more compelling as a dystopian vision. So I recently, I’ve obviously reread them both recently. I have read them both on my own and also allowed to my sons. I would, I mean, first and foremost, beyond anything else, any politics or anything, these are masterful works of art.
[00:03:33] Blue: And I just, as I read them, I just got sucked into the artistic vision and probably preferred whichever one I was reading at the given time. They’re both just, they’re just that good. Sometimes things are popular for a reason. So just a review, Brave New World, written 1932, so we’re talking about before World War II. In the dystopia of Brave New World, humans are controlled with genetic engineering, conditioning, trivialities, and distractions. It is a world run by rationalists based on something like what we might call today, scientism. It’s a much funnier novel, I think, more lighthearted characters, maybe disjointed, could be a criticism of some of the characters. I kept imagining, and maybe this isn’t, I’m not a sex in the city hater or anything, I kept imagining these characters just existing in a kind of sex in the city episode that doesn’t end, so it’s funny. A couple of biographical details about Huxley that I thought was pretty interesting. He is the grandson of Thomas Huxley, who most people know as Darwin’s bulldog. His brother, Julian Huxley, was a major proponent of eugenics, which is something that Aldous seems to have mixed feelings about, but he took it pretty seriously. He seems to have some pretty out there ideas about human conditioning and behaviorism and psychoanalysis and things that might, at least in my mind, might not have aged that well, but we can kind of talk about that a little bit more. 1984, on the other hand, is just as brutal as a novel gets, seems to me. The dystopia is more about torture and brutality. Humans are controlled through fear and pain. Free speech does not, or expression, does not exist.
[00:06:03] Blue: Technology is used for control rather than pleasure, or while wrote 1984 while he was dying, he was presumably in a lot of pain while he was writing it. I think personally that comes through in the novel. He died right after it was published and never saw the success of it, as far as I know. The characters to me, Julia and Winston, at least, feel much more three -dimensional, much more real, for better or for worse. It’s just a different kind of a novel. It seems obvious to me, and maybe people can debate this, that Orwell was, may have been a socialist or a democratic socialist, so not a Marxist, but he was writing about socialism and Stalinism. He was taking both in 1984 and Animal Farm. If anyone read the critique of 1984, a famous critique by Isaac Asimov, who was a little bit more of a leftist, but he pretty much makes the case that I think is factual that this is a socialist or fascist state he’s talking about. I see him back to it being more of an emotional statement. I see a man really struggling with how to make sense of this collectivism that tore apart World War II and led to millions and millions of deaths and would continue to do so for many decades more. I think of it as part of a trio of the most important books on philosophy and politics ever written, which were all written right during and after World War II. I’m thinking of Carle Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies, along with Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
[00:08:12] Blue: But unlike those other books, Orwell I don’t think was providing answers to he was more wrestling, I guess, wrestling with issues and emotions about what was happening. Winston does not have any ideology other than the audacity to believe that truth is real, 2 plus 2 equals 4, and the ruling party is not infallible. He’s a regular person who thinks truth is real. That was why it spoke to me, and I guess if I was going to answer my own question that I’m about to pose to you, I might go with 1984 for at least for the artistic value and maybe maybe more mixed, maybe more mixed on the dystopian vision. Okay, so first up in the house, we’ve got, wow, what an honor this is. Who am I going to put on the spot first? I know Vaden won’t mind going first. He likes it. Vaden Maserani, I think I called you like Maserati or something, the first podcast you’re on, but I get Darth
[00:09:42] Green: Vader macaroni.
[00:09:44] Blue: You’ve got a cool name, by the way. I wish I had a name like yours. Wow. And geez, just just winning at life on every level. Wow. A musician, the increments podcast, your stuff, critiquing, hate, Jonathan, or Jonathan, Jonathan, hate, Jonathan Haidt, his was just, it was the best. I’ve looked for a lot of critiques on his work about phones and stuff, and yours was all around, I think, where I would send people if they were were looking for a deeper dive into that. And of course, I’ve loved your dive into Karl Popper’s conjectures and refutations. And I am so excited for you to get into open society on the increments podcast. And I’ve really, really gotten a lot out of that. And I was happy to hear that you have some strong feelings about this one. So Vaden, put it out there.
[00:10:54] Green: Yeah, thank you. I’m so honored to be here. Always enjoy talking to you guys. Yeah. And just, yeah, thanks for the kind words with regards to the height episodes. Yeah, I mean, I am very much in the Orwell camp. I think 1984 is a superb piece of art. With regards to which do I like more on the artistic merit, I think I should just fess up to the audience. So I was able to reread 1984. I wasn’t able to reread Brave New World. So I read Brave New World maybe 10, 15 years ago. And so 1984 is more fresh in my mind. And so please account for that one when I’m opining. But I did read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited, which he wrote. Peter, you had skimmed it too. So was it I think
[00:11:52] Blue: 1955 or something? Oh, okay. 1955. Okay. Excellent.
[00:11:56] Green: Yeah. And there’s just a lot of misanthropy in that book. And that’s made it difficult for me to analyze Brave New World in a bit more of an objective way. But he’s clearly quite worried about overpopulation. And he proposes some pseudo eugenics, eugenics light kinds of solutions to this. But the thing that was maybe most telling is that he wasn’t able to point specifically at what he meant when he was critiquing modern society. Soma just seems to take on be a metaphor for anything that makes life more convenient. And that was kind of what was a through line throughout all of his essays in his follow up work. And so painkillers, opioids, you could go there and you could absolutely say that the opioid epidemic is, is, let’s say, evidence that we’re living more in a Brave New World society. But he was also just against modern medicine and was against mechanized machines that made life easier. And so I don’t entirely know what he’s trying to pinpoint with his use of the device of Soma in society. And so maybe that’s something we can get into. Whereas Brave New World, sorry, whereas 1984, it is clear what the target of his critique is. And he’s critiquing totalitarianism and the, the, the ideology that forces you to see the world of the black and white and simplified language. And I would, I know we were asked not to go too much in the Trump Trump stuff in this conversation. So I’ll try to avoid it. But, but you definitely see some similarities between, say, the way that Trump and his acolytes speak and the, the, the new speak from, from Orwell.
[00:13:44] Green: So for all those reasons, I think that 1984 is both superior artistically and more relevant to today, today’s society.
[00:13:54] Blue: Thank you, Vaden. Yes, I would, the, the Brave New World revisited he’s, he had some weird ideas and he puts them all out there in that. Although I’d be curious what you, have you read Doors of Perception too? No, I have not. That is, that’s a pretty interesting, I guess, meditation on, on drug use and different kinds of drugs. And, you know, famously he was, took LSD as he was dying on the, on the day that Kennedy was shot, I believe. And so it sounds like kind of a bad trip to be honest, but no, it’s, it’s interesting. Thank you, Vaden. Next up, we have Dave Wainwright, who is, to give you a brief background, is a public school teacher for better or for worse. Like myself, I saw his list of books recommended on, you know, he puts up the, the books he’s been reading, to kind of inspire the kids and stuff. And I saw that in the hallway. We had Dostoyevsky, we had Chesterton, we had some, I just, I, I saw that list. I was like, okay, I got it, I got to talk to this guy a little more. He’s, he, I just recognized someone who was a fellow traveler in some things and maybe not in others, but a super interesting guy. My son had him as a language arts teacher, extremely well, well -liked teacher at the school for good reasons, very friendly, very cool. And I’m excited to hear what he thinks. Dave, how you doing?
[00:15:49] Red: Thanks, Peter. I’m humbled by your words. I’m excited to be here. This is my first podcast appearance. So thanks for the opportunity. I, I don’t know what else to, to say about myself per se. You know, my dad was a, is a voracious reader. So I was sort of raised in a literary philosophical household. Yeah, I appreciate the camaraderie of a fellow deep thinker, searcher for truth, wisdom, especially in the halls of a public high school, which is meant to be an institution of learning, but I think reflects certain aspects maybe of Huxley’s dystopia. I agree that 1984 is the better book. It is a more complete narrative. It just draws me in a little bit more. I care more about the main character. There is a main character, whereas Brave New World sort of meanders between three -ish main characters. The similarities and differences are really interesting. I think that Orwell’s dystopia is also a little bit more compelling. I think because he was responding to what he was seeing in history, right? And wanted that to be, his focus was a warning. Huxley, if I understand, was also sort of responding to the utopian novels of the 20s and 30s like H. G. Wells. And I read somewhere that Brave New World started sort of as a spoof of those and then just evolved into what it became.
[00:18:05] Blue: That’s an interesting perspective. I didn’t know that.
