… George Orwell Anniversary of Death | New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Huxley and Orwell do not say gloomily, like Wells and Koestler and Shaw, “Humanity is done for, unless a miracle lifts it towards the heavens.” Rather they suggest that, if certain tendencies towards regimentation which have appeared throughout the world are allowed to develop without hindrance, then we may within a foreseeable future find ourselves trapped in a world where freedom, and all the values that go with it, have withered and been forgotten. Huxley puts the argument well when he says:Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms…or else one supranational totalitarianism … developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare tyranny of Utopia.
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