Ah. I think the despotism of Oceania was more subtle than the North Korean kind. And I don’t remember starvation being a problem.
When I visited Berlin we stayed at a hostel next door to the North Korean embassy. The hostel was nice - but it turned out to be owned by the North Koreans and was used to launder money for them. Oops.
Of course not - chocolate rations are higher than ever!
Starvation by itself may not have been a problem, but the quality of food — and by extension, its nutritional value — seems to be suboptimal (Winston comments on this in several places). At least that’s true for the Outer Party: the Inner Party gets a far better variety and quality, and the proles seem to have access to a black market that’s pretty much ignored by the authorities.
(One headslapper for me was how long it took me to realize what “spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat” referred to. Especially since I was pretty much raised on the stuff.)
If I had to live in a dystopia, I’d choose This Perfect Day or BNW.
Both have a lot going for them.
You know your purpose in life.
You have a job for life, a job you love either because Uni knows it will fit with your talents and personality, or because you were decanted and conditioned specifically to do that job.
You don’t have to send out a thousand job applications and get ghosted.
You never have to worry about being laid off, of being thrown out with the trash because the quarterly earnings are down, or because your position has been outsourced to Bangladesh.
You never have to worry about becoming homeless, or not being able to afford medical care.
There are no concentration camps, torture chambers or secret police (no police at all in TPD’s world).
True, there’s no longer such a thing as beer, but BNW at least has Soma.
No more crime, no war, no ethnic conflict.
(Actually TPD feels like Levin listening to John Lennon’s Imagine, grabbing that ball and running with it.)
I still find it amusing that Huxley asks us to imagine a society so depraved in its hedonism that everyone plays a version of golf where there are obstacles on the course!
So the same book predicted both Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and mini golf?
It’s sort of like the world of San Angeles in Demolition Man (as if Sandra Bullock’s character Lenina Huxley was not an obvious reference). But aside from it’s citizens seeming weird and naive by our standards and not appearing to “fuck” in a traditional sense and their culture seeming a bit sterile and obviously ill equipped to deal with actual violence by our sensibilities, it was never really made clear what was actually so bad about it.
It was written with amazing foresight but, as is pretty much always the case as more and more time goes by, things progress much farther than even the best imagination can envision.
Every restaurant is a Taco Bell?