In spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of the totalitarian superstate and how it exercised power and control over its residents, George Orwell and Aldus Huxley shared a fundamental conviction. \u00a0They both argued that the established democracies of the West were moving quickly toward an historical moment when they would willingly relinquish the noble promises and ideals of liberal democracy and enter that menacing space where totalitarianism perverts the modern ideals of justice, freedom, and political emancipation. Both believed that Western democracies were devolving into pathological states in which politics was recognized in the interest of death over life and justice. Both were unequivocal in the shared understanding that the future of civilization was on the verge of total domination or what Hannah Arendt called \u201cdark times.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Neil Postman and other critical descendants have pitted Orwell and Huxley against each other because of their distinctively separate notions of a future dystopian society,[1]<\/a> I believe that the dark shadow of authoritarianism that shrouds American society like a thick veil can be lifted by re-examining Orwell\u2019s prescient dystopian fable 1984<\/em> as well as Huxley\u2019s Brave New World<\/em> in light of contemporary neoliberal ascendancy. Rather than pit their dystopian visions against each other, it might be more productive to see them as complementing each other, especially at a time when to quote Antonio Gramsci \u201cThe old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n Both authors provide insights into the merging of the totalitarian elements that constitute a new and more hybridized form of authoritarian control, appearing less as fiction than a threatening portend of the unfolding 21st<\/sup> century. Consumer fantasies and authoritarian control, \u201cBig Brother\u201d intelligence agencies and the voracious seductions of privatized pleasures, along with the rise of the punishing state\u2013which criminalizes an increasing number of behaviors and invests in institutions that incarcerate and are organized principally for the production of violence\u2014and the collapse of democratic public spheres into narrow market-driven orbits of privatization\u2014these now constitute the new order of authoritarianism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n