Orwell vs. Huxley: Which Dystopia Was More Prescient?

Tech and Humanities Series

It’s a perennial debate: Who was more prophetic, George Orwell or Aldous Huxley? I find discussions about this debate to be quite interesting. Read on to find out different perspectives on the issue, including comments by Orwell and Huxley on each others’ works, and my own take.

Orwell and Huxley wrote two of the most influential dystopian novels of all time. Both dystopias involve total control, but they achieve control in different ways. Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949) features an oppressive drab world ruled by an authoritarian government called Big Brother. There is pervasive surveillance, and the government wants to control not just what people say but what they believe. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) depicts a world where people are controlled by drugs and pleasure. Although everyone is happy, everyone is manipulated and controlled and lives a shallow mindless existence.

George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949)

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Big Brother watches its citizens pervasively. A primary surveillance device is the telescreen, a TV that watches people in their homes (known today as the internet).

Orwell’s novel powerfully captures a society suffocated by surveillance. Our world is much better because it is a lot more colorful and the government doesn’t use rats . . . yet, though only because most officials in the regime in power haven’t read the book.

Orwell’s novel captures many terrifying aims and techniques of totalitarian society:

• Pervasive surveillance

• Thought control

• Disinformation

• Falsification of the past

• Complete domination

• Inducing people to deny their experiences and senses

• Gaslighting

• Marshalling hatred

• Undermining trust among people

• Total destruction of private life

Illustration from Fido Nesti, 1984: The Graphic Novel (2021)

I originally found the non-surveillance elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four to be too exaggerated. The satire went over the top when Big Brother insisted that 2+2=5 or when it advanced the slogans “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.” These parts were silly, I thought.

Now, sadly, they ring true. A popular refrain today is to “make Nineteen Eighty-Four fiction again.” But not only has it ceased to be fiction; it has also ceased to be satire.

First US edition: Harcourt, Brace and Co. (1949)

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) was written several decades before Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It presents a much brighter world than Orwell’s, but it is much uglier than it appears on the surface. Although everyone is happy, they are manipulated and controlled and live a shallow mindless existence. People use a drug called soma to maintain their happiness. Instead of natural conception, humans are genetically engineered and grown in incubators. The society is organized into a strict social status hierarchy. Casual sex is encouraged, and the society lives by the slogan that “everyone belongs to everyone else.”

Features of Huxley’s dystopia include:

• Lack of individuality

• Diversion with pleasure to avoid deep thinking

• Rigid caste system

• Genetic engineering

• Inhibition of personal relationships

• Psychological manipulation

• Shallow and hedonistic existence

• Colorful happy world rather than drab unpleasant one as in 1984

The novel captures how people are controlled through the manipulation of their beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions. As Huxley observed in the foreword to the second edition: “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

Two of my favorite Brave New World covers

Orwell and Huxley on Each Other

Orwell was influenced by Huxley’s Brave New World and by other dystopian books, such as Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1907), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), and H.G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899).

Orwell mentioned Huxley a few times when speaking about his influences.¹ In speaking about Zamyatin’s We, Orwell stated:

On the one hand it debunks the super-rational, hedonistic type of Utopia (I think Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ must be plagiarized from it to some extent), but on the other hand it takes account of the diabolism & the tendency to return to an earlier form of civilization which seems to be part of totalitarianism. It seems to me a good book in the same way as ‘The Iron Heel’, but better written.

Orwell also said:

Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalized, mechanized, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place six hundred years hence. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same type of society that is being described, though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories.

Huxley wrote a letter to Orwell on October 21,1949, about his thoughts on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although praising Orwell’s book, Huxley argued that Brave New World was the more likely future:

It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. . .

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. . . .

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.

Here’s a video of Huxley speaking about his and Orwell’s dystopias coming to the United States:

For those of you who prefer to read Huxley’s remarks, here’s the transcript:

Aldous Huxley: [T]he dictatorship of the future, I think will be very unlike the dictatorships which we’ve been familiar with in the immediate past. I mean, take another book prophesying the future, which was a very remarkable book, George Orwell’s “1984.” Well, this book was written at the height of the Stalinist regime, and just after the Hitler regime, and there he foresaw a dictatorship using entirely the methods of terror, the methods of physical violence. Now, I think what is going to happen in the future is that dictators will find, as the old saying goes, that you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them! But, if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in “Brave New World,” partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so, making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn’t to be happy.