[00:18:08] Red: Yeah, I mean, I can’t cite a proper source for that. So maybe double check. It makes sense.
[00:18:14] Blue: It makes sense. Yeah.
[00:18:17] Red: I do share, I don’t know, I’m not a Huxley expert, but I do share to some extent his doubt of human nature. I think both authors imply a strong doubt of human nature. They’re both tragedies in a way. I actually wrote papers in high school on each of these books and found them earlier this week and was tickled by my writing then. I’m glad nobody else will ever have to read those, but it was fun to revisit. And I guess by way of disclaimer, disclosure, I have not finished rereading 1984. I’m maybe three quarters of the way through. But I did. Originally, I thought we were just discussing Brave New World and then I realized, oh, we’re comparing the two. So yeah, I’ve been panic rereading that this week. But yeah, enjoying it just a touch more. But I’m excited to, I don’t know if debate is the right word from how I’ll approach this, but putting the novels in conversation and discussion, I think neither of them is necessarily more right than the other. But I find well, yeah, it’s tricky. Which dystopia is more compelling? That one’s tricky. Because I think they both have a lot to critique our modern world.
[00:20:01] Blue: I agree. Thank you, Dave. Thank you so much. Next up, we’ve got Sam Kipers. Wow. Yeah. A physicist and just interesting person, a nice person too. And so I admire so much of what you’ve put out there. And I was just saying before the podcast, there’s a lot of, I’ve got a little bit of a backlog on set. I usually like to follow everything you do, but I think there’s probably about three or four podcasts I need to check out. I’ve got, or in my queue, but as soon as this conversation is over, I’m just going to plunge right in and try to get caught up in your work. And I’ve loved also many of your discussions with the Oxford Hopper Society. I’m sad that that’s kind of not happening. It seems like anymore, but that was one of my favorite things out there. You had so many cool guests and guys that I had never even heard of that I now follow. So thank you for all your work, Sam. And I’m excited to hear what you say.
[00:21:20] Orange: Yeah, that’s nice to hear. Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate it. And yeah, I’m actually surprised. I thought that we would perhaps have differing opinions about the books, but I agree with David Vaden that 1984 is the more compelling. I find it both artistically more interesting. And I find the totalitarian aspect of it more compelling. Basically, for the same reason Vaden gave, which is that in Brave New World, it’s somewhat unclear what exactly the main problem with the world is supposed to be according to the author. I mean, it’s partly it seems to be a kind of complacency. It seems to be a book written against convenience. And I endorse convenience. I think convenience is good. But so maybe I feel like I should defend Brave New World a little bit more just because of that. So one of the things I do like about the book, I liked a lot, is this idea that person can claim the right to be unhappy. That seems to be a big theme for, I’ve ever called correctly, John, who’s like the savage who grew up outside the world state. And he has this appreciation for literature and for deep emotion and religion, which the other citizens of the world state do not have because they grew up in their close totalitarian society where such ideas are not presented to them and are worse suppressed. And so again, I find convenience a good thing. But there is the idea that a person can claim the right to be unhappy, can claim the right to make his own mistakes, can claim, for example, the right to choose one’s own route to hell if they so want to. There is a strong case to be made for that.
[00:23:31] Orange: And I think the book does succeed in that regard. So I, as I said, I somewhat awkward position because I do really, really like 1984. There’s so many quotable lines, there’s so much, it’s very gritty, it’s so depressing. That’s maybe the only thing I don’t like about 1984, or it should be said is it’s too, it’s too sad. I like, I like it when a book presents a problem and then solves it. And with 1984, I, I’m able to bear it. But I, I do sometimes dream that maybe spoilers, I guess for listeners, if anyone hasn’t read it yet, but that that Winston makes it out alive. And that he manages to somehow resist the government, somehow manages to resist and implement his plans to change after all. You’re here. Yeah.
[00:24:30] Blue: Yeah, it’s a dark book. Wow. I mean, it starts off as a very moving, somewhat moving love story, really, but then you get into the torture and the room nine, and it’s just, it’s, it’s relentless, but it’s so powerful.
[00:24:46] Orange: It does that all to the extent, like it wants, there’s a couple of ideas which are really, really interesting in 1984. One of them is the controlling human thought through altering language. And there’s lots of psychological aspects of the book that are very interesting. I found very interesting when I first read them, like that kind of, there was a certain logic that was explored about the totalitarian society they inhabited, because for example, you could not have it that anyone would have energy for anything but the party. That it’s like, when you read about history, you don’t get it spelled out like that. You read about the horrors of Soviet society, but you don’t get that to also then hear the interpretation, the psychological interpretation. At least that was the case for my education, that there was no psychological component to why, how do people think about this? And that, I found that very compelling about 1984 that they explored, what is the mindset of someone who wants to implement this regime? How do people, what’s, what makes it tick? Another great one, I don’t know if I can quote the line, but it’s something like, you have to make sure that someone is suffering while they’re doing your bidding, because if they’re not suffering, then how can you know it’s really your bidding that they’re doing? Stuff like that. It has a twisted logic to it, and you kind of go like that. That weirdly, there is, it makes sense in a really disturbing way. And 1984 had lots of those kind of genius insights that stuck with me throughout the years. But anyway, so my, so I basically agree with Dave Invaden, but just to perhaps put a contrarian opinion out there.
[00:26:39] Orange: And also, because I think it is really true, the brave in your world, this aspect of you, you know, part of freedom is being able to choose suffering, it’s being able to choose, like, you can make a choice, it might be an error, it might really be a bad idea. Perhaps comfort really is better than believing in, you know, this idea of freedom, or not the idea of freedom, but perhaps in certain cases, comfort would be better than making mistakes. But we should nonetheless allow people to make mistakes, just because that’s part of fallibilism, that you can’t, you can’t know in advance, which are the mistakes and which are not. And I feel that that was the main thing that I liked about Brave New World.
[00:27:32] Blue: Thank you, Sam. There’s too much disagreement, though. We need some more disagreement. I think Bruce is going to say Brave New World, though. I am. You’re going to be our Brave New World defender. I am. Or against one, but I think you can take it. Bruce, what do you think?
[00:27:50] Purple: You know, both books, both books are very good. And when I was reading 1984, after having heard about it so much for so long, I did find it rather chilling. But it didn’t really cause me, like, neither book is particularly realistic, like neither vision could in my mind ever really happen. So there’s a certain distance that I feel from both of them. But Brave New World hit me in a way that 1984 just didn’t, and I don’t think ever could have. Let me give you the actual quote. This is exactly what Sam was just talking about. But I don’t want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin. In fact, said Mond, you’re claiming the right to be unhappy. All right then, said the savage defiantly. I’m claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent, the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy, the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow, the right to catch typhoid, the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind. There was a long silence. I claimed them all, said the savage at last. That passage hit me like a ton of bricks, and I’m not even sure I can fully explain why. Now, keep in mind, I’m probably the only conservative in the group. In fact, I think I’m the only conservative crit -rad I actually know for those listening to the show, critical rationalist. I don’t know if Dave knows what that meant.
[00:29:35] Purple: And so clearly there’s a conservativeness in the way he’s saying this, so maybe that hit me a little stronger. But I think it’s more a matter of that he’s posing a problem that I don’t know that I have a great answer to, or I can explain. I really like it when I can give an explanation where I can say, this is why this is the way things are. And he’s posing a problem that I’ve got no real strong explanation against to try to explain away what the problem he’s raising. Sam also hinted at this. This is a static society. This is a society that isn’t ever going to advance because they don’t allow themselves to make mistakes and have things go wrong. But they’re happy. And maybe that’s unrealistic. I don’t know. We could probably talk about if, but that is what he’s raising. What if it’s this moral dilemma of what if you live in a society that has actually made everybody happy, but did it at the expense of all meaning? And what would that mean? Would that be good? Would that be bad? And clearly, at least at the time that Huxley wrote it, I agree that in his later books, it’s really unclear. Like, he almost agrees with Brave New World dystopia later in his life. But at the time he writes it, he’s clearly against against it as it is. And he’s really kind of making the point that meaning requires risk. And again, from an epistemological standpoint, this makes absolutely perfect sense to me that a good explanation is a risky explanation. It’s a bold explanation. It’s one that absolutely risks being wrong so that it can be error corrected.
