Before I get started on what very well may be my most epic post (in size...I don't guarantee epic quality of content) I want to point out that with this post I am sure to go over one thousand pageviews. The fact that anyone looks at my blog at all makes me happy. When there are enough people looking at it that it has been viewed one thousand times...while I may not sure how to process that stimulation I do, however, know how to appropriately respond.
Thank You.
Now that we've had a puppy validate you with positivity and cuteness, it's time for the bleakness.
The world that George Orwell creates is not frightening because of its substance or structure. If he set it on some alien planet populated by Zygons then it would be an amusing entertainment. It is so frightening because it is so close to not only the world we live in but the world we are becoming. Every technological step along the way, every change in how we consume information propels us closer to 1984. There's a sort of vertigo that I feel, that fear as we get closer and closer to the edge and we can see Oceania below.
The story itself is not the point of the book. It is quite rightly seen as a warning rather than entertainment. Normally I try to give a sense of the overall storyline in my blog. With this novel, there are so many more ideas than actual story. I haven't marked up a book like this since Atlas Shrugged. I openly wondered to my wife if this book would change me in a similar way as Ayn Rand's prescient masterpiece. She shrugged and said, "Probably not". Now that we are both reading 1984 together it's clear that it will change us both.
The basic story is that of a man, Winston Smith, who goes about his day and life as a member of the Party. In this world there are two castes. There are the Proles, the working class stiffs, who are pretty much anyone middle class and lower. Proles make up 85% of the population and are essentially "slave" labor for the Party. The Party is the government, the intelligentsia, and the media. They are the college graduates, the blessed, the smart ones who are controlled and indoctrinated by the ubiquitous and mustachioed Big Brother. It's fairly strange to think, but the Party is more indoctrinated and has more confining laws placed on them than the Proles.
Winston has strange feelings that there is something missing in life. He has noticed for ages that Big Brother and the Party manipulate facts and even create them out of whole cloth. The past, which he can barely remember, has been erased and changed in so many ways that he can't be sure what is true. Truth, in itself, could just be another lie.
Without realizing why, Winston purchases a diary at a shop and takes it home. He discovered a blind spot in his apartment where the all seeing Teleplate cannot observe him and takes up writing in it. He's gripped with an exhilarating fear as he goes to write in it.
"The thing he was about to do was open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp."
And that is our first taste of the great paradox of living in the world of Big Brother. Sure, their slogans routinely pumped into them are:
The world that George Orwell creates is not frightening because of its substance or structure. If he set it on some alien planet populated by Zygons then it would be an amusing entertainment. It is so frightening because it is so close to not only the world we live in but the world we are becoming. Every technological step along the way, every change in how we consume information propels us closer to 1984. There's a sort of vertigo that I feel, that fear as we get closer and closer to the edge and we can see Oceania below.
The story itself is not the point of the book. It is quite rightly seen as a warning rather than entertainment. Normally I try to give a sense of the overall storyline in my blog. With this novel, there are so many more ideas than actual story. I haven't marked up a book like this since Atlas Shrugged. I openly wondered to my wife if this book would change me in a similar way as Ayn Rand's prescient masterpiece. She shrugged and said, "Probably not". Now that we are both reading 1984 together it's clear that it will change us both.
The basic story is that of a man, Winston Smith, who goes about his day and life as a member of the Party. In this world there are two castes. There are the Proles, the working class stiffs, who are pretty much anyone middle class and lower. Proles make up 85% of the population and are essentially "slave" labor for the Party. The Party is the government, the intelligentsia, and the media. They are the college graduates, the blessed, the smart ones who are controlled and indoctrinated by the ubiquitous and mustachioed Big Brother. It's fairly strange to think, but the Party is more indoctrinated and has more confining laws placed on them than the Proles.
Winston has strange feelings that there is something missing in life. He has noticed for ages that Big Brother and the Party manipulate facts and even create them out of whole cloth. The past, which he can barely remember, has been erased and changed in so many ways that he can't be sure what is true. Truth, in itself, could just be another lie.
Without realizing why, Winston purchases a diary at a shop and takes it home. He discovered a blind spot in his apartment where the all seeing Teleplate cannot observe him and takes up writing in it. He's gripped with an exhilarating fear as he goes to write in it.
"The thing he was about to do was open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp."
And that is our first taste of the great paradox of living in the world of Big Brother. Sure, their slogans routinely pumped into them are:
"WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."
But that can be readily discarded as party propaganda. This fear is how they actually live on a day to day basis. It is the substance of their thoughts which is, after all, Big Brother's goal. Dominance of thought. ELIMINATION of thought, actually. This is how they think. It's not illegal because there are no laws, but I could be punished for it. Insane? Just wait.
Winston works as one who "corrects" the past. He adjusts news articles so that Big Brother appears to be all knowing, non-contradictory, and perfect in all his words. He sort of sees a problem with this but his indoctrination is so deep that it is easier not to think. A good member of the party always chooses not to think. There are things he can't not think on though. For instance:
"Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened"..."The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible."
