George Orwell: smart or subtle?

Cafe Society
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never thought about it in some of those viewpoints. I have to agree about it not being prophetic, but some things bother me. Like the whole propoganda issue. And yes, i added a minute to 2 minute hate…my bad.

Maybe we shouldn’t ask if it is happening, but perhaps how we can keep it from happening? Granted, i am against OBL, but i find it funny how certain things on television sway us EVEN more than just events. Not to belittle the twin towers incident, but does anyone remember how many times it was played over and over within that day? (disclaimer: I was quite stunned that day too…this is merely speculation)

But one can’t deny the media has quite a bit of an influence. One person needs only to be more intelligent than others, to have some degree of influence…

22

I sometimes wish that stupid book had never been writen. Big Brother has become the most overused and inappropriately used anology ever.

IMHO, 1984 shows us two things about human nature.

  1. Our desire to force everyone to think the way we think
  2. Our desire to be part of the “winning team”

The population of Oceana allowed themselves to be controlled because that’s what they wanted. I see the same thing in corporate America every day. If you tell someone who is talanted and ambitious “you are the best because we hired you and we only hire the best” (apparently, the last three companies I worked for all hire the “best of the best” yet I didn’t meet too many valadictorians, Rhodes Scholars or Wharton grads…but I digress) that person will put up with all kinds of aggrivation in the name of “being a team player”. They will work 15 hours days, sleep in their office, ride a train for 2 hours each day or live out of a suitcase for months at a time. Anyone who doesn’t devote their life to such a company is an “underperformer” and is generally gone in short order. It’s a lot easier to fault and ostricise someone who points out the obvious flaws in the system than it is to step back for a second and say “wait a minute…he’s right…why am I wasting the best years of my life working like an elephant for the off chance I may make the big money as a partner when I’m 50 years old?” Heck…go to the What Corporate Buzzwords do you Hate thread to learn the new MBA new-speak.

1984 is a warning that the needs of the individual must be balanced with the needs of the group otherwise you end up with a tyrany of the majority. The surveilance and tech stuff was mostly nonsense. If the citizens of Oceana really wanted freedom they would have donned skimasks and gone around smashing TV screens with a hammer. You can’t remove a persons desire for freedom by taking the words to articulate that desire out of the dictionary. They just didn’t want it because they were happy recieving their rations of chocolate and being a part of the great victories against Eastasia/Eurasia.

23

mic84

Ever hear of Yuri Gagarin?

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Or, you know, you could start you own business, work indpendant, move elsewhere, or simply not give much of the information. Its not all required by law. No one’s forcing you to take all those enefits. As much as I hate to piss on the pot, don’t whining that the world isn’t bowing to serve your vision of it.

Though the Soviet Union did succeed in scientific endouvers for some time, their scientists had a lot of freedoms and respect that most peple didn’t. In biology, where the party line was that genetics was bunk for years and years, they lagged significantly.

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Or, you know, you could start you own business, work indpendant, move elsewhere, or simply not give much of the information. Its not all required by law. No one’s forcing you to take all those benefits. Moreover, you could just find an employer that respects you. As much as I hate to piss on the pot, don’t whining about your own hyperbole.

Though the Soviet Union did succeed in scientific endouvers for some time, their scientists had a lot of freedoms and respect that most peple didn’t. In biology, where the party line was that genetics was bunk for years and years, they lagged significantly.

26

I think that 1984 is happening, just not here, but in places like Iraq and North Korea. If you read the story in the Atlantic Monthly about Saddam a couple of months ago it was very reminiscent of 1984. Saddam’s picture is everywhere, his agents are monitoring everybody. People are whisked away to torture chambers at the slightest pretext. A couple of months ago PBS showed a videotape of the meeting where Saddam took power. It is just chilling, men being dragged away to torture or execution, the fear causing some men to weep openly while other men stand up and shout praises to Saddam at the top of their lungs.

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They didn’t… that was the final step in the whole series of events that led to this.

Like if Winston and Julia wanted to have sex they would simply go and do it? Wait… oops!

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You don’t have to be intelligent/literate/sane to work on an assembly line. In fact, the fewer of these qualities you have the better you’re likely to tolerate the mindless repetition of factory work. But with respect to the telescreen, all that we’re asked is to suppose it can transmit and receive simultaneously – a notion requiring far less suspension of disbelief than warp drives, teleportation or time travel.

Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia had no intention of conquering one another. The object of the war was to continually swallow each nation’s industrial output in order to keep the citizens in a state of perpetual poverty. But each superstate already had the atomic bomb, which it deliberately did not use because doing so would mean an end to organized society and therefore an end to their respective power structures: since there was no real conflict between the superstates, there was no real need for technological advancement.

I’m not sure the millions of intellectuals who perished in the Russian and Chinese purges would agree with you, but showing just how brutally you’re willing to treat a poet might put a scientist in a more collaborative mood. Despotism tolerates science only so long as it has something it needs: once it’s obtained that, it suppresses empirical thought the way it suppresses any other form of intellectual expression.

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Shoudn’t that read “a boot stamping on a human face–for ever.” **
[/QUOTE]

Yes, yes it should. thank you.