[00:31:17] Purple: And a society that is set up like this is really hard to explain exactly what’s wrong with it. Because they are, I mean, I know it’s fiction. So one of the main things you could argue is that it’s unrealistic. But assuming for the moment it actually could exist, what would be wrong with a society where everyone is happy, but the meaning’s all gone? Don’t we care about human happiness? Isn’t that the utility that we were trying to maximize in the first place? And he’s really kind of showing that there’s just something wrong with that whole way of thinking, but it’s really unclear what it is. And I don’t know if I ever fully, I mean, the book changed me in that I had to admit he’s raising something that I don’t think I can explain. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, trying to figure out some way forward. I’ve given some hints as to what I’ve come up with, epistemologically speaking. But I feel like it’s just a haunting scene that there’s just nothing in 1984 that’s even close by comparison. So that would be why I am in the Brave New World camp.
[00:32:21] Blue: I think Moustapha Mond calls Soma Christianity without the tears.
[00:32:28] Purple: Yes, he does.
[00:32:29] Blue: Well, yeah. That’s I thought of you, Bruce, in light of some of our religion conversations there. Yeah, no, that’s okay. I’m glad we’ve got we’ve got one person at least defending Brave New World here. Yes, please.
[00:32:46] Red: Yeah, maybe two, you know, if each of us is a half for
[00:32:51] Blue: fair enough.
[00:32:52] Unknown: Good.
[00:32:52] Red: Yeah, because I, you know, I wouldn’t again, I wouldn’t put these novels in competition per se. I agree with what Bruce said that I don’t find either dystopia really possible. But I find elements of each of them chilling and compelling. And I think the similarities are compelling in that they both prohibit solitude and silence. And, you know, in a certain way, the experience of deep emotion, I would question, do you think the people living in the Brave New World are really happy?
[00:33:39] Purple: Well, they believe they’re happy. I mean, that’s of course part of the fiction, right? They believe that they’re happy. They have all the signs of what we would consider happiness.
[00:33:52] Red: My, I guess my pushback is that whenever they experience some discomfort, they turn to Soma, which I guess, and I, I suppose maybe this is where I’m coming from, is that, you know, I wouldn’t say that happiness is the ultimate goal of life, at least in the way that the modern world tends to define happiness or the way that it is portrayed in Brave New World. I similarly loved that passage where, where John the Savage says, but I like the inconvenience. And, you know, I mean, any novel that climaxes with a philosophical debate between, you know, a protagonist and an antagonist is, is wonderful in my eyes. But, you know, I think I would say they are happy, but they have no joy. And joy
[00:34:57] Purple: is
[00:34:58] Red: something that you can experience even in the midst of suffering, of great suffering, and maybe in some ways only through suffering. And I think that’s maybe what the Savage is yearning for. But I agree with you also that Huxley doesn’t really aim at anything in place, like good in place of the, you know, he just highlights like, here’s an absence of something, but he doesn’t imply what that something might be necessarily.
[00:35:33] Orange: Not
[00:35:34] Red: completely, I guess.
[00:35:37] Orange: I guess my counter -argument would be that he, there’s no discussion about what the good life is supposed to be. People accept what the good life is, because it’s been handed down to them from on top. And a certain component of happiness is knowing what the options are, like you have thought about what else was available, and you chose to do the thing you thought was most rewarding, most fulfilling, and they don’t have any of that. They don’t have any, it’s not an examined life that they’re living, as Socrates would put it.
[00:36:20] Green: I’m curious, Bruce, so Huxley sets up this, I feel like a false trade -off between happiness on one hand and then meaning on the other. And so in Huxley’s world, you can’t have Soma and Shakespeare, right? One of them has to go. And so Soma is there, and then thus we have to get rid of our Milton and our Shakespeare and our Dante. But why must this be the case? I guess I’m getting stuck there. Why can’t we have both? And in Bruce, in your defense of this book, I think you kind of took that for granted, or maybe just like to hear your thoughts on why we must necessarily trade -off between these two things.
[00:37:05] Purple: I agree with Dave, what Dave just said, that what we’re really talking about is a trade -off between happiness and joy, or maybe we could call it meaning. I think happiness is not something that humans care as much about as we think they do. I think that humans will gladly give up happiness and even cause themselves suffering if they find meaning in it. Think of this maybe in a positive way, though. Like, you’ve decided you’re going to try to change the world for the better, and you go out there and you protest, and you’re hated by your neighbors maybe. But you don’t care because you feel it’s right, and you actually do help change the world in some way. Human beings, not all human beings maybe, but I think it’s pretty common for us to have a really strong preference for meaning. And I think meaning often does come maybe because of suffering. So you’re saying you use Soma as the example. Soma is, of course, a drug that has no side effects. He had to do that because, of course, he’s trying to create a kind of perfect happiness without any meaning. But the fact is, is that it may be a better example here would be the idea that there’s no families in this world. So why do they have no families? Why is mother a dirty word? I mean, that’s obviously humorous. But why is that? Because when you have relationships, relationships cause pain, but they also cause joy and meaning. And can you have a relationship with joy and meaning without pain? I’ve never heard of anyone pulling it off. Like, I don’t even know if it’s possible, right?
[00:38:51] Purple: And he’s proposing the idea that it’s not possible, that the moment you take that risk, the meaning comes from the risk. The savage, he falls in love with a woman. And what he really wants is a meaningful relationship with her. And she’s incapable of it, right? She’s been raised in a society where she’ll gladly have sex with him and she, you know, likes him as a friend. But the concept of relationship is gone because that’s a risky situation that she can’t even conceive. And again, I don’t mean to imply this is realistic, because it’s not, right? I mean, I suspect that even in a society that tried to set up up this way, you would have people who would try to form relationships anyhow. And take that risk. But he’s posing this idea that meaning goes with suffering in some way. And I do think that’s correct. Does that mean that you have to be unhappy? Not necessarily. It’s kind of more the risk that you’re taking.
[00:39:55] Orange: I would be careful about endorsing suffering as such. Suffering is not, it’s the potential that you might suffer, something like that. You can make a mistake, you can make an error. And no one else will know beforehand, in most situations, whether that you are in fact making a mistake. And it might be that you suffer unnecessarily, because you made a bad choice, but no one could have known beforehand. That’s the way I phrase it. Because I think Huxley kind of has to make a case for suffering as if it is in and of itself something good. Which again, that I think kind of weakens the argument again, because I don’t think suffering is good. I would like to minimize suffering. But yeah, there is tension with preventing all possible risk. That’s the stronger case.
[00:40:49] Purple: He does say the right to be unhappy, not happiness itself.
[00:40:54] Orange: Yeah, but it’s like in the book, you notice that the thing which is supposed to be bad, at least this is how I, maybe this is my interpretation of it, but it’s the convenience that is, you know, it’s the lack of suffering, which is itself something which the savage seems to oppose as well. But I agree that you should be perfectly allowed to take the risk.
[00:41:17] Red: He does end up whipping himself too, right? Like he secludes himself and then whips himself every day.
[00:41:28] Green: Yeah, the I am, I think similar to Sam, very squeamish tying meaning with suffering. Because that relationship kind of goes both ways. When someone is suffering, it is nice to make that tie because you can say, despite the suffering, there’s the suffering’s for a higher purpose, there’s meaning here and that itself can be a bit of a sooth. That very notion can be a kind of mental soma, I would say.
[00:42:00] Unknown: However,
[00:42:01] Green: when it goes in the other direction, and so I don’t know if anyone has read Christopher Hitchens critique of Mother Teresa, but she actively enabled suffering in her awards for people in Calcutta because as they were suffering, she was just thinking this was bringing them closer to God. And so I want to read one quote, not from Brave New World, but from Brave New World Revisited. And so we can maybe see how Huxley thinks about malaria, for example. So for example, we go to a tropical island and with the aid of DDT, we stamp out malaria and in two or three years save hundreds of thousands of lives. This is obviously good. But the hundreds of thousands of human beings thus saved and the millions whom they beget and bring to birth cannot be adequately clothed, housed, or educated, or even fed out of the islands available resources. Quick death by malaria has been abolished, but life has been made miserable by undernourishment and overcrowding is now the rule. And slow death by outright starvation threatens ever greater numbers. So Huxley is actively advocating that we should not do anything to treat malaria. And I imagine one way that he can arrive at this position is while he sees the suffering of people in Africa and other places, he tells himself that this suffering is giving them meaning. And as they are suffering, they’re getting loads of meaning and so we don’t need to do anything. And so I find that to be a very troubling consequence and conclusion of the entire suffering in this way.
[00:43:38] Red: I agree. I think maybe what I meant at least more and I think Bruce, we’re highlighting this in the word risk, but it’s that state of vulnerability where I might suffer. I’m in this position where I can suffer. I think I wonder if meaning entails that vulnerability, not always necessarily suffering, but I think like when you love someone, there is suffering that is guaranteed to come with that because loving someone puts yourself in a position to be hurt. It also like every relationship ends in some way, whether it’s the loss of the relationship or the loss of the loved one. And I guess it’s what’s the end result of the suffering or what’s the, is there a possible meaning found in the suffering? I would say maybe not all suffering is is equal, but obviously I wouldn’t say that suffering should be allowed just because, well, that’s how people find meaning. That strikes me as obviously cruel.