Winston viewed it as HIS fault for remembering anything other than the way the Party said it.
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture or death."
"Reality Control".
This serves as a primer to doublethink: "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies...to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it."
One only needs to turn on the TV, read a newspaper, or just pay attention to what is going on in the world to see all of this in action.
The world we live in, this digitally predominant world, makes the past so easily malleable. If we don't have hard copy then any administration could change something of the past. People have been rightly worried about how easy it is to edit things like Wikipedia. People look at it and believe its contents are truth. However, if enough people agree that something should be changed it will be. Our past could easily be destroyed. I remember being in a discussion with someone about how my daughter was being taught that this leftist Union Leader in America was a hero. They shrugged, said they didn't see anything wrong with it. I mentioned, well except for the fact that he used violence, physical and financial retribution to achieve his goals. If that was true, they reasoned, then they wouldn't teach about him to children. We rationalize before we even dare to look it up. It was not something that was included in the Wikipedia article and so what use was there in still looking? Less than 5 minutes of doing a different search yielded proof. With just ideology and a keyboard it has been wiped from the popular consciousness.
Recently I watched a TED talk where the speaker actually said the words "The era of knowing is over. We don't need to actually have knowledge anymore. If we need information we can look it up and then should forget it when we don't need it anymore."
Creeping closer.
There are so many political issues on both sides of the spectrum that frighten me. I have met so few people who even question their own party's line. They'll give a pass on anything because it's "their guy". They'll ignore blatant lies, forgive "readjustments" of their candidates history, and not bat an eye when he/she lies to them again, and again, and again. If the other side does it then they are, quite naturally, scumbags bent on destroying the country. We aren't that far from a single party in all but name anyway. There is no consistency and no principles. "Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." That, as far as Orwell's warning, is already here in many ways.
Personally I find the notion of Newspeak as particularly offensive. It is the new language of Oceania, always being refined. As a colleague of Winston's declares, "You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone." Later her justifies, "After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words?...If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well..."
With some zealousness he later explains, "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it...Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."
So, what would be the fall out? "Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron - they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they use to be."
There is so much here that my mind is all abuzz with multiple ideas all firing at the same time. Let's see if I can organize them and tease them into some sort coherent mess.
Firstly, language is so extremely important. Their goal of controlling the people through language is not as far fetched as it seems. When I first learned about rhetoric my mind was completely blown. Rhetoric is how people use language in order to effectively state their position on something. Well, that's the Light Side of rhetoric. The Dark Side of rhetoric is choosing carefully the words you use in order to manipulate the listener/reader. It's one thing to have a news report with the headline "Fifteen soldiers killed in a firefight with the Taliban" and completely another to say "Fifteen soldiers slaughtered in a firefight with the Taliban". Which one grips you more emotionally? The second one clearly sells more papers and, intended or not, makes you feel more negatively about the Taliban, or on the other hand may predispose you negatively toward the war.
Every day, language is used to manipulate. Your emotions are being toyed with in order to achieve a desired result. Now, in the world of advertising we can just go "Oh, look, they're using sex to sell blue jeans again" and discard it if we want. Language is more tricky. Reading and hearing automatically sets up residence in our minds and few are trained, let alone have the desire, to put it in a holding tank to consider it and either hold it or jettison.
I learned this and paid attention on my own over the years and then one day took a high level philosophy course as an elective. (Yes...I took philosophy for fun.) I get bored fairly easily, and so one of my ways to fend off boredom is to play with language and ideas. I squish them, stretch them, spin them on their head just to see what happens. I like to hold two contradictory thoughts in my head at one time and then watch as they play Texas Hold'em...to the death. It was during one of these 'bouts that I realized that the teacher was manipulating the whole class. He had taught about rhetoric only from the perspective of "the enemy" as perpetrator. There wasn't a single bit about how our own "party" our own "allies" manipulate us. I watched as he manipulated the class from one side of the issue to the other side of the issue and every one of them followed like obedient little ducklings and agreed wholeheartedly without even considering that just five minutes ago they were agreeing wholeheartedly with the complete opposite. I started chuckling and the teacher turned and gave me a wink, knowing that I'd caught it. He asked me, for the benefit of the class, to tell what I was chuckling at. I explained and watched as each person in that 30 seat classroom couldn't figure it out. They defended each side, as they had heard from the teacher, and some people even managing to argue the validity both contradictory views at the same time.
So, what does this have to do with 1984? We're not so far from it. The enemy is the one trying to manipulate you, they will tell you, while deliberately and blatantly manipulating you just as well. It's the Democrats. It's the Republicans. It's the Libertarians. It's Greenpeace. It's Big Oil. It's the church. It's Atheism. Language and loyalty are the blinders every institution uses. Not every institution is bad. Not every use of rhetoric is bad, but we need to be aware of it or we may as well be sidling up to Big Brother. If your emotions are engage by those you trust in order to sway your opinion then remember the "Two Minute Hate" from this book. I am immediately suspicious of anything that engages my emotions in an argument of ideas because that tends to mean logic won't win them their argument.
Pax,
Will Arbaugh
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