Jim Quinn: Burning Books In A Brave New 1984 World, Part 1
Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
“Those who don’t build must burn.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” ― George Orwell, 1984
The Venn diagram above perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our current dystopian world better than any academic drivel disguised as a scientific study or any regime media produced propaganda disguised as journalism. In fact, these three novels capture everything that has gone terribly wrong in our world, and I put the blame at the feet of totalitarian governments and an apathetic fearful populace who went along because it was the easiest path to follow.
These three novels, considered among the top 100 novels ever written, were penned between 1931 and 1953, during three distinct periods, which are reflected in the themes and story lines of their dystopian worlds. They were supposed to be works of fiction, providing warnings of what could happen if we made the wrong choices and trusted the wrong people. Sadly, they became user manuals for today’s authoritarian dictators in how to control, condition and cow a population of indoctrinated sheep, as displayed during the covid pandemic exercise.
Knowing the fate of the three protagonists in these novels does not provide much hope for those trapped in the same nightmarish dystopia we are experiencing today. The three protagonists in these dystopian novels have more similarities than differences. Montag, the fireman who burns books in Fahrenheit 451, is the protagonist who begins to question his life, his profession, and why he and most of the population are deeply unhappy. His curiosity about the books he previously burned leads him into conflict with his family, his bosses, and society. He murders his boss and becomes a fugitive among the other rebels who love books and refuse to knuckle under to the totalitarians blowing up and burning their world.
John the Savage, who is a complete outsider in the “civilized” World State culture, is the main protagonist in Brave New World (a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest). His knowledge of Shakespeare provides him with the rhetorical ammunition to hold his own in a debate with the controller of the World State, Mustapha Mond, but Mond’s totalitarian state where stability and happiness outweigh individuality, emotional connections and humanism, win in the end. John’s weakness leads to him giving in to his desires and ultimate suicide, much like a Shakespearean character.
Winston Smith, a Party member who commits thoughtcrimes by keeping a diary, believing The Party misleads about history, and questioning The Party orthodoxy, is the non-charismatic protagonist of 1984. His passive resistance against the totalitarian state becomes more overt and ultimately puts him into the clutches of O’Brien and the Thought Police, who inflicted physical and psychological torture upon Smith, until he breaks and becomes an emotionally deadened, loving follower of The Party.
Three of the greatest novels of all time, all written within twenty years of each other, had similar themes, analogous protagonists, and equally disheartening endings. It is certainly clear the warnings of these brilliant men were not heeded by the masses, mainly due to the techniques described in the novels regarding population control and suppression. The overlapping themes in the three novels have played out in various forms over the last several decades, as our world has slowly descended into a dystopia of our own making. There are several key themes in these novels that are perfectly aligned with our current predicament: (1) Technology as a Means of Control; (2) Censorship; (3) Individuality Versus State Control; (4) Truth, Happiness, and Materialism; (5) Dangers of Totalitarianism.
Technology as a Means of Control
“It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Technology is the central source of societal evils in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. It is the fundamental reason for the decline in reading by the populace and the means for destroying books with high tech flamethrowers. Bradbury’s view is that the advancement in technology is ultimately destructive to society and humanity. Bradbury’s vision of the future was spot on, with wall sized televisions and radio earbuds providing endless entertainment and distraction to the population, making books obsolete. Television was in its infancy, with small black and white screens and little programming in the early 1950’s.
Today, even the poor have big screen HDTVs on their walls and everyone at the gym has earbuds with their playlist blasting. No need for human interaction or reading a book. Thirty percent of Americans haven’t read a book in the last year, and a significant percentage of the 70% who say they have are lying. I’ve had friends and co-workers who acted proud of not having read a book since college.
The dumbing down of Americans and addiction to our gadgets can be greatly attributed to the “advancement’ of technology. Super-fast automobiles and a Mechanical Hound programmed to hunt down and kill fugitives are other examples of technology in Bradbury’s novel of addictive contraptions and robots used by totalitarian regimes for nefarious purposes. Today expensive fast cars are the narcissistic status symbols of shallow people trying to impress their friends and neighbors. Robots capable of killing and attacking humans are a reality and now Artificial Intelligence programmed robots are theoretically capable of thinking independently and potentially destroying the world.
Maybe Bradbury’s most strident warning was regarding nuclear technology, having written the novel only eight years after atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, and the Soviet Union testing their 1st bomb in 1949. In the novel, two nuclear wars had already occurred, and it ends with an atomic bomb dropped on the city. Today, as Biden and his neo-con handlers push for war with Russia and China, the potential for nuclear war is the highest in fifty years. These psychopaths actually think they can “win” a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China.
Huxley’s fundamental warning in Brave New World is the danger of handing control of new powerful technologies to authoritarian minded men, who use the technology to control the population, rather than benefit society. The strict control over reproduction through technological manipulation, removal of female ovaries, and conditioning techniques, to produce the desired number of people in each class dehumanizes the entire population.
The leaders of the World State use technology to promote their desired outcome of stability and a compliant populace who are conditioned to think they are happy. The technological entertainment machines produce harmless leisure and high levels of consumption and production, producing the desired stability for Mustapha Mond and his apparatchiks. Technology is used to develop drugs like Soma, encouraged by the state to be taken as a means to increase happiness, complacency, and apathy towards seeking truth or meaning in life. Creating a superficial world through technological inventions like “feelies” insures a sedated controllable population of sheep.
The ability to grow fetuses in high tech digital pods is already being planned and designed. Technology exists to manipulate DNA to produce a desired human product. Everything Huxley warned about regarding reproduction is going to happen, with the horrible consequences to follow. We were warned but have allowed sociopaths to gain control of our government, universities, media, corporations, and medical industry.