[00:45:09] Green: And a justification for inaction.
[00:45:11] Red: Right, right. But maybe more important than always alleviating suffering sometimes is helping people find meaning in it, if it’s not able to be alleviated, perhaps.
[00:45:27] Green: Yeah, well, if I may just comment on that. I mean, part of the reason a man’s search for meaning is so insightful is because of the amount of suffering that Victor Frankel had to undergo to gain those insights. But fortunately, he then wrote those insights down and we can then read them. I mean, we don’t need to personally go to Auschwitz to be able to learn some of the things that he was able to bring back from that terrible, terrible experience, because we can experience it vicariously. And part of the reason why it was so tragic in Brave New World when Shakespeare and Milton and all these great figures from the past were just kind of forgotten about is that they have gone through so much suffering so that we don’t have to, you know. And we can learn from those horrors of the past that we can see what the extreme parts of human nature can teach us. But fortunately, we don’t need to continue to undergo these experiences over and over and over again to get the gems from them, I guess. And so I would just challenge the fact that we maybe need to continuously be suffering to continuously get access to the meaning from these experiences. I think maybe once is enough. And if it’s written down and we can learn from that, then I would take maybe a little bit less meaning for a lot less suffering than the other way around.
[00:46:57] Blue: That’s a great way to put it. Okay. Well, I’m attempted to just let you guys talk, but I do have questions that maybe to keep the conversation going that a lot of my questions have already been at least hinted at. But I thought we could go through these. First question about pop culture. Huxley seems to think that popular culture leads to something like the degradation of humans. All modern advocates of Brave New World, and I’m thinking of Ben Shapiro as a conservative, I’m thinking of Neil Postman, I think his name is, who wrote that book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which where I think Brave New World is referenced, seem to think that to link dystopia with advertising and modern music and pop culture and all these, I mean, of course, now we’ve gone way beyond to these or TikTok and all this stuff. I mean, I think that it’s easy to do that. One point about the novel that I’ve never heard anyone else address that I find ironic is that he talks about feelies, which are the movies where you go and you feel things too. And it’s a parody of hockey’s, which had just come out in 1929. So three years before the novel was published, you know, we had we had movies that suddenly had sound. He talks about sexophones, obviously a parody of the saxophone. There’s there’s kind of a name sort of song lyrics that are sort of are are parodied throughout the book. But what is he really parodying? He’s parodying the golden age of Hollywood, which is just getting started, westerns, film noir, musicals, like the most some of the most beautiful art Disney that America produced. What music is he denigrating here?
[00:49:27] Blue: The American songbook standards, jazz, also America’s most significant contribution to the world. Like, it’s just kind of ironic that he’s thinking of this stuff is is he’s but then it also makes me wonder, you know, maybe we should be maybe the right attitude towards popular culture and popular entertainment is to just try to appreciate it, try to like it, try to enjoy it. Is it is there is it really dangerous in the way that that people seem to oftentimes, I would say, oftentimes think that, you know, is it is it is it is is it best to just just ignore pop culture? Is it really going to lead? Is there a link between pop culture and dystopia? I guess is the the gist of my question.
[00:50:24] Orange: I have a strong opinion on that, which is no pop culture is good. Generally, good. No pop culture is good. No, but pop culture is good in general. Oh, good. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Cool. I agree. I guess the my argument for it would be that it’s so ideas should compete for attention. That there should be several ideas out there. That should be as I said before, several ideas of what the good life is several ideas of how to have spent on time. And pop culture is very competitive in that it has to compete with lots of other stuff, lots of other bits of pop culture even in order for your attention to receive attention from people like you and me. And that is one of the things which makes it good. It’s it’s you can criticize it. And there were reasons why I don’t know you liked the the most recent Batman movie or something, presumably, because you had other choices, you could have spent your time differently, you could have spent your money differently. And one of the things in Brave New World that is interesting is that there isn’t as I said, there isn’t really, as far as I recall, a discussion about what the good life is until John the Savage comes along and kind of starts that discussion, which then gets snuffed out at the end of the book, because that’s not something that their society can allow for. So I think even within the book, although I think Huxley probably would not agree with this, or maybe not wouldn’t have intended this, the thing which is problematic is that there is no there’s no competing ideas about how to spend one’s time.
[00:52:09] Orange: Everything is pre arranged, or almost everything is pre arranged. And there’s not really any personal choice, like you can’t you can’t have a discussion with anyone about, well, how do you spend your time? What do you want to watch? What are the things that you find interesting?
[00:52:33] Purple: Program like the different classes, so like one of them likes baseball or something like that. It seems like that’s how they do it. They literally have worked out what the optimal interests would be by class, which is not particularly realistic, but you have to kind of buy the world for what he’s putting
[00:52:50] Green: out. I mean, YouTube recommendations are kind of doing that.
[00:52:57] Purple: Yeah.
[00:52:58] Green: Well, like, figuring out what the optimal thing is that a particular class of people will like is I think why we see like naked people on Instagram when you first sign up, right? It’s the sensational, it’s the truth exposed. All this is just a battle tested strategy to figure out which kinds of content people click on more. And yeah, I mean, to defend the world a little bit, I think that does have some potentially eroding effects if people just are staring at Pabulum all day. So hopefully there’s education component as well and people being aware that one has to search in a particular way to overcome that. But I do think that these companies have just figured out because they have hundreds of billions of data points of what people like to click on and in that way they kind of figure out the optimal kinds of content for different demographics.
[00:53:57] Red: And those demographics, or they’re less demographics, but what they call psychographics, if I recall. Nice. And it’s less about your economic class and what your personality type is because they can pitch you ads based on your mood for your personality type or what have you. I don’t, I didn’t interpret Huxley as being anti -pop culture in and of itself, but anti -pop culture when it is designed to manipulate and when it is designed to subdue, let’s say, the masses. Does that make sense? Did anybody else have that sort of interpretation or feel?
[00:54:52] Blue: Well, I think there was a certain snobbishness to him, though, don’t you think? I mean, he seemed like the kind, you know, the way that the John discovers Shakespeare and Offamond gives a speech about Milton and all the great things that have been lost. And I just kept thinking, you’re immersed in one of the most like, in so much great art and you don’t even know it.
[00:55:21] Unknown: Like,
[00:55:21] Purple: why are
[00:55:22] Blue: you
[00:55:22] Purple: like, you know, I’m just thinking
[00:55:24] Blue: about the time frame of Huxley writing. Like, I just, it’s just something that kind of, I guess, kind of gets under my skin a little bit about some of the advocates for Brave New World. I just, I personally detect some snobbishness there. I think the proper attitude towards pop culture is to strive to appreciate it. It’s, that was a beautiful thing, although at the same time, like Vaden said, you’re hinted at kind of, I don’t, I don’t like to watch my kids like surfing algorithms on TikTok videos, either it kind of like gets under my skin or myself. I mean, I’m not immune to that at all either. So maybe there are dangers there.
[00:56:14] Green: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting to hear that both Sam and I have arrived at a similar position with regards to pop culture because I totally agree with Sam that there’s a lot of merit in pop culture and I maybe take a bit more of a pedestrian view of the reason why, which is just that pop culture is definitionally sets of ideas that are extremely popular. And so I don’t watch a lot of, say, Big Brother to tie it into the theme or other kinds of like reality TV shows all the time, but Helena likes to watch it and usually I’m kind of doing some work on the side and kind of watching a bit. And then when I meet a random person at a bar, at a party or something, those tend to be the first kinds of ideas that I can interface with them around. So if I know a little bit about Beyonce, if I know a little bit about the fact that Taylor Swift just recently repurchased all of her music rights or whatever, then that can be like the key that allows deeper conversations to unlock with strangers. And for me, that’s the major benefit of it is that if I meet somebody, I can’t be very sure that they’re going to know what critical rationalism means, but I’d be pretty sure they’ll know a lot about Taylor Swift. And that’s a great way to start having a conversation with somebody. And so for that reason, I think that pop culture is extremely valuable, but like everything, one has to have a diverse portfolio, right? And so I think too much of any one thing, too much of just popper and critical rationalism itself can be not a good thing either.
[00:57:46] Green: And so the downside of pop culture is just, yeah, it can start to drown out all other forms of interests. And we all have a bit of a personal responsibility, I think, to not somatize ourselves in that fashion, but there’s still a lot of great aspects of it too.
