Is anyone familiar with Orwell? 1984? What about Aldous Huxley Brave New World?
I've read 1984 twice and I've read Animal Farm. I started Brave New World, but have yet to finish it.
My wife just finished 1984 and she found parts of it somewhat prophetically disturbing in light of the way things are progressing in today's world.
Orwell and Huxley definitely had the ability to look at the unfortunate possibilities concerning the baser trends of human nature and science.
Mike
I’d seen the movie and my son read the book a couple years ago. So back in March last year when we first went on lockdown, I thought about 1984 again, and my son read the book again and then we watched the movie together.. recognizing early on what trajectory we were on. It’s been like watching parts of the book unfold piece by piece ever since.
It’s made me wonder, what exactly is a prophet.. what does it mean to hear from God.. is it always an audible voice? If not then what is it then. Is it thoughts. If Orwell was able to see the direction that society was going then it wasn’t by his own power. Nothing we are able to know is ever of our own power. If God caused him to accurately see into the future and warn of where we were going when the many were blind to that insight, is that what a prophet is?
The word prophet is most often associated with divine inspiration, such as the prophets of the Old Testament. But it also has the synonyms: seer · soothsayer · forecaster of the future · fortune teller · clairvoyant which are not so divinely associated.
While “all is of God”, I think they were as I stated previously: “Orwell and Huxley definitely had the ability to look at the unfortunate possibilities concerning the baser trends of human nature and science.” They were not 100% right on the money, but they certainly knew what they were writing about. And they were not alone. I think forecaster of
POSSIBLE future would be more accurate. If you were able to call them prophets then consider President Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY. Like Orwell, he was not a prophet in the biblical sense, but he certainly was in a position to see the possible trends of where human nature could take us.
Mike