"Love Their Servitude:" Huxley's 1949 Letter to Orwell

Psychological conditioning is more powerful than intimidation and violence.

John Leake

In a letter dated October 21, 1949, Aldous Huxley thanked George Orwell for sending him a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He praised the book, but also offered some friendly criticism in which he proposed that his dystopian vision in Brave New World was the more likely direction in which the world was heading.

Key points of Huxley’s letter include the following:

• The Ultimate Revolution: Humans will be managed through internal, psychological, and biological means rather than external force.
• Love Your Servitude: Huxley argued that the ruling oligarchy would find “less arduous and wasteful ways of governing” than the “boot-on-the-face” approach, by “suggesting people into loving their servitude”.
• Technological Control: He predicted that the future would be more like Brave New World, in which people are made to feel comfortable in their enslavement.
• Efficiency vs. Sadism: Huxley believed that the continuous, sadistic punishment in 1984 was too energy-consuming. Instead, governments and technologists would prioritize a more “efficient” form of control based on pleasure and distraction.

Huxley concluded his letter by stating: “I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, with its lockdowns, masking, vaccine mandates, and censorship, it seemed to me that Orwell’s vision was coming true. However, I now wonder if Huxley was right—that is, that psychological conditioning is a more effective way of controlling people than intimidation and violence.