Comparing Huxley's Brave New World 'And 1984'

In 1931, Aldous Huxley embarked on a journey to create a futuristic dystopia where one government encapsulated the entire global population—saturating its civilians with constant mental and physical distraction to avoid innate dissent. Eighteen years later in 1949, Eric Arthur Blair, under pseudonym George Orwell, penned an oppressive totalitarian society where unorthodox thoughts and rebellion were silenced by cyclical violence and torture. Each approach to the divisiveness presented in Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 could not be further apart. Huxley’s novel features future citizens molded from prebirth inside containers, undergoing biological programming in ‘hatcheries’ to obey the whims and orders of leader Mustapha Mond.
Orwell’s novel instead chose to form model civilians through psychological conditioning, severing familial ties and loyalty by enlisting children in the Party Spies surveillance organization, who report indiscriminately each and every crime. Brave New World’s outsider and protagonist Bernard Marx is rewarded for his dissent by being sent to an island populated with like-minded individuals. In stark contrast, 1984’s hero Winston Smith is beaten, starved, and placed in a unique torture room designed to emulate his subconscious fears. Although both novels are widely different, they share similarities in the burying of the complete truth in a sea of misinformation, sensationalism, and irrelevant propaganda. The two authors were not strangers to each other, with Huxley mentoring Orwell while teaching French for a year at Eton College, an English boarding school for boys. It was there that Huxley, albeit a notoriously poor teacher who “couldn’t keep discipline and was so blind that he couldn’t see what was happening”, demonstrated his remarkable mastery of language to Orwell, imprinting on him a “taste for words and their accurate and significant use” and perhaps even strong ideas of dystopia and government (Crick). While the methodologies and ideologies employed by the autocracies in 1984 and Brave New World are vastly different, understanding of the root causes behind the ideation polar opposite societies is needed to assess applications to future and current society. Furthermore, the respective plotlines should not be the sole factor considered when analyzing the slant and intended implications of the two authors. To what extent does tone and rhetoric impact the timelessness and contemporary relevance of Orwell and Huxley’s respective vision?