Since the Internet came about, I’ve read countless referrences, rantings, & moanings about society resembling 1984.
I’m fairly certain that the generation partially grown up with the Internet in it’s origins, & the following ones that grew up when it was already in place, are fairly well aware of the extent that 1984 can be applied to real life.
This was never more evident than during even the mainstream TV coverage of the “War on Terror” (I include Comedy Central as mainstream TV, fyi).
I kind of doubt many people became anti-state reading 1984, though.
To the extent that they learned the nature of the state & tyranny, many I’ve spoken to only go so far as to say that it showed them the importance of being active in government (the state), and how the sense that “we are the government” is true in a sense that we activley responsible for preventing evil from over-taking the state & thrusting into such a world.
As you can imagine, I just smiled politley at such interpretations & supressed the headache of the day.
Maybe you’ve had different experiences, but from what I can gather, most people only get an anti-establishment or anti-incumbent message out of 1984. I’m not counting the people I do not know online & offline, however, that have read the book, though.
Hey! Are you talking about Hercule Poirot? I love that show! Agatha Christie was a genius!
I have several audio books about Hercule Poirot.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a humanist, and he was famous for saying that existence precedes essence. And the existentialists did not believe in any such greater purpose to life.
Sartre not only totally misunderstood Heidegger and butchered him horribly, he was also a communist who believed everyone who was not a communist was a pig.
That’s sad to hear. I have not had many experiences with 1984 beyond a high school english class. And I guess it didn’t make me become anti-state then - I just thought of it as another novel. I like to think that it somehow contributed to my eventual openness to libertarianism, and I still think it’s a great book. However, I can understand your frustration, and why you think BNW is better. Does BNW influence people to become anti-state? Can any work of fiction “convert” someone?
Over on Nielsio’s website, V for Voluntary, a person just joined who said that reading 1984 helped him to take his ideas to their “logical conclusion” and become a voluntayist. You can read his post here.
“Sartre not only totally misunderstood Heidegger and butchered him horribly, he was also a communist who believed everyone who was not a communist was a pig.”
It is my opinion that Heidegger and Sartre are apples and oranges. The butchered aspect was purely Heidegger’s opinion, because he had a different goal: to understand Being. Rather Sartre’s goal of talking about consciousness, authenticity, freedom, and so forth. Husserl would probably say that Heidegger had butchered his work, too. But many Heidegger fans say that Husserl is not as interesting. It’s all in what they are looking for in a philosopher. And of course if they reach interesting conclusions.
Also, Sartre was not merely communist. He also opposed the state communists as much or not more than many anti-communists. He loathed the French communist party, for instance. And academic communism. And eventually dropped the goal of mixing communism/Marxism with his existentialism (his latter period even saw him looking towards Judaism). And if we can blame him for being communist, surely we should blame Heidegger for being a Nazi for a time.
I tried to read Brave New World but I just couldn’t get into it. As one of the top 100 books of all time (that’s what the book store down the road says anyway?), I have to say it was pretty spacey. I actually quite like sci-fi and futurisitc fiction and the story and themes were interesting, I just don;t know if the writing was that good for me to keep me interested.
And if we can blame him for being communist, surely we should blame Heidegger for being a Nazi for a time.
Some authors I like were actual Nazis (Otto Strasser) and quite a few were faux-Nazis (Heidegger, Ernst Junger). I’ve always thought the NaziSozi movement was more entertaining and sane than the Socialist left.
I like Husserl and Heidegger, and my main gripe with Sartre is that I just don’t think he has any real philosophically valid points. ‘Existentialism’ is really bleh to me, I think all its torments were very readily put to sleep by Max Stirner, if not ancient philosophy.