Un mundo feliz ambientado en 1984...

Como le comentaba el otro día a un amigo, el título que yo elegiría para definir el mundo actual en el que vivimos sería: "Un mundo feliz ambientado en 1984..." Me parece interesantísimo el discurso "The ultimate Revolution..." que Aldous Huxley dio en la Universidad de Berkeley en 1962, un año antes de su muerte. Todo lo que dice en él es una profecia anunciada desde que en 1932 escribió el que para mi es uno de los mejores libros en los que, como gran visionario que siempre fue, describe con una precisión increible la sociedad de hoy en día... El discurso completo podeis escucharlo aquí:

Os dejo lo que comenta cuando compara la predicción que él hizo en "Brave New World" con la que Orwell vaticinó en otro gran libro para mi de obligada lectura 1984...:

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Extracto del discurso "The ultimate Revolution"
Aldous Huxley (20 marzo 1962, Berkeley)
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"[...]
And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty- Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it’s a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.

Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I’m inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the Brave New World pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the Brave New World pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.

That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they’re living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen, needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its way to the surface.

But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in Brave New World. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale [...]"

Y un artículo donde se resume muy bien la profecía de la sociedad que hizo Orwell en su libro "1984" vs la que vaticinó Huxley en "Brave New World":

 

Orwell VS Huxley - La explicación de por qué nadie hace nada