brave new world v. 1984

Hannah Arendt defined totalitarianism as the elimination of the individual. A totalitarian regime seeks uncontested authority over one's inner thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, in addition to one's actions and utterances. All action is either forbidden or mandatory; individual will is subsumed as an instrument of the state. This is Orwell's 1984.

But there is another, equally dystopian path to absolute power over the soul. The danger posed by the elimination of the public realm in sacrifice to the cult of individual whims and desires poses no less of a threat to human flourishing than does its inverse. This is Huxley's brave new world.

At the heart of Tocqueville's vivid descriptions of mid 19th century American society were the mediating institutions that existed in a conceptual space between the individual and the collective, such as markets, churches, schools, and leisure clubs. Such voluntary institutions were essential to - perhaps even a prerequisite for - the protection of the rights and liberties enumerated by the Constitution. Individual liberty is constrained from devolving into hedonistic license, while collective power is constrained from devolving into mob tyranny by force of habit. The precarious balance between freedom and security is cultivated and preserved over time through these institutions. The result that emerges is civilized life.

Whereas the totalitarian nightmare of the twentieth century emerged from top-down imposition of revolutionary ideology that slowly strangled the life out of mediating institutions, the totalitarian threat of the twenty-first will emerge from the gradual disintegration of the institutions into irrelevance and meaninglessness, like house plants wilting in forgotten corners. Social coercion and market incentive will be the only instruments that remain to orient and motivate human action. Once again the strong will dominate the weak, and it shall be considered justice.