which predictive mid-twentieth-century author got the future more right—Aldous Huxley, with his vision in Brave New World in which people were controlled by the state through pleasure, or Orwell, with his darker view of a state built on the use of pain. (Huxley, in fact, briefly had been one of Orwell’s French teachers at Eton.) Actually, it is a false distinction—both men are right. The great majority of people are content to be amused and not to challenge the state. But a dissident minority often emerges, and suppressing it generally seems to require harsher methods. As Orwell put it near
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