Top Tier in the Top End: Life at Clayton Utz Darwin

Credo, matematica, inglese, filosofia, italiano fisica, senso, crepo matematica, inglese. Hoho, ma tu radio, ma tu. Mati radio, ma tu. Ma tu, mati radio, ma tu. Non l'esse più su fiasate, ma tu radio, ma tu radio. Podcast inglese per le zamedi maturità, letto danila prisco, the dystopian novel, all well and haxly. Oh wonder, how many goodly critters are there? How beautiful mankind is, oh brave new world that has such people in it. William Shakespeare, the tempest, act five-seen one, utopia. Imagine the perfect world, a fair society with a just, uncorruptible government, ensuring happiness and stability to all. From Plato's de Republic to famous dystopia by Sir Thomas Moore, philosophers and storytellers of the past have tried to portray for us what the ideal world would look like, the perfect city, the perfect country. Their books remain to this day impressive feats of philosophical and political imagination, thought experiments that have contributed to our current or the standing of what a good society should be. But here is the thing, more often than not, do not a really lot of fun to read. You know what stories people love to read instead? dystopias, imagine a horrible world, a non-fear society with an unjust, corrupt government, ensuring misery and violence for all. Those stories seem to really get enough of. Isn't that strange? So many stories of dark futures. Even just limiting ourselves to literature, we get Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Vladimir Nabokov band sinister. Philip K. Dick's Minority Report and Margaret Atwood's The Handsmaid Stale, Seven's King the Stand and Kushun Takami's Battle Royale, just to name very, very few. And it's not just literature. Think of movies, some of which inspired by books by the way. Metropolis 1927, A Clockwork Orange 1971, Blade Runner 1982, The Terminator 1984, The Matrix 1999, Wally 2008, The Hunger Games Series, and the books are quite fun too. The divergent series and Mad Max 4 E Road 2015, Class TV shows like Black Mirror, Westworld, The Handsmaid Stale, The Walking Dead, and many more, in what about comic books? Alan Moore's V for Bandetta and Watchmen, Marvel's Civil Ward and X-Men Days of Future Past, Plus Akira and Battle Angel Alita from Japan. And of course, the dark apocalyptic world of dystopias have been a perfect setting for video games. The Fallout series and the Delsex games, the 2007 classic Bea Shock or Half-Life 2, are just a few examples but at least it's endless. Today is all too common for an artist to use an imaginary feudal wall to make a point about the present day, Be it about technology, about authoritorian politics, or about unrestrained capitalism. We are used to dystopian stories, we know them very well, we've enjoyed so many of them. But in order to understand the role of this dark and scary feudal walls in our collective imagination, we need to look at the work of the two writers, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, who in the first half of the 20th century really popularized the genre. They wrote stories that permeated our culture deeply, through the point that they gave us wars we still use to this day. Think of Big Brother, Thought Police, New Speak, just to name a few. Their most successful books, Brave New World and 1984 respectively, are the all-time classics of the dystopian genre, and are still loved by many. Let's learn more about these two British novelists and the strange dystopian walls they dream up, and we'll discover why their vision of the future are still so relevant and worth reading today. Aldous Huxley, Aldous Loner Huxley was born in England in 1894, when an unusual family of famous scientists and academics. But his parents were teachers and school headmasters, while two of Aldous brothers became successful biologists, one even winning a novel prize. Huxley studied English literature at Oxford and began his career as a writer very early. By the time he was only 34, he had already published four novels, From Yellow 1921, Antique Hay 1923, Those Barren Leaves 1925, and Point Counterpoint 1928, All Social Sattires. All together over the course of his career, Huxley published almost 50 books. In 1916, Huxley tried to volunteer for the British Army to fight in World War I, but he was rejected on health grounds, being half blind in one eye, a problem that plagued him through his life. Instead, he spent the years of the Great War and much of the following two decades in the company of the so-called Bloomsbury set, the group of British intellectuals that included novelist Virginia Wolfe and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Writer E. M. Forster, it is following this period that Huxley wrote his most famous work, The Distopian novel Brave New World, published in 1932. In 1937, Huxley and his wife Maria moved to the United States, where he lived the rest of his life. In the 1950s, Huxley became closely associated with the growing cultural interest for psychedelic drugs, which led him to write a memoir of his psychedelic experiences, titled The Dores of Perception, 1954. The book that later inspired young Jim Morrison to name his rock band The Dores. Huxley died on November 22, 1963, on the same day as another great English novelist, CS Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia C. Euris. Ironically, both of these high-profile vets found little room in the press at the time, because November 22, 1963, was also the day United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in one of the most famous and talked about incidents of the 