In 1949, George Orwell received a snarky letter from his former high school French teacher.
Nineteen Eighty-Four had just been published to great acclaim, but this former French teacher felt differently.
His name was Aldous Huxley.

Huxley starts off the letter praising the book, describing it as “profoundly important.” He continues, “The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.”

Then Huxley switches gears and criticizes the book, writing, “Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.”

Basically while praising Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley argues that his version of the future was more likely to come to pass.

In Huxley’s seemingly dystopic World State, the elite amuse the masses into submission with a mind-numbing drug called Soma and an endless buffet of casual sex. Orwell’s Oceania, on the other hand, keeps the masses in check with fear thanks to an endless war and a hyper-competent surveillance state. At first blush, they might seem like they are diametrically opposed but, in fact, an Orwellian world and a Huxleyan one are simply two different modes of oppression.

Big Brother is watching

"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard."
George Orwell, 1984

Joseph Cannataci, the first UN privacy chief, a position created in response to the Edward Snowden revelations, makes a strong case that Big Brother was an amateur compared to today's surveillance state.

“It’s worse,” he said. “Because if you look at CCTV alone, at least Winston [Winston Smith in Orwell’s novel 1984] was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. So the situation in some cases is far worse already."

It's scary that it's almost impossible to argue with that point.
Cannataci isn't alone in this observation. Edward Snowden shares this opinion.

“The types of collection in the book — microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us — are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go,” he said. “Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.”

Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge wrote that 'We are far, far beyond the point of Stasi or “1984”. '

This doesn't even address the non-online threats such as facial recognition software and stingray tracking devices.
Almost none of these tools are ever used by law enforcement against actual terrorists as commonly understood.

Suck on that, Orwell

George Orwell once wrote about a perfect society where no one was a thought criminal, we were in a permanent state of war, and everyone loved Big Brother.

   Well, I read his book and it didn't contain something as awesome as this.

 The report suggests Abu Zubaydah was a broken man after his extensive interrogations. In CIA documents he is described as having become so compliant that “when the interrogator raised his eyebrows” he would walk to the “water table” and sit down. The interrogator only had to snap his fingers twice for Abu Zabaydah to lie down, ready for water-boarding, the report says.

 Self-torturing prisoners! How awesome is that!?!
Even Orwell couldn't dream that one up.

Still not convinced? Well consider this quote.

 The CIA’s chief of interrogations characterized rectal rehydration as a method of “total control” over detainees, and an unnamed person said the procedure helped to “clear a person’s head”.

Some people spend thousands of dollars every year on vacations in order to "clear their heads". Now we know that all that is needed is to have food shoved up your ass to accomplish the same thing.
  I'm not a doctor, so I don't know what the medical connection is between food going up the rectum and the clearing of the head, but I'm sure it is really complicated doctor-speak and I don't have that kind of time anyway.

In 1984 the United States signed the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. It was ratified by Congress 10 years later.

On the 30th Anniversary of the treaty, the U.N. has released a report condemning the United States for torturing, both on foreign and domestic soil.

 Police brutality, military interrogations and prisons were among the top concerns of a U.N. panel's report Friday that found the United States to be falling short of full compliance with an international anti-torture treaty.
   The report by the U.N. Committee Against Torture, its first such review of the U.S. record since 2006, expressed concerns about allegations of police brutality and excessive use of force by law enforcement officials, particularly the Chicago Police Department's treatment of blacks and Latinos.

 Amnesty International has been condemning the United States record on torture for some time. While it is no suprise that the torture was widely used under the Bush Administration shortly after 9/11, what isn't as well known is that Amnesty International was condemning the United States for domestic torture when Clinton was still president.

Maine Senator Angus King said, "“This is not America. This is not who we are.”
  President Obama has assured us that torture is contrary to who we are, contrary to our values." But if the muslim non-reaction to the report is any indication, they would take Obama's comment with a very tiny grain of salt and maybe a patronizing pat on the head.

  Americans are in complete and total denial.
Torture is who we are.

  In the 19th century, American slavery relied on torture. At the turn of the 20th, when America began assembling its empire overseas, the U.S. army waterboarded Filipinos during the Spanish-American War. As part of the Phoenix Program, an effort to gain intelligence during the Vietnam War, CIA-trained interrogators delivered electric shocks to the genitals of some Vietnamese communists, and raped, starved, and beat others.
   America has tortured throughout its history. And every time it has, some Americans have justified the brutality as necessary to protect the country from a savage enemy.