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As part of my tour through old high school reading I didn’t appreciate enough the first time around, I have read over the past couple of years 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.

Unfortunately, the details of each haven’t stuck all that well (although the Two Minute Hate certainly did). However, I was left with the distinct impression that of the three, Fahrenheit actually felt the most prescient. I believe it was written later, and it is certainly in a very different style, but Bradbury really nailed a lot of today’s TV/Internet culture.

Read Fahrenheit, and then wonder if bulletin boarders are like the “friends” the wife has on the screens.

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I also find 1984 one of, if not the, best books ever written – hence my nick.

I have read it some three times, but it’s now five years ago – so I may be somewhat rusty.

I also find the book immensely more powerful than Huxley’s Brave New World (also a good book by all means, just not in the same class) which Orwell had read – but found unrealistic; because he couldn’t see the motive for the rulers to rule. Why did they do it; there was no lust for power, no power corruption, no boot-in-the-face.

If you want to read more in the same category you can also try We by Zamyatin, which is the book that directly inspired Orwell. It’s now available on Amazon.

By the way, it might interest you to know that Orwell never left his basic left-wing political bend – I think he was a socialist and remained in the Labour party till his death.

  1. I don’t see an immediate threat of 1984’s Orwellian State emerging; however some parts of his dystopia are always dangerous close. Of all his inventions, I find the idea of Newspeak the most disturbing (and interesting). Newspeak as a technique for the state to control the mind of the people, by making them unable to even form illegal thoughts - thought crime. That’s why I personally absolutely abhor the kind of language being used in the modern military, government and business institutions – as well as many forms of PC speak. Actually PC speak the most, since the other institutions are simply trying to cover-up inconvenient or embarrassing facts, but masters of PC speak are really trying to decide what we can think. I also do not like invented languages, like Esperanto, since they have deliberately been designed to do away with all the dirty historical laundry of natural languages. They are convenient, easy to master but ultimately utterly boring sterile substitutes for a language like English. Incidentally talking of though crime, wasn’t there a case in the US not so long ago – where a man was convicted for having expressed his (paedophile) thoughts in a personal diary. Personally I hate paedophiles as much as the next man, but this really is not a place we want to go. “It is intolerable to us that an erroneous though should exist anywhere in the world” however much we may detest them, it is an inescapable, perhaps revolting, fact that erroneous thoughts are the stuff freedom is made of.

  2. The technology angle which is what is what is most often referred to when finding Orwellian features in todays world, was actually of minor importance in his dystopian vision - and the one I find least impressive; telescreens are hardly state of the art – even for his day (indeed in we, the technology consisted of houses build of glass). So if you’re focusing your wariness on things like implanted id-chips, identity scans, etc. your focus is the wrong place (and BB will sneak up on you :eek: ). In the perfect Orwellian State, after the completion and implementation of Newspeak, the two-way telescreen, together with all the other surveillance stuff, would supposedly be superfluous – since the people would not, neither could, rebel.

  3. I think you may have misunderstood the ending somewhat. Indeed the end for Winston Smith is not very enviable. But neither is the end of the State. O’Brien describes how he envisions the State as being the perfect system – and a system which will exist in perpetually thereafter. Indeed possibility for change looks very bleak at the end of the novel. However the very last chapter (or first – I can’t remember) talks about the State in past-tense. Which was how Orwell gave hope, it may look bleak but there’s an end, even to this evil. Some publishers wanted to remove that last chapter, since they didn’t see what good it did – but that would truly have left us in the cold. (Argh! I can’t find it here in my Penguin paperback – did they really tear it out?! I’m sure it was in the last one I read)

Es geht alles voruber, es geht alles vorbei, das Ei von Dezember kriegst du im Mai! Zuerst fallt der Fuhrer, und dann die Partei!

  1. I mostly think we have moved away the last ten to fifteen years, at least when it comes to the totalitarian control – just think Clinton and try to fit him into the Orwellian State. And with all due disrespect for OBL, he is hardly an enemy worthy of Goldstein; or what Soviet and the West drummed each other up to during the heights of the Cold War. So I don’t find the Big Bad State is in the cards right now, which does not mean there isn’t a legion of Little Evil Midgets wanting to control what we can think.

  2. The State is one and all, it will not suffer anyone or anything to dilute the attention of the people – thus love and sex is abolished. The sex drive is harnessed and put to the yoke of state supplication. See the women who take chastity vows and promise themselves to the State, how O’Brien talks about the future abolition of orgasm, or how Winston and Julia think of sex as a subversive activity – Winston relishes the though of all the State officials Julia has subverted through her libertine acts. The State is built on hatred and sexual frustration is the engine. And love is trivialised, and perverted. See how the neighbours’ son informs against his father, and the father is proud of him for it; in the future love is not something you can afford if you want to survive. “[in the future] Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.” I don’t know if the name Julia is a parody of Romeo and Julia, if so then it’s another ironic or satirical element, for their love is not a Romeo and Julia affair; there’s hardly any love lost between Winston and Julia, they think there are – but already the act of love has been perverted by the State; and their illegal love is little more than a rebellious teenage fling.