[00:58:03] Orange: To add a little bit more to my position, I would say pop culture isn’t necessarily right. We should still be critical about the content we receive or we consume. And for me, Brave New World is one of the things that’s wrong in the book or one of the things that’s wrong in the society, rather, of Brave New World is that people are not doing that. And that John the Savage, who starts this conversation, then gets snuffed out. He hangs himself by the end of the book. And that kind of stops this whole discussion that they were having of what really is the right way of living. Because they encounter someone who’s not grown up in their society. They encounter someone who it’s a little bit like Popper’s analogy with the I believe it’s the people who bury their debt and then there’s people who cannibalize them. And each of the groups of people believes that their way of doing things is the right way, that they do it respectfully in both cases. But there’s still there’s something interesting that happens when they both meet each other and they have to critically examine each other’s traditions. They learn something from that. And that kind of happens in the book too, where you could there are elements, you could say that are defensible of the totalitarian society. It’s not I think it’s not as bad as the totalitarian society of 1984. But in any way, whatever is defensible of it never really gets discussed. Like there’s no the discussion in the book kind of ends with John’s death. And then that is it for the characters there.
[00:59:45] Orange: They they never get to discuss any further or explore any further if they would have liked to deviate from their way of life or not. That ends I think that’s what makes it so tragic. So that’s my thank you
[01:00:01] Blue: guys. Getting back to it, they didn’t say the I someone someone had an interesting little quip about the the about the debate. They said this is on YouTube or something said is the is the real danger Big Brother or Big Brother the TV show.
[01:00:17] Orange: A good distillation.
[01:00:22] Blue: Moving on, the conspiracy theory view of history in Popper’s words, I believe, in open society. Both novels feature individuals in power who really know what’s going on. In 1984, inner party member O ‘Brien and in brave new world Mustafa Mond, the world controller of Western Europe, Popper calls this way of thinking a primitive superstition in open society. In his way of thinking, and I sure agree with him, bad theories are the cause of evil rather than bad people or hidden plots. But we see this world all this kind of thinking all around us, maybe because they read people read 1984 and brave new world in high school or something. I don’t know. But you know, you hear about the billionaires, the Jews, the globalists, Hollywood, the CIA, the media, they all they they are they want to control human history. It’s it’s like it’s a kind of of conspiracy theory. Why is this way of thinking so appealing to humans? Like, and maybe does it ever have some validity? Maybe people someone wants to defend it?
[01:01:47] Red: That’s a deep question that is probably out of my league to be able to answer. But
[01:01:56] Green: 1984, maybe more so than than brave new world is is is set up such that the conspiracy theory is true, right? Like there is the inner core that is actively trying to suppress the masses. And then again, because I haven’t read Brave New World recently, I’m reticent to say too much about the plot plot there. But my impression and Dave, please, please weigh in if I get this wrong. Is it’s similar thing going on? It’s just gone on via the mechanism of drugs and pacification through stupidification or something like that. But both Popper and Orwell, we’re pointing out this this tendency in people’s minds to imagine that all of their ills are set up because some tiny group at the top is is creating these these evils rather than recognizing it’s just the world is stochastic. And it’s good things that need to be explained rather than the bad things. But why is this a part of human nature? I think because people seek to find meaning and suffering and often the easiest way to attribute an explanation to suffering is that it’s because of bad people or bad spirits or bad what have you. But I guess what I find interesting about the 1984 insight is like what happens when people who think this way start to take power and then actually start to create the very thing that they hypothesize exists. So too with, for example, doge in the deep state, right? There was no deep state until Elon Musk and all of his billionaire lackeys started to hack and chop at the at the government. And so yeah, I guess maybe to tie the two threads together, I think that
[01:03:54] Green: and to object to something that was said earlier, which is that 1984 is just not believable. I would just point to North Korea or you could point to Iran, not to the same extent, but Iran has their their day of hate. They just hate the Jews. They get all the school children. I forgot what it’s called Al -Quds day perhaps or people can Google this. There’s a day where all the the Iranian school children go out into the street and they march and they say death to America and death to Israel. And this is the day of hate because Orwell was just observing what what what naturally happens when you have conspiracy minded people start to run the government. And so to tie all the threads together, I think that when you have people who are conspiracy minded starts to become in positions of power, then they create the very dystopian hellscape that Orwell fears and that the conspiracy theorists posited existed before their ascendancy. So that’s I see these things relating.
[01:04:59] Purple: That is maybe why people, I mean, like if you were to say how how well is Brave New World known compared to 1984, I don’t in terms of popularity contest, I think it’s fairly easily 1984. It’s the more well known even if nobody’s read it, you know, like everybody knows about Big Brother and the basic ideas. And that may well be for exactly what Baden was saying that it was it was talking specifically about if Isaac Asimov’s review is to be believed, he was specifically critiquing communism. So it was a known totalitarian state. He’s imagining it taking over the entire world so that it’s all under some form of communism. And he is critiquing something that is real, whereas Brave New World is vaguer. And like you said, it may have even just started off as a kind of a spoof wasn’t intended to be particularly realistic. I think when I talk about 1984 not being realistic, the thing that makes 1984 so chilling really isn’t that it is a totalitarian state because that is chilling to be sure. But what makes it particularly chilling is that it’s one that’s unbeatable. And there is there’s nobody in there who’s really ever going to resist it. The main character is not a particularly there are no real protagonists in the story. They’re all kind of not great human beings. He finally does make an attempt to resist it, but it turns out it’s just a trap. And then in the end, he realizes in the end he loves Big Brother, right? And they even have a part where they talk about the reason why totalitarian states fail is because the original totalitarians actually believed in what they were doing.
[01:06:53] Purple: It wasn’t just about the boot on the face. They were actually trying to make the world a better place. So of course they were doomed to fail. We’re not trying to make the world a better place. So we have don’t have that weakness is kind of the argument that they make, right? That doesn’t strike me as at all realistic. I think realistically, you would absolutely have resistance to a totalitarian state like this that they always exist in real life and totalitarian states do not exist forever. They don’t they fall. It’s almost like there’s a laws of physics that force them to. So that was what I was really thinking of when I was saying I don’t find 1984 particularly realistic. But it’s specifically the fact that in the fiction, this is a permanent state of bad well -being, you know, bad being, and that they’ve worked out how to do that, that is part of what makes it such a scary book is trying to imagine a state where you can’t even escape from it, right? But that’s the part I don’t find particularly realistic.
[01:07:55] Red: I don’t know. I think Vedin has a point with North Korea though, like… Exactly, exactly. But I would rescind some of what I said earlier about, you know, I think Brave New World is much less possible or maybe impossible. But yeah, I mean, you brought up 1984 and I reconsidered or you brought up North Korea and I reconsidered what I had said about 1984 for sure. But I share your resistance, Bruce, to the idea that, you know, would the super state in 1984 ultimately win against Winston? Like does he really, you know, is he really brainwashed at the end? That’s the part that I just hate at the end of the book is that, you know, I would rather he had died for what he believed in than to succumb to and to really, you know, feel like he believes in the super state.
[01:08:55] Green: I think it remains to be seen if all totalitarianism and North Korea has lasted since 1948 or when was the Korean War in 52, 53, something around then. It remains to be seen if all democracies continue. That too is an unknown thing at the moment. I viewed 1984 as pointing out a number of tendencies which if unchallenged will lead to totalitarianism in the limit. At the end of 1984 when Winston says, yeah, tear Julius face off, right, that part still haunts me to this day because that’s big brother getting to the very deepest principle in Winston’s in Winston’s heart, right? And I see that same thing when I look at Marco Rubio, like the people who used to have principles, people who used to be quite firmly on one side just having those principles completely excised out of their spirit, you know. And this clearly is a possible thing that can happen to some people. And now the question is, is it going to happen to enough people such that the entire state collapse? That’s unclear. But when Orwell is talking about duck speak and just a good party member will just machine gun off the syllables that will sound as if they’re almost thinking for themselves. But of course they’re not. And then you hear just another Trump apologist go on Fox News and just rattle off the syllables of Biden and Kamala, just as you just swap them out with ID log number 36. It’s all the same thought patterns. It’s the simplification of language. It’s the demonizing of the other side. It’s the abandoning of all principles.