The worldwide baby killing business, using high tech murder gadgets, and technology created pharmaceuticals to murder babies quietly, allows anyone who feels inconvenienced by pregnancy to terminate it. Down syndrome babies can be killed, so the lives of the parents aren’t disrupted. With further “advancement” in technology, we’ll be able to terminate babies that aren’t the right gender or may have an IQ below 120. Isn’t technology grand? The birthing pods envisioned by Huxley are now a reality.
The purpose of entertainment technology in Brave New World was to create a false sense of happiness in order to maintain stability in society. In reality, if you keep the masses dumbed down and distracted, they will never consider revolution against the controllers of society. This method has been utilized brilliantly by the ruling class to keep the American masses amused, distracted, entertained, and ignorant regarding their civic duty to ensure our society functions in a way in which all citizens have a say in how community standards are designed.
Allowing a small cabal of unelected psychopaths to control our government, media, corporations, and educational institutions, while the masses are entertained by their X-boxes, i-gadgets, Tiktok, Facebook, Twitter, HDTVs, Hollywood, sports, gambling, and porn, has gutted our culture and allowed the ruling class to accumulate obscene levels of wealth and power. Having the sheep-like masses distracted and ignorant is the kind of stability our current day controllers’ desire.
When they are not distracted and amused by technology, current day variations of Soma have been created through the use of medical and biotechnology to enrich the sickcare industry, pill pushing pharma industry whores, and the regime media hawking the pills, while sedating the masses and keeping them in a permanent drug induced stupor. They start them young, with millions of boys diagnosed with ADD by women who want boys to act like girls, forced to take Ritalin, Adderall, and a myriad of other Big Pharma concoctions that turn normal rambunctious boys into passive zombies who do as instructed in the public-school indoctrination centers.
Once they attain adulthood, it’s on to Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro, or dozens of other technologically create anti-depressants, designed to sedate and numb the masses from the reality of their leaders pillaging and looting their wealth through taxation, inflation, and corruption. The richest country on earth has the highest antidepressant usage on the planet because the average person’s existence is so shallow, meaningless, and devoid of value, they feel the need to escape reality. This is particularly true of older white women, with more than 25% of them taking anti-depressants.
It’s not a coincidence these mentally ill Karen’s are the easily manipulated dupes who vote for Biden, wear pussy hats, cheer for abortion, believe the bullshit climate change narrative, were gung-ho for the Big Pharma toxic jabs, and still wear masks while driving alone. The ultimate Soma-like creation has been the mRNA technological “miracle”, which the ruling class used as a test case in ruling the world through coercion and fear, while enriching themselves, and jump starting their de-population agenda. They had to change the definition of vaccine to convince the masses they were taking a vaccine, and not an untested experimental gene altering therapy, that has killed far more than it saved.
“Big Brother is Watching You.” – George Orwell, 1984
Dystopian technological totalitarianism has been epitomized by the picture of Big Brother monitoring everything the proles did, said or thought. By means of telescreens and hidden microphones, the Party is able to monitor most of its members and/or invoke fear into the hearts of the masses. Orwell essentially created the concept of a dystopian Zoom seventy years before its invention.
Orwell envisioned a centralized Party exerting control over the means of production, sources of information, surveillance machinery, and the fearsome torture apparatus used to keep the proles in line. His warning was based on Stalin’s Soviet Union. Instead of heeding Orwell’s warning, we allowed totalitarian psychopaths to use 1984 as an instruction manual. The use of technology to monitor and control the masses has exceeded any tyrannical apparatus Orwell’s mind could envision in its darkest recesses.
Today, surveillance cameras are universally utilized by the State to control the proles, collect fines for minor vehicle infractions, and prosecute anyone who breaks one of their millions of ridiculous laws. Your phones listen to every word you say, using them to bilk you out of your money through targeted ads. Even worse, as revealed by Edward Snowden in his book Permanent Record, the NSA can access your computer and phone in real time and store everything you say, text, or type.
They essentially have a permanent technological record of every communication by every person on the planet. And if you are deemed a threat or dissent from their approved narrative, they can and will use that information against you, without providing context. They can make anyone into a “criminal” whenever necessary for their purposes. Now they have the technology to turn your vehicle on or off and gain complete control of the vehicle. I’m sure this will work out well when you piss off the powers that be.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984
By linking everything you do (home security, utilities, internet usage, appliances) to wireless networks, you are captive to the whims of the State (Party). As we have seen in the last few years, authoritarian government, corporate whores, and social media tyrants have colluded in a corporate fascist scheme to use their combined dominance over social media platform technology to propagandize their agenda (Covid scam, Vaccine con game, climate hoax, transgender degeneracy, race hustles, Ukraine lies) and suppress the truth.
By deplatforming the critical thinking dissenters, silencing the truth tellers, destroying the livelihoods of those who have been proven right, and purposefully misleading the masses to further their agenda, these totalitarian psychopaths have far exceeded what the Party accomplished in Orwell’s 1984. And now, for the coup de grace, the ruling class plans to roll out CBDCs as a means to capture complete control over the proles.
Once your social credit score drops below the acceptable level, due to your brazen disregard in accepting the approved narrative, your ability to transact will be cut-off. No food or fuel for you, until you bow down to your masters and beg for their mercy. We will have allowed technological handcuffs and shackles to be placed upon us as we rot in our self-made techno-gulag. We’ve chosen momentary faux happiness over enduring hard-earned freedom. Orwell warned us and we failed to heed the cautionary tale.
"The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.” ― George Orwell, 1984
In Part 2 of this article, I will examine the role censorship played in the three dystopian novels and how our current censorship state exceeds Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury’s worst fears.
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