As a writer, one takes pains to avoid the dreaded cliche.

If one is writing, let’s say a hearty biographical piece and takes great care to note that the subject’s ability to win a Best Actor Oscar, a Nobel Prize in Astrophysics AND a ribbon at the county fair for Best Pumpkin was (forgive me, dear reader) no mean achievement, that’s when you know you have embarked on a gloomy stroll down Hack Alley as a writer.

Thus, a problem presents itself for anyone interested in scribbling about the various depravities and decadencies of the totalitarian ideology. This is simply because what we may call totalitarian sentiment and the banality of the cliché are rather joined at the heart.

To kick off the cascade of cliche, writers will often notice, perhaps overnotice, the road to power.

Well, let me just say, to complete the cliché, that the road to power is paved with two rather different kinds of miseries. These are the suffering we endure and the pleasures we cannot bring ourselves to surrender.

Here, two immortal bastions of wisdom on the matter cleanse us of the cliché.

History whinnies, quivers, and vibrates with irony of the sort that one wonders if it were pitched as a TV show, would it get rejected on grounds of unbelievability.

That the eternal Aldous Huxley was, in fact, the teacher of the equally imperishable George Orwell, is positively soaked and dripping with irony and serendipity.

Indeed, it was far nearer the turn of the last century, 1917, at Eton college when a teenaged Eric Blair, known to us historically as George Orwell, found himself in front of an emerging but by no means established writer and French teacher named Aldous Huxley, fresh off the publishing of a collection of poems called The Burning Wheel, deployed to the reading world the previous year.

Truly an encounter that would be dismissed as ludicrous were it to grace the silver screen, but nonetheless an aforementioned vibration from history that will, to trip over another cliché, show that the truth is less believable than fiction.

It would be several decades later when Mr. Orwell, now an established, though impoverished writer published his immortal 1984 only just one half-step behind the second half of the 20th century, in 1949. He had written it while he was extremely ill with tuberculosis, which would eventually push him beyond this veil of tears the following year.

Whatever the depth of the acquaintanceship, may I be so bold as to say friendship, he and Huxley (by the way, of course by this point the author of the equally undying and prescient Brave New World) might have been will remain forever shrouded in the mists of history.

But it was at least deep enough to merit Orwell sending a copy of the newly minted 1984 to Huxley a mere 4 and a half months after the saga of Winston Smith in Oceania was published. Deeper still enough that Mr. Huxley wrote a letter, dated October 21, 1949, to Orwell to observe the writerly chore of one-upmanship.

You see, dear reader, both 1984 and Brave New World have the same bleak, dark and, to coin a phrase, futureless future for their respective casts of characters. Yet the roads to power they took were shaped differently. One with the agony of coercion, the other with the comforts of capitulation. Well, Huxley had some thoughts about Orwell’s now infamous “boot on the face”.

After Huxley’s obligatory concessions of kindness referring to “how fine and how profoundly important [1984] is” he moves straight in for what the true future of power may look like.

But it is the philosophy of the “ultimate revolution” that Huxley wants to set his and Orwell’s gaze upon. He said that the “first hints” can be readily 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,” Huxley wrote,“which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.”

He puts the finest point on his argument by simply writing that “whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.”

So, in that shrug, the curious reader can see Huxley dispense entirely with Orwell’s vision of the future of one of surveillance, coercion and abuse. His “own belief”, Huxley continues,”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. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.”

So, there you have it, dear reader. The two threads of cliché weave themselves into a singular question mark. Whose vision of the future of totalitarianism was correct?

Would Orwell’s bootheel goosestep the ruling class into forever-power as it did when the Inner Party sent the doomed Smith into the rat-infested innards of Room 101, or would Huxley’s vision of a society placated by casual meaningless pleasure and a perennial Soma holiday be the ruler’s recipe for perpetual power?

Perhaps this is the final irony of the exchange between Orwell and Huxley. The question was never simply which of the two men possessed the clearer crystal ball, but whether we could recognize the different faces of power before becoming so accustomed to them that we ceased to notice their presence.

And so, dear reader, we return to our dreaded cliché, that gloomy stroll down Hack Alley, the road to power. Perhaps the mistake was in imagining that this road must run in only one direction, paved either with the agony of coercion or the comforts of capitulation. What if the ruling class need not choose?

What if Orwell’s bootheel and Huxley’s soma bottle are not rival instruments of domination, but complementary ones, the former lying gleefully in wait, as the Cheetah stalks the Gazelle, for those who refuse the latter?

Well, Huxley closes the curtain on his letter by foretelling that, “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

“In other words,” he explained, “I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large-scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.”

A society capable of both might discover that it need not keep its subjects perpetually terrified if it can keep them perpetually entertained, and need not persuade everyone to surrender if it can punish those who will not. One makes resistance dangerous; the other makes it seem unnecessary.

Perhaps in the age of smart phones, social media (I fully recognize the cliche imbricated in and necessitated by bitching about modern technological conveniences), and the on-demand dopamine dumps that these imply, as well as the algorithmic excess that heightens our appetites while circumsizing our interests, we might simply have discovered that the most efficient prison is the one whose inmates mistake their bars for toys, whose wardens need not stand watch so long as the entertainment never stops, and whose occasional dissidents can still be reminded, by the bootheel, that the walls are real. Thus, our wretched cliché comes alive.

And if this does indeed sound like a cliché, I can only plead that, on occasion, the truth has the most unfortunate, though nonetheless helpful, habit of making a hack out of us all.