BNW & 1984

For most of 1984 I thought that the main goal of both societies was stability. Of course they achieved this in different ways - while in Brave New World stability is achieved by keeping people happy, in 1984 it's achieved by keeping everyone under the absolute power of Big Brother. But then we get to read O'Brien's long explanation about the real point of the party and how it was actually just set up to hold onto pure power.  At least that's the gist I got from his spiel - although I don't know if I caught everything O'Brien was saying, most of it seemed to revolve around power and how anyone that says they want power for any other means than just having power is fooling themselves.

This marks a pretty big difference between the two books. While Brave New World is a story about a utopia that doesn't work in practice, 1984 is a story about a totalitarian government that went too far to satisfy it's need for power and control. This means the warnings the authors are trying to get across might also be different. Huxley could be trying to say something about how unrealistic utopias are and how one could never really work - due to the different wants of the people within one society - however Orwell didn't even pretend that the party was trying to set up a utopia. O'Brien keeps repeating the Party doesn't care about the good of their people -  that they aren't just governing party members because they think it's what best for them. Basically Orwell might just be trying to warn people just against greedy governments that want too much power. In my opinion this dilutes some of the power of 1984's warnings, since it seems less realistic that a government with the goal of pure power would be able to rise up, at least in our current society. The totalitarian governments I can think still had some goal - some utopian like vision they were trying to achieve and through which they could garner the support needed to take control in the first place. Of course, any government or political party could take on the facade of a goal while still just wanting power, which I'm pretty sure O'Brien mentions at some point and that might be what Orwell is really warning us about. Still at that point the book's big warning would be to watch out for misleading governments - which doesn't seem as powerful of a message as warning us against utopian visions that don't really work. Then again, corrupt or lying governments might be more common of a problem in the real world, so perhaps Orwell's warning is more applicable today anyway.

 Anyway, overall I mostly enjoyed the book. Especially the sections around the long drawn out explanations about how the society worked - both "Goldstein's" book and O'Brien's speeches. I guess these were important, yet I would have appreciated if Orwell applied a show rather than tell policy to some of the points he was trying to make in these sections. What did you think?