Aldous Wallace: Well, let me ask you this. You’re talking about a world that could take place within the confines of a totalitarian state. Let’s become more immediate, more urgent about it. We believe, anyway, that we live in democracy here in the United States. Do you believe that this Brave New World that you talk about, er...could, let’s say in the next quarter century, the next century, could come here to our shores?

Aldous Huxley: I think it could. I mean, that’s why I feel it so extremely important here and now, to start thinking about these problems. Not to let ourselves be taken by surprise by the...the new advances in technology. I mean the...for example, in the regard to the use of the...of the drugs. We know, there is enough evidence now for us to be able, on the basis of this evidence and using certain amount of creative imagination, to foresee the kind of uses which could be made by people of bad will with these things and to attempt to forestall this, and in the same way, I think with these other methods of propaganda we can foresee and we can do a good deal to forestall. I mean, after all, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Neil Postman Weighs In

In his famous preface to Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Neil Postman writes:

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another — slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Scott McMillen’s illustrated adaptation of Postman’s preface (June 8, 2013)

Common Ground

Who wins the debate between Orwell and Huxley?

Based on our world today, they both were right. I believe the world is increasingly darkening to dystopia, and it has a blend of both Orwell and Huxley. We live in a surveillance society. We embrace technologies that watch us and gather our data because they make us happy. We eagerly invite Big Brother surveillance into our lives. We’re constantly controlled. We have an oppressive government aiming to suppress speech, manipulate how we think, and spread misinformation. We have companies that also manipulate us into behaving in ways that advance their aims and line their pockets.

Our world is not dismal like Orwell’s. We live in vivid colors; we’re well entertained. But we’re not fully free, and our freedom dims every day.

Both Orwell and Huxley’s dystopias share the following common ground:

• Thought control

• Overriding of people’s judgment and senses

• Lack of private life

• People being conditioned to love the state

• Government control rather than corporate control

• Loss of individuality

• Restriction of intimate interpersonal relationships

• Inhibition of original thinking

• Throttling of intellectual capacities

• Restriction of consumption of ideas

• Suppression of uniqueness

• Ruthless conformity

The most pervasive element of dystopian literature, including Orwell and Huxley, is the suppression of individual intellectual activity—the elimination of original thinking and the ability to critique. Our thinking no longer becomes our own. As John Lanchester writes: “Thought crime is one of the most serious crimes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is at this point that we can start to see his and Huxley’s novels not as competing visions of the future but as complementary, overlapping warnings.”²

Orwell and Huxley both focused heavily on the government and not enough on the role of corporations. As I argue in my recent article, Privacy in Authoritarian Times: Surveillance Capitalism and Government Surveillance, 67 B.C. L. Rev. 51 (2026), surveillance capitalism and government surveillance are deeply interrelated. I write:

To adequately regulate government surveillance, it is essential to also regulate surveillance capitalism. Government surveillance and surveillance capitalism are two sides of the same coin. It is impossible to protect privacy from authoritarianism without addressing consumer privacy.

In Orwell and Huxley’s worlds, the missing dimension is the private sector, which not only augments government power but exercises power of its own over people, controlling and manipulating them for profiteering and the ideological ends of corporate leaders. Capitalism is one of the greatest sources of freedom, but when companies amass too much power and collude with the government, capitalism can become twisted and perverse and end up stifling individual freedom.

You can download my article for free here.

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Daniel J. Solove is the Bernard Professor of Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the George Washington University Law School. He is the founder of TeachPrivacy, a company that provides workforce privacy, cybersecurity security, and AI training to companies and organizations around the world. He is the author of 10+ books and 100+ articles.

You can follow his events, writings, training, cartoons, and resources by subscribing to his free weekly newsletter.

1. The quotes are from The Complete Works of George Orwell Vol. 20, at 72 and Vol. 18, at 14 (1998).

2. John Lanchester, “Orwell v Huxley: Whose Dystopia Are We Living In Today?” Financial Times (Jan. 23, 2019).