20th century. Brave New World, published in 1932, is without adoubbed all the Huxley's masterpiece, and it remains one of the most celebrated examples of dystopian fiction. The story is set in London in the year 250040, in a society where natural reproduction has been outlawed, and all humans are created in labs. At birth, every man and woman is assigned a social cast, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta or Epsilon, which will determine their entire future. Their job, their access to money and power, the people they will be able to frequent socially. In order to keep the social peace, members of different castes are psychologically engineered to reach different levels of intelligence and physical development. With Alpha's and Beta's being the ruling class, tall, beautiful and highly intelligent, while Gamma's delta's Epsilon are genetic clones, most of them all look the same. Are shorter and weaker and have gradually lower and lower intelligence, to the point that Epsilon's are practically overgrown babies, capable only of the most basic manual labor. In order to keep this horrifying social system in place and prevent the lower classes from rebelling, societies flooded with distractions in the form of entertainments, such as high-tech movies that involve all five senses, and a constant supply of a calming happiness-producing drug called Soma. In this nightmarish setting, a savage, a man who was born naturally in a savage reservation, were supposedly uncivilized people still live without the social engineering of the rest of the world, is brought back to London. The savage John is then confronted with a pleasure obsessed, sterilized society of 2540 London, and struggles to adapt to a world that seems to think the peak of individual freedom is getting to choose which form of entertainment to enjoy. It's impossible to overstate the impact that Brave New World has had on our culture. Haxley's incredible imagination managed, in 1932, to envision a world where pleasure and entertainment were the tools with which the ruling class kept the population calm. Injustice is allowed to go on in the Brave New World through a constant stream of distractions of meaningless pleasures that make people forget the horror and unfairness at the root of its social system. He said that at the time the book was published, he didn't believe the dystopian world depicted in his novel could be an actual threat, but a couple of decades or so later, after World War II, del film. Visible consequences of Nazia and Soviet propaganda and scientific evidence of how mass conditioning worked. He changed his mind and then thought that the idea of a society where people were made to love their state of servitude by a controlling oligarchy was not so far fetched. As to numbing and pervasive influence of entertainment, technology and psychotropic drugs he was nothing short of prophetic. George Orwell Eric Orther Blair, better known by his chosen pen name George Orwell, was born in 1903 from a wealthy English family in the Behar state of what was at the time British India. He was educated in England but returned to India in 1922 to work for the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Years later he wrote about the experience in his first novel Burma's Days, which was published in 1934. Still in his 30s he published his two most celebrated walks of nonfiction, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937 and homage to Catalonia, 1938, written in his characteristic crisp lucid prose with a strong attention to our social and political themes. The Road to Wigan Pier is an account of Orwell's experience traveling through the north of England, and it gives a vivid portrayal of the life of the working class there, particularly the struggles of the family of coal miners. The book documents Orwell's increasing interest in social and political themes, which was to come full fruition in homage to Catalonia just one year later. Homage to Catalonia is Orwell's moving account of his experience fighting for the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. The book famously opens with a description of Barz Lona during the short-lived existence of Anarchist Catalonia, as Moll's socialist state, based on anarcho-syndicalist principles, which was soon brutally repressed by the communist forces, backed by the Soviet Union. Although the experience Orwell fully embraced the support for democratic socialism, which would continue for the rest of his life and be a central part of his writing, while at the same time strongly rejecting Ophorotharianism and remaining a staunch anti-stalinist. Orwell's complete rejection of totalitarian communism and Stalinism is certainly at the hearth of his 1945 novella Animal Farm, to this day one of his most red books. The short book is an allegorical fable, telling the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human masters to create a society based on equality, freedom and happiness for all animals. After their successful revolution, the animals instate a fair government for the farm, based on the principles of animalism, the most important of which is, all animals are equal. However, the little revolutionary state pretty soon devolves into a violent dictatorship, where any opposition is repressed by force, by the self-proclaimed supreme commander, the Pignapolian. In the end, the utopian animal farm is turned into a ruthless totalitarian state, where all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others, and the rich powerful pigs from alliances and traded deals with the humans in neighboring farms by