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Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, Wells and Vonnegut - Each Wrote Based On How People Actually Behave [1]

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Date: 2025-07-30

It has been a while.

The summer filled in with a too-much-ness, tasks I didn’t want but was handed because no one else was there to get it done, scheduled tasks that were challenging and exhausting, typical summer unscheduled tasks that can not be foreseen, and then there’s getting sick in the middle of all of that. On the mend, I can put a little something out there for all of us to gnaw on, and get some new insights flowing.

I’ll start by saying, these books are not on my current summer reading list, but at one time they all were, and are in my library.

H. G. Wells wrote books about everything. Born 1866, died 1946. His story The Time Machine tells of a man possessed with the control over events in life that are uncontrollable, but for an invention that allows going back, going forward but always having to return to time and place of the here and the now to accomplish the act of living.

His work tells us that no mater what inventions we create, our fears, our hopes, our dreams and our reality seldom stay aligned, nor should we expect to be able to make that so. We live in an ever-changing world, but yet, so much of it is constant.

Aldous Huxley, yet another prolific writer, gave us Brave New World, a required reading book at middle school and high school levels. Born 1894, died 1963. Brave New World tells us of a time when society is sorted into classes based on perceived intelligence, compatibility and some peculiar sense of hierarchy. In his story, the massive technological institutions required to hold this edifice in place crumble in the face of human desire, intrigue, innate drives, including sexual, that all of us are prone to. In short, we are who we are, even when we’re manipulated, or we sometimes forget that we aren’t just “product” that gets packaged, sorted sold, and shipped. We’re not widgets. Again, fears, hopes, dreams and reality can be held in alignment for only a short while, until our basic nature slips the cogs and the drive chain comes off.

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was primarily a social writer, born 1903, died 1950. His criticism of authoritarians, communism and fascism are seen in his two required reading books, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Nineteen Eighty-Four very closely parallels the world we now try to navigate through our electronic portholes, the cellular device. Here’s a partial listing from Wikipedia of some phrases that resonate with how we view media, the news cycle and the way our devices attempt to control our thinking:

Orwell gave us a vocabulary for looking through that porthole of human behavior. We stay inside our “safe place” because that’s what our fears direct. Our hopes and dreams want the “cruel world” outside to remain there, not come in and invade our near perfection. We seek the bubble. We want to not feel the prick of the rose thorn when we cut its bloom. We are angered and displaced when we have to deal with those who tell us we are not valid without THEIR approbation and consent. Whether you lean left or right does not matter. As you lean in to the displacement and lose center, the dynamic becomes even more unstable. The porthole fades, reality crashes in, and we become overwhelmed by its awesome power.

Kurt Vonnegut, born in Indiana in 1922, died in 2007, wrote about absurdities, disturbing experiences, a world in deep trouble, and making sense of the absurd. Satire and gallows humor are evident in his writing. Cat’s Cradle, a story about a peculiar 20th century that tangles cultic beliefs with dangerous technology. A primary notion is this religion called Bokononism, based on an imaginary island, where the leader of the cult is in possession of an unimaginable seed crystal called ice-nine, a chemical that instantly freezes liquid water wherever it is found. The leader thinks of humans as stupid, and as himself even superior to a known God. It once was required reading at the high school level.

Vonnegut studied engineering, so technology is no stranger in his writing. He served in the Army during World War II and was held as a POW during the Allied bombing of Dresden. He witnessed first hand what we do to one another with our technology, the violence, the horror and the absurdity of it all.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood primarily writes about fictional genres, but the themes are closely tied to the world we live in. Born in Canada in 1939, themes include environment, politics, gender, women’s rights, but she leans in and looks at how we as humans navigate dystopias. The Handmaid’s Tale is not just a speculative work, but an examination of the perils of male domination and female submission in a world that requires the talents, skills and abilities of each gender identity, separately and in collaboration. When hostility between the genders, and hostility toward all variants of these two archetypes exists, we fail to thrive as a species.

We fall into the gender trap so easily. It is a curious world we live in right now, because, we are being asked to offer up our most capable people, most suited for certain tasks, even if that is not their traditionally assigned biological capacity, or the previous roles society had placed on them. Again, fears, hopes, dreams and reality are misaligned.

I’m mentioning these specific writers because they are seminal in American literature, but also, because their writing was dangerous when they spoke, dangerous now, and always will be dangerous. Danger comes when you see the world around you for what it truly is, begin to imagine how terrible it can become, put those ideas down on paper, and share with the rest of humanity about your fears and concerns.

Dismissive, “we know better” experts are not of any help once those fears have been released. We humans extrapolate into our future, based on how our past has gone. If we have been programmed not to respect, but to fear, we will continue to process our reality through that filter. We will make fear-based choices, fear-aligned assumptions, fearful hesitations about “going against the grain.”

I recommend that you get a copy of any one of these authors’ books, actually a paper copy, and touch the pages, break through into the minds of a world gone by that they describe, and attempt to see the world they foresaw.

It is not all dystopian. That’s fear talking.

But it is within the realm of actually happening to us as a species.

We all need to wake up. We need to turn off our electronic leashes and stop trying to “join everybody else” just long enough to discover that we already are connected, very deeply.

Trying to make this connection even more immediate and “constantly on” robs us of our opportunity to find our own place in the world.

Don’t become a mechanical automaton. Be uniquely you.

Peace.

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