[01:10:58] Green: Whether or not they all exist in one place at the same time and to the same extent that Orwell writes about, sure, yeah, I can grant that not every single thing happens all at once. But these are definitely real phenomena. And maybe just to comment a little bit about the backstory of 1984. And Orwell was writing about totalitarianism in general. And so obviously his critique applies to fascism as well. But because it was just blindingly obvious that the fascists were bad. And Orwell went and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He fought against the fascists. And he joined the side of the socialists. And part of that experience was what made him realize that socialism was just another form of totalitarianism. And like any good, of course, Orwell wouldn’t have used that language, but like any good critical rationalist, Orwell realizes what’s the point of criticizing something that everyone already agrees is bad fascism. No, he made the case as challenging as possible for himself and for the people who are going to read the book by criticizing socialism. But no mistake that his critique applies just as much to fascism or theocratic totalitarianism in the shape of Iran as well. It’s totalitarianism, be it from the left or the right, that he’s critiquing. And maybe the last thing I’ll say is that I’m very much a student of Hitchens. And Hitchens is a student of Orwell. So I get a bit of my Orwell knowledge from that source. But Hitch made the point that Orwell, his biggest contribution and the reason why he is such a literary and journalistic genius is that he was able to point out the three great mistakes of the 20th century, which is fascism, socialism, and imperialism. And
[01:12:56] Green: so he critiqued all of them. And I think all both the left and the right would love to claim him for themself and people often do this arguing. And so just we should be aware of that, that he critiqued the three great evils of the 20th century in equal force. And so 1984, I think, should be seen under that lens that it could apply to a British fascist state if imperialism was allowed to go unchecked, say. So it applies to totalitarianism.
[01:13:30] Blue: That leads into the whole, I mean, this is probably beyond the scope of this conversation. But whether or not fascism and Marxism are essentially branches of socialism is an interesting historical debate. I know it’s a minority opinion amongst historians to see it that way. But clearly Mussolini and Hitler thought of themselves as socialists. I mean, they pretty much explicitly said so. They were against capitalism. They were against free markets. They were collectivists. When you go down the road of commonalities between the fascists and the, I mean, obviously they didn’t like the Marxists, but there’s nothing new about that, that two different factions of socialists not liking each other or whatever, that’s pretty normal. But this idea of is history more controlled by bad people or bad ideas is something that I’ve thought a lot about and I would probably come down more on the side of bad ideas. I mean, even if you think of the Nazis or whatever, I mean, if you accept their factual claims about race and history and whatever, it’s not like what they did makes sense. They were motivated by bad ideas, sure, in incorrect claims, but they’re not just like, I don’t know, or they don’t know, they don’t have like a self -awareness of like that what they’re doing is wrong, I guess. Yeah, I guess what’s,
[01:15:31] Green: what I find so interesting about that and Peter, feel free to veto this line of conversation is just how few ideas Donald Trump has if it was just bad ideas, then I would expect Trump to be much more ideological than he is, but he’s notable in his, his lack of interest in ideas, I would say. And I think Trump, the only way to really analyze Trump accurately, I think, is through like cluster B personality traits in the DSM. So borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, these kinds of things.
[01:16:10] Blue: But doesn’t that make him unlike a fascist in many ways? I mean, I’m not saying Hitler and Mussolini were particularly intelligent, but they were intellectuals of their time. They read books and had strong ideas. And most of the Nazi members had the equivalent of PhDs and were highly educated.
[01:16:36] Green: Yeah, I mean, I’d recommend to anyone listening, Ann Appelbaum in her most recent book, Authoritarian Inc., because she makes the point that, well, one, it’s probably not even helpful or useful to apply the phrase, the term fascism to Trump, because people immediately tune out when you do that. But also it conjures up images of like stormtroopers and tanks flowing through the streets and concentration camps and stuff. But that’s just not how authoritarianism works in the 21st century. And one of the major differences between authoritarianism and fascism is what you’re pointing at, Peter, which is that fascism has, there’s scholarship underneath it. There’s books. There’s an ideological bent. Whereas authoritarians are simply just driven to stay in power by whatever means. It’s just greed and permanency. That’s all they care about. And so you can have authoritarian on the left, the right, and on no political axis. So you can have the Hugo Chávezes, you can have the Iranian mules, you can have Vladimir Putin, which yeah, he’s maybe socialist ish, but really, he’s just an oligarch. He just wants to stay in power. And the only through line between them and Trump is just that. It’s not the ideology. It’s just the realization that as soon as you stop being a government, you are going to go to jail. And so how do you get around that? Well, you just destroy government. You just destroy democracy. You slowly hollow it out and just amass more and more wealth and just stay in power. It eternally. And so, yeah, I guess one could say greed and the drive for power is a form of an idea. And yes, you could say that. But
[01:18:32] Green: I would just want to say that the people who are at least interested in ideas who have read the least, who know almost nothing about the world, are going to be those who are the most interested in just power and greed. And so it’s kind of the default idea, the most dull idea possible, such that it’s so uninteresting. I’d rather analyze it through the lens of aberrant mental health. And so it’s hard to say for sure. Yes, I think bad ideas have huge amounts of sway and negative consequences in our society. But I also think that we have to make room for aberrant personality types. I think Stalin was incredibly paranoid, for example. And his paranoia was one of the things that led to the purges. And that doesn’t easily fit into the Popperian framework, for example. Popper doesn’t talk too much about mental health. But I think that mental health, especially when it’s deranged mental health, held by a lunatic real estate fake businessman, then I think talking purely in terms of ideas doesn’t fully capture what’s happening.
[01:19:56] Blue: No, that’s a compelling way to put it. And I guess, like you guys kind of said, North Korea seems to be the single best example of just terrible people acting in it. I mean, there’s 25 million people living in slavery in this country, basically. It’s like, in some ways, maybe worse than slavery, the way these people live.
[01:20:24] Green: If I can just briefly put in a plug for an essay that Hitchens wrote. So he went to North Korea and he did the whole tour and he wrote an essay about it. And in the essay, he keeps saying that as soon as he landed there, the one thing he was not going to do, he was not going to make references to 1984. And his piece, it’s just two cliches. Edio and everyone who’s talked about North Korea has made the comparison to 1984. And Hitchens hates cliches, so he just wasn’t going to do it. But lo and behold, spending three or four days there, Big Brother makes you do it. And so in his essay, he essentially like, it’s as if someone handed Kim Il Sung 1984 and they said, you think we can make this work? And Kim’s like, I don’t know if we can, but we can sure give it the college try. Like they have their forced protests, the forcing kids to learn classical guitar at the age of four. Otherwise, the informing on the parents. They have
[01:21:27] Blue: TVs that don’t turn off too, don’t they?
[01:21:30] Green: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 24 hour surveillance, all of this. And the similarities will force a writer like Hitchens who cannot stand to use cliches, to use cliches. And that’s just yet another way that the totalitarianism Big Brother ideology makes you compromise your principles.
[01:21:51] Purple: I actually wanted to say something in favor of what Vaden was saying. When I wrote Red 1984, it was before the polarization era that we’re currently in in America. And there’s that part where they all go out and they all shout how much they hate the other side. And that’s a
[01:22:12] Green: week.
[01:22:13] Purple: Sorry, what did you call it?
[01:22:15] Green: Oh, it’s hate week, capital H. Yeah, hate week.
[01:22:19] Unknown: Yeah.
[01:22:19] Purple: So at the time, that seemed rather silly to me, right? Because I lived in America where stuff like that just didn’t happen. And I have to admit, it’s been chilling to watch the polarization and the radicalization of friends and family that I would have thought would be resistant to and by both sides, by the way, just to be fair, who get to the point where they can’t think straight because they hate the other side so much. And I think Vaden’s right that when you’re talking about Trumpism, that that’s pretty much all they are. They’re defined by their hate of the left. I think as a conservative, that’s embarrassing to me. That’s humiliating, in fact, to find out that I have been a part of a movement that I truly believed in, that it turns out huge swaths of them. I wouldn’t say it’s the majority, but I think that we’ve proven that huge swaths of them, and then many will go along with it, are defined more by their hate of the other side than by the principles they claimed they believed in. And that is something that’s been very difficult for someone like me to come to grips with, that that has turned out to be true. I would have to say that part of 1984 was I maybe originally found it silly, and maybe I don’t find it silly anymore. And
[01:23:37] Red: with that, the, not just the hatred, but the idea that you have to publicly prove your allegiance to your group through the expression of hate or through just vocalizing in solidarity with whatever, it’s kind of like this idea that if you’re silent, you’re not with us, you’re against us. So you better speak up in the same way that we are. I see that a lot.