now completely indistinguishable one from the other. The allegory of the downfall of the Russian Revolution and the birth of the totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin, here satirized by the Pignapolian, is evident. The story of the farm animals and their unfortunate revolution is particularly effective and memorable, and the book has remained firmly impressed in the public's imagination ever since its publication. It is the book in which Orwell in his own words, "For the first time tried to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole, but it's four years after animal farm, that Orwell published his most celebrated book, the novel 1984, 1949. It was George Orwell last published work, just a few months before he died in January of 1950, when he was only 46 years old, after his lungs deteriorated rapidly as a consequence of tuberculosis. 1984, Orwell's masterpiece of dystopian fiction is set in the future of England, which is part of a super-state called Oceania, ruled by an extreme authoritarian government. In order to keep the population under control, the ruling party in acts constant surveillance on the people who are watched through teliscrints, televisions that also function as cameras, and via vast network of spies disseminated everywhere. To reinforce unity and faith in the party, the country is kept in a state of perpetual war against a vague foreign enemy, an enemy that sometimes is arbitrarily replaced overnight with a different foreign state. The party forces its subjects to believe a variety of slogans propaganda and filth dogmas, and histories constantly rewritten to suit the narrative that the party wants for itself. The party's mysterious leader, Big Brother, is a powerful, invisible figure that may not even really exist. In this terrible totalitarian world, a diligent party worker named Wisdom Smith enters a forbidden love relationship with a core worker named Julia, and dreams of rebellion and the destruction of the party. In his lucid and unsparing prose, Orwell tells the story of Smith's doomed revolutionary dreams, writing one of the most memorable parables of totalitarianism and tyrannical repression in literary history. So much of the books in Magiari has entered our culture and has become part of what we say every day. From Big Brother, the mysterious leader of the party in the book, to the thought police, a secret police that finds and punishes anybody who has personal political thoughts that go against party policies. Radiohead's song, "To When To Make a Five", takes its title from Orwell's 1984. It's what Wisdom Smith says, complaining that the party's propaganda machine is so powerful that they could tell people the two plus two is five, and they would believe it. It's not hard to see how book about constant surveillance and false propaganda would be still very relevant to readers today. In fact, the popularity of 1984 has grown even stronger in our age of constant technological monitoring as the success of shows like the British Black Mirror clearly prove. Orwell was a self-professed political writer who wrote to expose lies and injustice and ultimately to change the world for the better, very much like his beloved Dickens. In his 1946 essay, "Why a Right", he lists four great motives for writing, valid for each and every writer. One, egoism. Two, aesthetic enthusiasm. Three, historical purpose. Four, political purpose. He claims the other three motives would have all waved the forth, had he not lived in dramatic times which called for a militant action and commitment. Always an untintely intellectual, his loyalty was to common ordinary people, choosing to resort to simple and popular literary forms like the Fable for Animal Farm and the science-fiction novel for 1984 in order to talk to as vast a readership as possible. Brave New World vs 1984. The two most famous dystopian novels presented an incredible number of elements that have become a reality into this world. Brave New World's constant stream of entertainment, distracting people from the unfairness of the world through always available pressure. 1984's Hyper Surveillance, which in our world is not or not only performed by centralized states, but increasingly by private corporations who profit off of it. Yet the two books present a fundamental difference in their dark vision of the world. In Owl's book, the party rules with violence and terror, repressing any decedents and constantly hiding the truth from the people. In Huxley's novels instead, the status quo is kept through pleasure and entertainment, with a flood of narcotics that keep the people artificially happy while the truth is not hidden is just irrelevant. The difference well articulated by Neil Postman in the four word of his famous 1985 book I'm using our selfs to death. What Owl feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Owl feared those who would deprive us of the information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Owl feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of your relevance. In 1984, Orwell added, "People are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that our fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us. Which one of these two worlds is more likely to come true? Which way are we had it? These are the questions that the dystopian fiction has been asking over a century, imagining a dark future as a way of understanding how to fix the present. What mistakes we must try hard to avoid? This is why we like the stories of dark future worlds so much, and why we keep breathing, writing and reading them today.