Sales of George Orwell’s ’1984′ up 69 percent on Amazon
It's interesting how little improvement in the characterization of power structures heavily intent on limiting individual liberty has occurred over the last half century. 1984 was written in 1948 and Brave New World in 1932. There have certainly been newer works in the same vein, such as V for Vendetta, but they generally have just used the same palette, the same terminology, the same ideological formulations.<p>However, I think those formulations are out of date and their out-of-dateness is harmful to this critical discussion about the nature and importance of liberty and its relationship to governance.<p>Our terminology, our mental models, even our archetypes are best-suited to the world of the 1930s and '40s, not to today. We throw around terms like fascism and tyranny and they lose a lot of their force because they are not really applicable. That's not to say that there is no danger of the industrialized, democratic nations slipping into forms of governance which are every bit as bad as tyranny or fascism, but we must recognize that when we use terminology that is not 100% applicable it makes it that much easier to dismiss or ignore.<p>History is replete with examples of tyrants who have ruled harshly to further their own self-interests or out of a sense of megalomania. But I think we need to recognize that limitations to personal liberty need not be due solely to tyranny or fascism and so forth, there are other forces, other modus operandi at play. People have tried using the term "nanny state", but that has the opposite problem of lacking sufficient gravitas.<p>There is a very real movement that has been underway for over a century to limit individual liberty in the service of the greater good. The war on drugs is an extension of this phenomenon, as are the worst excesses in the war on terror. But lacking good terminology makes this discussion that much more cumbersome and difficult.