Kafka's America

Obama’s proposed TTIP treaty with European countries has been so successfully hidden, that even the number of years it will be kept from the public isn’t yet known.

  Secret laws are not democracy. This is the opposite of democracy.

 Secret trade laws are just the start for this Obama presidency.

Obama has create 19 secret directives that are enforced just like they are laws.

 "The only reason we know about it is the sequential numbering of the directives, and realizing they skipped a few," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks the directives.
   PPD-29 isn't the first to be tacitly acknowledged only by a missing number. Of the 30 PPDs issued by Obama, 19 have not been released. And for 11 of those, the White House has not disclosed even the subject of the order.
   "It's not only the public that doesn't have copies. It's also Congress that doesn't have copies," Aftergood said. "It's a domain of largely unchecked presidential authority."
   But they have the same legal force as an executive order, forming a body of largely secret law, said Harold Relyea, a political scientist who advised Congress on national security directives before retiring from the Congressional Research Service.
   "The difference is that while executive orders are public by law — they must be published in the Federal Register to be effective —- PPDs are not," he said. "It is a kind of secret law. People have to obey it. But it's a directive that can allocate money, direct people or take a course of action."

 I would ask how this is any difference from Rule by Royal Decree, except that Royal Decrees generally aren't secret!
How would you even know if you were breaking one of these laws?

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak”
  ― Franz Kafka, The Trial

  If you are like me your first response would be, "This can't be Constitutional." However, the Supreme Court has already ruled in favor of secret laws.
   It wasn't until last year that the Obama Administration was finally forced to reveal the legal justification for assassinating American citizens. A justification that hasn't been tested in open court.

"Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached?"
  - Franz Kafka, The Trial

I emphasize open court because plenty happens in secret courts, courts in which neither defendants or their representatives ever see.

 Federal magistrate judges, in addition to issuing routine search warrants, hear warrant applications for electronic surveillance orders, which grant permission to monitor cellphones, personal computers and other electronic devices. These orders are almost always secret and almost never become unsealed.
   In 2006, magistrates issued over 30,000 sealed electronic surveillance orders — more than the entire output of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court since its creation in 1978. These orders constitute a massive body of unpublished case law. “It is as if they were written in invisible ink,” Judge Stephen Wm. Smith said, “legible to the phone companies and Internet service providers who [receive them], yet imperceptible to unsuspecting targets, the general public, and even other arms of government.”

 We've all heard about the FISA court and its infamous lack of oversight, but even if FISA went away tomorrow the problem wouldn't go away.
   What's more, the Obama Administration has told the FISA court, the formal secret court, to ignore public court rulings. In truth, FISA "has basically become a parallel Supreme Court, but one which operates in almost total secrecy."

""The final verdicts of the court are not published, and not even the judges have access to them; thus only legends remain about ancient court cases."
  - Franz Kafka, The Trial

It seems only logical that with secret courts ruling on secret laws that you must also have secret prisons for secret prisoners to do secret interrogations on.

In some cases, the facilities in Cuba, Iraq, Lithuania, Thailand, Romania, Afghanistan and Poland are still in operation, more than six years after the Obama administration banned the enhanced interrogation tactics detailed in a lengthy report on the CIA's surveillance program released Tuesday.

Drink your soma

"What you need is a gramme of soma. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
"Take it," insisted Henry Foster, "take it. Stability was practically assured." ...
"And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn." They went out, laughing.
- Brave New World

Aldus Huxley continues to bother people.

Satires tend to tire with time, but not Brave New World : It still manages to offend. Last year American librarians ranked it among the top 10 novels that readers wanted to see banned.

First of all, there are drugs.

Nearly 70 percent of Americans take at least one prescription drug and more than 50 percent take two, scholars writing in Mayo Clinic Proceedings say. Antibiotics, antidepressants and painkilling opioids are most commonly prescribed, they found. 20 percent of patients are on five or more prescription medications, according to the findings.

It's not a coincidence that the most heavily medicated society on the planet is also oblivious to the evolution of a scary dystopian present. Why worry about things when being worried is a medical condition that can be cured.
Aldus Huxley saw that one coming a mile away.

When Philip K. Dick wrote Minority Report, he probably didn't imagine that the United States would simply substitute "precogs" with flawed computer algorithms, but that is where we are going today.
Yet discussion of this alarming trend is almost entirely absent. Why is that?

“Predictive policing used to be the future, and now it is the present.”
- Police Officer William Bratton