Poster Presentation
The Perfect Dystopia: Huxwellianism
Andrew Thompson
Faculty Mentor: Christine Iwanicki
English and Journalism
Faculty Mentor: Robert Seltzer
Philosophy and Religious Studies
My presentation analyzes Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 drawing parallels from both totalitarian agendas in comparison to today’s world. My intention was to answer the question, “Is either dystopia coming to fruition?” I was also able to find many critical essays on both of these dystopias becoming realities. My presentation also benefits from a personal discussion I was had with one essayist in particular, James B. Rule, an Affiliated
Scholar at the University of California, Berkley. He and I discussed totalitarianism and the usage of technology for surveillance. He also directed towards his most recent book Privacy in
Peril. To my luck the Kony 2012 internet campaign exploded throughout social networks, contributing a great deal to examining how people react to propaganda. The Kony campaign was a great help because it incorporated methods from both totalitarian societies, following the sympathetic, loving roots of the Huxleyan system and also the violent, angry roots of the
Orwellian ideology. In terms of other modern methods of both of these systems, the Persian
Gulf War media censorship, the NDAA (2012), the Patriot Act, the usage of the Pledge of
Allegiance as a Neo-Pavlonian conditioning, and touched upon how religion is used as a soma in population control all alluded to either the Huxleyan or Orwellian ideas. As these topics began to dovetail it became clear to me that America is not approaching either totalitarian societies but both, which I coined as Huxwellianism.