After rereading Farenheit 451, I got into a discussion about dystopias in general. An idea that came out of it is that people's conceptions of dystopian fiction exist in a kind of hierarchy. At the top is 1984 and slightly below it is A Brave New World, while others such as Farenheit, We, or V for Vendetta are less recognizable or thought of as that type. This is interesting to me, in that I've always regarded 1984 as the most unrealistic description of a dystopian future. It seemed to me to reject what could happen for focusing in on the hyper-extension of certain ideas. This is slightly less true for A Brave New World. However, I feel like we're almost living in the world described in Farenheit.
There's a concept in animal studies called the super-normal sign stimulus. In this situation, a stimulus that signals something, say food, to an animal has it's relevant properties increased and the new "super-normal" stimulus gets increased responses and even crowds out responses to the actual stimulus. You can get a bird to ignore a realistically modeled feeder while it goes nuts on a huge stimulus marked thing with no food in it.
I was wondering if it's exactly the over-emphasis of the authoritarian elements of a dystopia in 1984 that makes it the king. Ehhhh...I doubt this will go anywhere, but it was just something the little men sent up.
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
Brave New World scared me more than 1984 because there was no opportunity for rebellion UNLESS one had contact with Savage.
At least in 1984, thoughtcrime was a possibility; in Brave New World, it simply wasn't.