[01:24:04] Purple: Keep in mind, I am a conservative living amongst conservatives, and I will not do that, right? So there is suspicion around me because of that. So I mean, I know exactly, that is my life. I should note it’s nowhere near as bad as 1984, and there’s quite a few reasonable conservatives around, far more than probably someone living in a liberal state would even begin to guess. But so maybe there’s more hope than sometimes it appears on the news. But you’re right. I mean, it’s, I suspect there’s huge question about whether I even am a conservative at this point, because I will not support Trump. I am 100 % never will support Trump period end of story. So he has done things that make it so that it is impossible for me to ever vote for him or support him.
[01:24:58] Red: And I think Orwell nails the kind of social psychological principle that like people will publicly speak something they believe to be false in order to fit in with the crowd. And he just chillingly highlights the danger of that, right? And I think that the history of the 20th century has shown how dangerous it is when people are not willing to speak freely what they believe to be true.
[01:25:40] Green: Yeah, Dave, if I can just echo and reinforce and amplify what you’re saying, I think I think it’s slightly even more sinister than that. It’s not just what happens when someone says something that they know to be false. It’s what happens when I can force you to say something that we all know is false. As soon as I can force somebody else to speak and utterance that they know to be false, I own them, right? And this is quote the loyalty test. So this is not just a maybe plug and apple bomb again, right? Which is that I think it’s the case that and please listeners fact check me on this that some government employees now when they’re trying to apply to the federal government, they have to answer a question. Who won the 2020 election? Those who say that you can’t determine it or that Trump didn’t lose are loyal. Those are the ones who are loyal. This is the two plus two equals five thing. And if you want to gut a man, force him to say something that he knows to be untrue, and then you have him forever. And this, I think, is the deeply dark insight that Orwell was getting at when he spoke of the two plus two equals five.
[01:26:59] Red: One of the most compelling things I think Orwell has written is an essay called Politics and the English Language. And if anyone listening has not read that, make sure you read it as soon as possible because it is all about how it’s just sort of the explanation behind what he’s doing in the book. I think he wrote it before he wrote 1984, but it’s how political language masks what it really means and how language can influence thought, right? And so if we limit the language, if we change the language, we can change and limit what people are thinking, which is the whole idea behind Newspeak in 1984. And I think we see much of that in our own culture. My English teacher in 10th grade made me read that essay, made the class read that essay, and then find examples of euphemistic language in politics of the time, which was eye -opening for me in the mid -2000s, right? And how much more so is that at play today is, yeah, it’s
[01:28:20] Green: terrifying in some ways, right? And there’s 100 % that essay. I actually try to reread it every year or so. It is it is one of the most profound essays I’ve ever read. And yeah, as soon as I read it, both euphemisms and cliches, euphemisms and cliches are the death of the mind, and the two of those things, I became very, very highly on guard for after reading that essay. But I wanted to link to it in the show notes. Yeah, yeah, please. But I wanted to say that the Hitler and totalitarianism and stuff comes in this conversation via Huxley and via Huxley’s follow -up work Brave New World Revisited, because he’s very light on Hitler. Huxley has written multiple essays in this piece where he says at the beginning, Hitler is a bit, yeah, you can’t read him on the race stuff, but when he starts moving to talk about how to be a propagandist and how to control the masses, he’s incredibly insightful. And then Huxley goes and just writes all of the insights that Hitler raised about how to fulment a crowd, how the best way to disable someone’s thinking is to put them into a crowd. As soon as people are in a crowd, they can no longer think as an individual. And it was never said outright, but I think that when people are reading the Brave New World World Revisited, it’s almost as if Huxley is trying to give an instruction manual for any reader of his who wants to deal with the overpopulation problem that he’s quite worried about. And
[01:30:15] Green: I think that it’s because part of Huxley’s ire is just people and that which makes people comfortable, it’s not hard to take a few steps and starts to find some sympathy for the Hitlerites. And I think this just goes to show that totalitarianism, like euphemism, like cliche, has to kind of be something you’re always on guard for in yourself, because it’s latent inside all of us. And Orwell teaches that you can never be a blasé here, the words that you use if they come from other people. And if you just happen to repeat stuff that you hear on TikTok or you hear on Instagram reels, and you repeat it unthinkingly, you’re not totalitarian, and of course I’m not saying that, but you are making it slightly easier for those who might be. And as soon as you find yourself repeating phrases and slogans that you’ve heard from others, and you don’t entirely know what they mean, what is from the river to the sea, what does that mean, what are you referring to, which river, which sea, who has said this and doesn’t know the answers to these questions. These are the tendencies that Orwell’s pointing out, and I think a firm view of language, and that’s why Orwell’s always talking about totalitarianism and language at the same time, Newspeak, Politics, and the English language. These are very deeply related, and I think that Orwell has done some amazing humanitarian work pointing this out, even if we’re not living in a full totalitarian hellscape right now, we can take certain measures inside ourselves to make it more difficult for those who wish to oppose that upon us.
[01:32:10] Purple: By the way, I did fact check, Baden, quickly. There is a fortune article called Trump Tests Job Candidates by Asking Who Won the 2020 Election. That is the title. If you actually read the article, it looks like maybe that was kind of clickbait title, it may not quite that. But yeah, there is some truth to what Baden is saying. The article is maybe a little more nuanced, but it looks pretty bad, to be honest. So I think that I would give you four out of five stars on that one, Baden.
[01:32:49] Blue: Okay, well, this leads right into my next question on political cosplay. To read a David Deutsch quote here. I hope this will be a provocative question for you guys, because I might push back a little bit on some of what Baden and others have said, but David Deutsch says, people seem to like the idea that they are living in a time of momentous challenge, where the stakes are exactly like or analogous to what the stakes were in the Second World War, where it was good against evil, where if evil wins, it is the end of civilization. And therefore fighting against that is glorious and it is worthwhile. It gives meaning to life. And so the more you can talk in terms of these hyperboles, the more life seems worthwhile. It’s as if making rapid, quiet, peaceful progress, which is actually what’s going on all the time right now, is not exciting enough for people when they are in political mode. So this makes me wonder how much of politics is a kind of mindless distraction that actually degrades us as humans. Maybe that’s more dangerous than pop culture. What is the proper amount of worry that 1984 or Brave New World is just around the corner? Should we really be kept up at night, psychologically affected by these issues? What do you guys think? Can
[01:34:16] Red: I answer that with a quote from Orwell?
[01:34:19] Blue: Yes.
[01:34:21] Red: This was pretty much in the center of the book. It’s when Winston kind of comes to a realization after a dream about his mother. I find this chapter to be super fascinating. And I think this is sort of the answer I would agree with, but he’s trying to communicate this to Julia, who’s like half awake. And he realizes what he really means when he says that the hope are in the proles. And it’s because that they are human and they’ve maintained their humanity. And he’s thinking or talking about how, you know, if you go against the party, they obliterate you from history. So I’ll read. This is from at least my edition. It’s an old, old tattered one, which I love, page 136. When once you’re in the grip of the party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing made literally no difference. Whatever happened, you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed all important because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties, which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships and a completely helpless gesture and embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man could have value in itself. The proles that suddenly occurred to him had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea. They were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life, he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force, which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world.
[01:36:28] Red: The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. I just, I loved that. And remember, that just really struck me as some, as some part of the core meaning of the book is that, you know, like our hope, I would say my hope at least, not to be in political movements one way or the other. And this one’s harder for me, but maybe that also means my fear, not ultimately need lie in political movements one way or the other. But what’s happening in the relationships around me and in the my little circle of influence and how I interact with people and am I really loving and building up the people around me. And, you know, that that’s not like a major feature in the novel, but it, you know, if you consider the lives of most of the people, maybe in 1984, they’re sort of not as concerned as Winston is, because, you know, like the old man in the pub, he can’t get his pint anymore. But his life is maybe still governed by what really matters and what ultimately makes life meaningful, which is close intimate relationships.
[01:37:54] Green: Dave, I can, that was, that was beautiful. And I got, I got goosebumps as you were speaking. Just, just another tiny thing about the book that just emphasizes what you, what you said that, that I missed the first time I read it actually is that the only person that Winston calls beautiful. And the only time he thinks something is beautiful is a 50 year old lady he sees out the window who’s a prole. When he first saw Julia, he did not think that she was beautiful. And I just think that that’s, that’s just an interesting observation that the spending time with Julia allowed him to see beauty finally, but it was not her. It was, it was the pros. And that was right before the thought police grabbed them and he never saw Julia again. Wow.
