įirst and foremost, he says, Orwell – just like Bradbury – feared censorship and people banning books Huxley, on the other hand, feared that there would be no reason to ban books in the future because nobody would be reading them. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”Īnd then Postman explains the differences between 1984 and of Brave New World. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. “Contrary to common belief even among the educated,” he writes, “Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Aldous Huxleyīut aren’t Orwell and Huxley saying the same thing? Orwell may have been wrong about the future, and that is one fight we won however, Aldous Huxley was dead-on right, and, unfortunately, that is the war we’ll eventually lose. Because, in his mind, humanity was losing the battle and – what’s worse – it was losing it on a largely ignored field.Īnd that’s the message Postman wanted to relay to the participants of a panel on Orwell at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. Neil Postman, however, was a bit worried. When 1984 came, and George Orwell’s vision of a world run by totalitarian governments didn’t pan out the way everybody feared it would, “American sang softly in praise of themselves.” And they sang even louder six years later when the USSR fell to pieces. Not reading it would be basically synonymous with ignoring a traffic post sign saying “Stop. However, Neil Postman’s 1984 vision about the world of today seems so true that we think everybody should read this book. Who Should Read “Amusing Ourselves to Death”? And Why?Īmusing Ourselves to Death is one of the classics in the fields of cultural criticism and media studies so everyone interested in them should have already read it.
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