Comment by shmerl
14 hours ago
> Insatiability
> The nation becomes enslaved to the Chinese leader Murti Bing. His emissaries give everyone a special pill called DAVAMESK B 2 which takes away their abilities to think and to mentally resist.
Interesting. That's quite a bit before 1984 was written.
And Zamyatin’s _We_ was even a few years earlier. Great artists steal.
It's not just that, it's that the topic was extremely actual. Between the Russian Revolution and the general state of European countries at the beginning of the XX century, a lot of intellectuals were working hard on the concepts of "fully rational" societies, fair governance, social efficiency, just social order, and so on.
Somewhat ironically, what seems to have survived in the public consciousness is actually the critique of all those efforts (1984, We, etc). The Western mainstream seems to have abandoned any attempt to create a rational, enduring order from social chaos. Somehow we just accepted that things are fucked up and there is no hope of meaningfully unfuck them.
Here is a link for people who don’t know about it (it’s not too obvious but “we” is the actual title): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
Published in 1924, it’s a short read, I would recommend, I personally find it more compelling than Orwell’s work