The Intoxication of Power in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)

Abstract

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) stand as two powerful works of art that emanated from a mere disorder and fragmentation. To put it differently, this work of art emanated from a world that underwent an extremely rigorous political transformations and cultural seismology. This is a world that has witnessed an overwhelming dislocation. All those upheavals brought into being a new life, that is to say, a reshuffled life. A new life brings forwards a new art. This research, accordingly, attempts to put all its focus on two modernist visionary works of art that have enhanced a completely new system of thought and perceived the past, the present, and even the future with an entirely new consciousness. In the world of Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World, power seems to get beyond of what is supposedly politically legitimate. This power has paved the way for the emergence of a totalitarian system; I would rather call it a totalitarian virus. This system has emerged with the ultimate purpose of deadening the spirit of individualism, rendering the classes nothing but “docile masses”. I will be accordingly analysing how power becomes intoxicating. In other words, I will attempt to give a keen picture of how power becomes no longer over things, but rather over men according to Nietzsche’s philosophical perception of “The Will to Power”.