Worth Watching: The Dystopia We Forgot

“Chesterton foresaw a world in which people were so completely emptied of purpose, roots, and meaning that they could be anything the current despot decided to pour in. In Brave New World especially, people would not have allowed their hungers, desires, and pleasures to become the very gods they allowed to destroy them had they not already been emptied of everything else.”

This is not merely a literary observation; Hannah Arendt identified similar factors as the prerequisites for a totalitarian society:

Loneliness and Social Atomization

Losing Faith in Hierarchies and Institutions

The Desire to Transgress and Destroy

Propaganda and the Willingness to Believe Useful Lies

A Mania for Ideology

A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise

Not sure if there will be posts the remainder of this week; I’m currently engaged in a project that will see a series of reviews next week for my annual Blast from the Past series, so I’ll be finishing titles but not listing or reviewing them until after the launch post on Monday. If you want an oblique idea of what’s coming, I guess you can click here — but I emphasize oblique.

About smellincoffee

Citizen, librarian, reader with a boundless wonder for the world and a curiosity about all the beings inside it.

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