Brave New World

In the last post I discussed things I didn't intend to in this blog, really.  I didn't want this to become markblogger2pointoh.  I meant this to become a jumping point for my writing career (hahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaa.... cough cough cough cough, gag gag, tears down the cheeks, heeeghh heeegggg  eeeeegggggg ha ha ha),

So the political thing derailed me because the post wasn't an essay, it was a rant.  A rather nonliterary rant (I wanted unliterary but Firefox's spellchecker didn't like unliterary.  Which I would call rather uniliterary... never mind).

I want to post essays, or essay like things, or nonfictional flash posts, but not rants.  Rants are cheap and easy and are the things I tell when drinking with my friends.  I want this to be deeper. I want some of the posts here to be eligible to go into my first collection of writings.  I want people to get something from my writing like I've gotten things from other people's writings.

I got a little from Brave New World, which I finished today.

I  got the overall message, but I'm not sure what it's actually pointing to.  Since it presented two distinct ideas, neither of them all that appealing (totalitarian ecstasy vs. a fiercely religious anti-woman semi-tribal society) it left me feeling off.  Of course, the book was written in the 1920s, which shocked me upon learning that after finishing it.  He got a lot of things right, and I feel like if I would have read it knowing that, I wouldn't have been so critical.

Unlike 1984 which has the choice between the clearly terrible society (w/easy to make clear parallels to today's society), and an abstract alternative of freedom that people of almost any political spectrum can embrace, Brave New World instead presents the choice is between two dystopias.  One a dystopia of a terrible unrealistic tribal nature, and the other a lifetime of unthinking pleasure.  Of being the rat that had a level attached to the pleasure center of it's brain, slamming the level until it starved to death.

Huxley later said he wished he included a third option, and if he had, perhaps the novel would have felt as complete as 1984 always felt to me.  But reading it I felt a disappointment in a work that I had heard so much about.  Even though I didn't like the writing style, the ideas presented within, control with love, are far too potent to ignore.  Are even more potent (though the writing is inferior to Orwell's) than 1984's society and it's message.  Because are society doesn't seem oppressed violently.  We are oppressed openly because of our endless distraction to an endless amount of entertainment-sexual, adrenal, romantic, humorous, and nearly sensual (as was the reality in the novel).

Those who are entertained do not revolt, as they say.  They just complain about gas prices in the lulls of distraction.