[01:38:46] Blue: That’s a really interesting observation. Yeah. So Dave and I are grilled, grilled pilled, I think. Have you guys heard that expression? Grilled pilled. It’s just mean, you know, you post, post, post stuff on social media about your, what you’re grilling and your, the music you like or something like that or your personal relationships, I guess, in politics. But I don’t know, Vaden, how do you, I mean, do you care about, do you think it’s a valid concern to care about politics too much? Depends on the era you’re living. But
[01:39:23] Green: I think right now it’s an, it’s an obligation to personally. I think that one of the tactics of the authoritarian is the flood the zone strategy, which was invented by Putin, I believe. And the effect of that is to just have people tune out. You just, there’s too much going on. There’s too many bad things happening. So why, like, let’s just, let’s just read our books. And as that happens, that’s, that’s when, when USAID is cut and, and all the things that people are reading about now. So I think that.
[01:39:57] Blue: So
[01:39:57] Green: we are living
[01:39:58] Blue: in an exceptional time is what you would say.
[01:40:00] Green: Yes, I would say definitively. Yes, we’re watching the end of the American experiment from my perspective. But I think that’s, so I live in Canada, Dave, I live in Vancouver, BC, and grew up in Calgary, which is a city in the province adjacent to us in Calgary. And it’s interesting to me because when I go back to Calgary, the premier of Calgary is a woman named Daniel Smith, and she’s very much a polarizing figure, like a Trump, Trump light. And everyone in Calgary are always fighting about regional provincial politics. When I go to BC, no one’s really talking about it. And things are going pretty well, pretty nicely. And we’re talking, of course, about federal politics and American politics. But I think that the better a society is doing, the less you have to think about politics, and less you should be thinking about politics. But the more the society is starting to tear itself asunder, the more politics comes into the conversation. And so I think that the goal would be to care about politics such that we fix our society such that we just naturally lose interest in politics again. But I think that we should not put our head in the sand and start to read other things when there are very important political concerns that they’re affecting many people’s lives at the moment. And so I would caution against the tune out strategy, because that very much is by design. That’s the Steve Bannon flood the zone approach. And don’t let them win. Don’t let the masters win.
[01:41:38] Red: And to be clear, I wouldn’t argue for that either. Yeah, of course. But yeah, just talking where my ultimate hopes, fears, dreams lie. Because there’s a there even if, you know, the the worst should happen politically at the grand scale in a way that perhaps no matter what I did, it wouldn’t change it. I guess I would hope that I would still positively influence the lives of those I love around me, but do what Winston could not, you know, I’d want to read a book that would inspire me to, you know, to be willing to die for truth, for beauty, for what’s what’s what’s right. Because perhaps, you know, ultimately there’s that’s a better a lot a better life and a better story to my life maybe then just scraping by, you know, living living quietly, hiding my head in the sand, you know, pretending that everything’s fine when it’s not. But I don’t know, that’s, yeah, I pray that I won’t have to, yeah, that this is not the end that we fear. It might be the American political moment, but
[01:43:02] Purple: I would like to make a final comment or not. I don’t know if it’s a final comment, but I would like to. So I feel like the what David Deutch is saying, the quote that you made of him, I do think that’s
[01:43:13] Red: accurate,
[01:43:15] Purple: but I think I have to thread the needle here. So are we are we living in an exceptional time? Yeah, absolutely we are. So there is a unique threat going on that I’ve never seen before this point. And I think if you were to use David Deutch’s quote to try to claim that there is no unique threat, that would be a mistake. On the other hand, I feel like what David Deutch is explaining about how we want to live in momentous times actually explains a great deal of the success of Trump. And I don’t mean for the Trumpists, I mean the fact that that was utilized by the left and all but played into Trump’s hands. The way you fight someone like Trump who this is John I’m going to channel my John Roush here from excellent book by the way is the Constitution of Knowledge where he talks about this tries to explain that the marketplace of ideas doesn’t really work on its own, that there have to be actually be institutions that help tilt towards truth. I can’t do justice to the book. It’s an excellent book. Let me just recommend it. One of the big mistakes that got made, I would say I mean like Trump is just not the unstoppable force that maybe the left sometimes makes him out to be. And I think that is in part a desire to try to live in momentous times exactly like David Deutch is suggesting. And that led to them making a misstep where they started to use untruth against a man who used a lot of untruth which all but protected him. And you know what he did it on purpose.
[01:44:58] Purple: The guy’s not stupid like he really is quite ingenious at times. And I remember really I mean I’m going to get specific here the whole Russia thing with Trump it was obviously just made up but it went on for two years and they spent all their political capital on that on something that was going to go nowhere and it was obvious almost from the beginning. And then when the real thing happened where it really was maybe an impeachable offense it was too late. We had already been talking about it over around something that didn’t matter. It had been part of the public consciousness. The same thing happened with a lot of the lawsuits. I mean Facebook posted Alvin Bragg in a picture of him and said Kingmaker when he went after Trump because I knew this was it. The left just seated just handed Trump exactly what he needed to be able to get out of the actual legitimate lawsuits that were coming his way. And that’s exactly how it played out. Right. It was 100 % Alvin Bragg’s fault. And the problem was is that the left was doing exactly what David Deutsch was talking about. They wanted certain types of headlines. Those are what are the clickbait. That’s what gets their people excited. And they were every single step allowing Trump to make advances that he would have been impossible for him if they just had stuck with the truth. He was going to do a bunch of things that were actually bad. Talk about those. Save your credits for those. Right.
[01:46:39] Purple: And when you expend them all over the place trying to just call everything the end of democracy and things like that, you’re basically allowing something like what Trump did to take place. And it really bothers me like I’m in some ways more angry with the left than I am with the right. That may seem very strange. But it was always the it was always the Democrats to lose for both all three of the elections. It was always the Democrats to lose. And they lost it was because they made incredibly stupid choices overreaching in exactly the way that David Deutsch said. Is that a reason to then say there’s no real threat here? No. There’s like a legitimate threat here. And one of the things that has bothered me a lot that has caused some of my breaks in the world of critical rationalism is I’ve had numerous ones tell me things like the American system is invincible. So there’s nothing to worry about or nearly invincible was the actual quote I was given. And just some of the things that I’ve heard said, it’s true. We’ve got a really powerful system. And I doubt Trump is going to end the American experiment. So I guess I disagree with Vaden on that. Although there is a threat there. So I agree with Vaden that much. Right. There’s always a threat. We have ways to deal with it. There’s some pretty good institutions that will probably cause the American institutions to survive. I don’t think Trump will be able to tear them down fast enough or well enough. And I think we will eventually recover and we will figure out how to learn from this and to move on.
[01:48:15] Purple: But I could be wrong if Trump gets a third term then Vaden, I’m wrong. But I think the simple truth is that you have to somehow accept that there is a strength in the system. But also accept that if you’re going to use that as an excuse to do nothing, to not even take September 6th into consideration when you’re voting, something along those lines, that really presents a very real problem at that point.
[01:48:47] Blue: Well, so much for not getting political here. But that’s okay. I’ve really, really enjoyed this conversation. I guess I write too many questions because I wanted to talk about education, technology, drugs, behaviorism. There’s so many directions we could take this. But I think this is the power of these novels. They’re just so good. I mean, that gets in our brains. It’s just such a beautiful and powerful thing. Any final thoughts, guys?
[01:49:37] Green: Yeah. So everyone else has kind of sneakily dropped off the call. So it’s just the three of us here. But for Dave, who is no longer here, but hopefully we’ll listen back. Last thing I want to say is that I just wish I was in your high school class. Seemed like a phenomenal teacher. And I think your students are unbelievably lucky to have you. And if my teachers taught me about Orwell, I think I would be doing much better in my life than having discovered him in my late 20s. So just wanted to give Dave credit, even though he’s not here. Bruce, I probably disagree with like 50, 60 % of what you said. And I think it would be so much fun to talk about that in a future conversation. It’s not as we’re winding down. But maybe the last tiny little point is that the device of this episode was to make the two compare and contrast. But ultimately, they have to be both viewed as works of art. And both of them can offer some really great insights into the human condition. And so while I was definitely a bit harder on the Huxley side of things, I think that I would rather have talked about what can we learn from Huxley and what can we learn from Orwell. But if forced to choose, then I would go on the Orwell side any day of the week. But this was a fantastic conversation. I always love being invited here. So yet again, thank you so much for what you guys do and for this amazing podcast.
[01:51:04] Green: And it’s nice that we’re kind of podcast buddies in a sea of critical rush lists where some of them are as critical or as rational as we’d like. This is great to have you guys out there in this world so we can be fighting, fighting from the same battle from different trenches, which that would say.
[01:51:22] Purple: Sounds good. Thank you.
[01:51:24] Blue: Yeah. Thanks a lot, Bruce, Peter. Thank you, Bruce. Bye bye. Hello again. If you’ve made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch theory of knowledge. We believe David Deutsch’s four strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at B Nielsen 01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting. Thank you.
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