Just wait until you read Huxley _Brave New World_ it’ll blow your mind. 1984, Brave New World, and Animal Farm should be required reading.
Edit: and atlas shrugged, but that doesn’t go over well here.
dylan604•41m ago
Animal Farm was required reading at my school. They also did Fahrenheit 451 instead of 1984 though.
operatingthetan•36m ago
The four books you mentioned have very different methods of control. The primary thing they share is being dystopic.
---
1984: control through fear and pain.
Brave New World: control through pleasure and distraction.
Animal Farm: control through corruption and deception.
Atlas Shrugged: control though guilt and regulation.
---
Brave New World is the most prophetic.
Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.
irishcoffee•32m ago
That was kind of the theme of the suggestions, control. I’m kind of stoked you identified it.
Terr_•23m ago
> Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.
Following the tangent: I read the book "blind", when I was mind-numbling bored for a couple pre-dialup weeks at a relative's house. Eventually I decided to finish it purely out of spite so that I could confidently denounce it as trash in the future. (And today it pays off?)
In short, it's a book of incredible hypocrisy which also disrespects the reader's intelligence and time.
Hypocrisy, because Rand asserts that certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing in the real world to the audience. The difference is that instead of "think of the starving children", it's "think of the Marty Stu [0] corporate executive üermenschen", the characters the author has been playing up for a couple hundred pages already.
This is compounded by the manifesto chapter where Marty Stu does nothing but monologue. The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought, a kind of necessary deceit to get people ready to swallow a pompous diatribe without looking at it too closely.
1984 has fear and pain for the white collar set like the protagonist, but it's implied mass media, telescreens, and propaganda do for the working class there, which is similar to BNW's style and of course has overlap with Animal Farm.
A pretty good study of different flavors when taken together, though?
Rury•14m ago
Honestly though, they're not all that prophetic. I mean, you can find widespread instances of each means used throughout human history. Although I would happen to agree that the methods that feed complacency and ignorance are the most effective.
slipknotfan•9m ago
You have to defend your freedom from all angles of attack.
thrance•26m ago
Brave New World warns against the dangers of consumerism, hedonism and complacency.
1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes.
Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray.
Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society? How we'd be better off if we just ceded total control of our society to the oligarchy?
Yeah... One of these doesn't belong on the list. I read all four, and while I enjoyed the first three, the last one is closer to fanfiction than literature in my mind. I always think of AnCap memes and chuckle to myself when I see it mentioned.
tracerbulletx•2m ago
The villains in Atlas Shrugged are other rich people who achieved their power with corruption and mysticism. I do not want to enact the morality of Atlas Shrugged, but its also wildly misunderstood by almost everyone for some reason. Its mostly just supposed to be competency porn.
refulgentis•19m ago
I liked Atlas Shrugged, didn't go over well for me because I'd read all of them by 15, and I assumed 2/4 were de rigeur in at most high school.
vincent-manis•7m ago
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
irishcoffee•1m ago
For what it’s worth I read Lotr when I was 8 and atlas shrugged when I was 12. I’m must be stupid naive about the discourse over shrugged around here. The meta-story made sense to me as much as the hero journey of frodo(and gollum) made sense to me.
I mean this sincerely, I don’t understand the beef with shrugged. The idea of “a small population owns the world” not only made sense as a theme, but it what is happening in the world today. I must be too stupid to have realized the political bits.
johnea•53m ago
> and a steady stream of pacifying media
Seems like he also predicted internet brain damage...
windowshopping•41m ago
It's amazing to me how nobody seems to know about the short story "The great automatic grammatizator" by Ronald Dahl. Nobody got closer than him. I feel like I should be reading about it all the time and no one seems to have ever heard of it.
darkerside•40m ago
Roald
gensym•22m ago
Roald Dahl also wrote a story about two dudes who wanted to try each other's wives without getting consent from said wives so they swapped places in the middle of darkness and then the next morning, one of the dude's wives said to her husband, "Holy shit, whatever you did last night was amazing. I never liked doing the hot dog dance before but if you can keep doing what you did last night, I'll always be down!"
senectus1•5m ago
what was this called?
gensym•1m ago
The Great Switcheroo
thrance•22m ago
Fitting how the author felt compelled to use Gemini to generate an ugly banner for their blog post. An image completely devoid of meaning, that adds nothing to the article except a few kilobytes: slop under any definition.
refulgentis•15m ago
Old enough to feel "get off my lawn" at this: a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" - heard this about TV, internet, iPhone in my lifetime.
It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. On net they tend to engender sloppy creation (hence: AI slop), not encouraging puerile tabloid consumption.
slipknotfan•10m ago
"While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers."
irishcoffee•55m ago
Edit: and atlas shrugged, but that doesn’t go over well here.
dylan604•41m ago
operatingthetan•36m ago
---
1984: control through fear and pain.
Brave New World: control through pleasure and distraction.
Animal Farm: control through corruption and deception.
Atlas Shrugged: control though guilt and regulation.
---
Brave New World is the most prophetic.
Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.
irishcoffee•32m ago
Terr_•23m ago
Following the tangent: I read the book "blind", when I was mind-numbling bored for a couple pre-dialup weeks at a relative's house. Eventually I decided to finish it purely out of spite so that I could confidently denounce it as trash in the future. (And today it pays off?)
In short, it's a book of incredible hypocrisy which also disrespects the reader's intelligence and time.
Hypocrisy, because Rand asserts that certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing in the real world to the audience. The difference is that instead of "think of the starving children", it's "think of the Marty Stu [0] corporate executive üermenschen", the characters the author has been playing up for a couple hundred pages already.
This is compounded by the manifesto chapter where Marty Stu does nothing but monologue. The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought, a kind of necessary deceit to get people ready to swallow a pompous diatribe without looking at it too closely.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue
nemomarx•21m ago
A pretty good study of different flavors when taken together, though?
Rury•14m ago
slipknotfan•9m ago
thrance•26m ago
1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes.
Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray.
Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society? How we'd be better off if we just ceded total control of our society to the oligarchy?
Yeah... One of these doesn't belong on the list. I read all four, and while I enjoyed the first three, the last one is closer to fanfiction than literature in my mind. I always think of AnCap memes and chuckle to myself when I see it mentioned.
tracerbulletx•2m ago
refulgentis•19m ago
vincent-manis•7m ago
irishcoffee•1m ago
I mean this sincerely, I don’t understand the beef with shrugged. The idea of “a small population owns the world” not only made sense as a theme, but it what is happening in the world today. I must be too stupid to have realized the political bits.