It amazes me that there are people who actually take Russell Brand seriously

I like Russell Brand, but the guy is a comedian. I think the best joke he's ever managed to pull is to get political wonks to take the crazy stuff he says seriously. However, insofar as there are those who do, this column in The Spectator deals effectively with Brand's newest lunacy:

..The strangest thing of all is that nothing Brand said on Newsnight is remotely new or interesting. It has always been fashionable to want to chop down the tree in the revolutionary-despotic manner because trimming it effectively (reform/voting) is slow, tedious and unglamorous. And who doesn’t know that there are vast inequalities in the world and that it is in the interests of certain people for things to remain that way? (Those who have looked into this will also be aware that ‘the system’ has dragged 20 million people out of poverty in the past two decades, many of whom understand a bit about revolution).

I certainly believe in a more equal society; which is why I suggest that, if we’re going to have a revolution, we begin with Brand’s new $2.224 million dollar mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

But seriously, the central objection to Brand’s desire for ‘revolution’ and ‘an egalitarian system’ is familiar to anyone who has read their George Orwell: how can complete equality become a reality without force? And if there is to be an enforcer, what is in place to make sure that person remains equal to everyone else?

h/t Terry Galvin

Huxley explains to Orwell why Brave New World is more prescient than 1984

From the marvellous site Letters of Note we have
Aldous Huxley's letter to George Orwell complimenting him on 1984 but explaining why his own novel, Brave New World, was more likely a better prediction of the future..

The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual's psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. 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. 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.