>don’t think anyone should approach 1984 as prophetic
Maybe it was anti-prophetic. By writing the book he inoculated us all against the lure of the totalitarian state – at least for a time.

>It was a happily ever after, both for the Party and for Smith. I believe that’s why it’s ultimately regarded as satire rather than horror.
It was living happily to the end of his days for Winston, which would be any day now – by a snipers bullet; it was not happily ever after for neither Party nor Smith.
I don’t think you could describe the whole book as satire, but it has a number of satirical elements to it; the name Winston Churc…err…Smith, the opening line: “The clock strikes 13”; an Englishman, I’ve been told, thinks it ludicrous to think of a clock striking 13 (I’m Danish and here the clock can strike 13 as well as 14,15… thank you very much), etc. Also I find in 1984 this longing for earlier times (also found in Tolkien – without comparison otherwise :/), when life was cosy, and you could order your beer in pints and pay in Guineas. Perhaps it’s tragedy; it is the final tragedy that any revolt or sacrifice of Winston Smith is ultimately meaningless – since there are no one left to revolt for and no person worthy of a sacrifice. He is the last free man.

>although I hope beyond hope that Maru’s tongue was in his cheek because that’s just psycho
Actually I don’t find that psycho at all, since it’s not body-control which is dangerous but mind-control. I also could contemplate a chip-tracker for my young children, to be used in cases like kidnapping or simply if they get lost in some foreign country (we have travelled a lot – and this fear was never far from my mind), this hardly imperil their free minds.

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I’ve been thoroughly Orwellized. When I hear that “we must attack Iraq!” I always think of, “Ocenia is now at war with East Asia. We have always been at war with East Asia.”

Hmmm. A society based on constant, pointless warfare against ever-shifting enemies? A secret conspiracy run by a villified ogre? A self-policing elite running the culture for the benefit of the lower classes (“the proles”)? Governmental misdeeds disappeared (mostly in public consciousness) down the memory hole? A language continually being tinkered with to limit thought? We do have a Department of Defense, afterall.

I think what Orwell failed to predict is how skilled the elite would be at achieving mind control without the need for brutality - at least brutality against our own people.

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Double-plus good post WinstonSmith.

Now see…this is what I was talking about. Drawing incorrect similarities between modern society and 1984.

Sorry, but War in Iraq is not about keeping our society in povery. In fact, it’s the opposite. Just a good old fashioned war over resources and political ideology.

Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. There are in fact actual enemies, just in case your memory doesn’t go back 16 month.

I don’t know about you, but I kind of long for the days when the biggest news from Washington was about how the president was getting blowjobs from interns.

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Beg to disagree there msmith537.
Not with your refutations per se, but rather the notion that literature has an immutable, ironclad interpretation.
I disagree with the notion that hapaXL can be authoritatively proved wrong.
I don’t see things in such easy to differentiate shades of black and white.
Orwell may not have predicted the exact nature of the future’s (our present perhaps) ills, but the novel was very prophetic in my view.
Although the title and setting give the story a definate place in history, I view the story as taking place in mythic space.
It’s themes are timeless.
We know that London was not part of an actual nation called Oceana in 1984 A.D., but the story is unfettered by the shackles of such mundane realities.

In it’s most elemental sense, the story is about the place of the individual in his society, particularly with regard to an absolute authority.
I think it’s taking place all around us much the same way that (sadly) the story of Little Red Riding Hood was re-enacted by Richard Allen Davis and (was it?) Polly Klass.

Those fairy stories are terrifying to children, but they symbolically represent real dangers that children face. There are in fact Big Bad wolves in the world, but they aren’t Canis lupus.

1984 is a moral tale of similar import to adults. There’s power in this world, and when it sneezes, you and I might catch cold.

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I never imagined the bullet to be literal.

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  1. Sure did; I never said the Soviet science wasn’t advanced, but

  2. That’s the point! In order to advance technologically, the Soviet gov’t had to educate the population, and since a reasonable education must involve intellectual freedom, or at least the approval of reasonable and logical thinking from an early stage(say, middle school), and since the advancement requires a lot of educated people, an Orwellian system and technological advancement contradict each other. After just one generation, an Orwellian system necessarilly(IMHO) leads right back to the medieval ages.(technologically speaking. As I said in the previous post, nobody will know how to operate all the technology, not to speak of developing new ones.

  3. The Communists in the Soviet Union understood this, and developed a pretty advanced education system

  4. We all know what happenned to the Soviet Union eventually, don’t we?
    In short, I don’t think that “1984”, “Fahrenheit 451”, and such are realistic. Unfortunately, we have real “dystopias” that did happen - namely,the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany. Sure, we don’t have any Goldsteins to outline the priciples upon which these regimes were built(and likely 40 pages are not enough to outline them anyway), but at least these examples are real. So, I suggest that when one is inclined to say “Big Brother”, one will say “KGB”. It’s much more offensive, too.

37

mic84

… but didn’t the SU crumble because the people could see that there was an alternative “out there” to perfect Communism/Marxism/Leninism. With nothing to compare the hell they were living in to, the evil empire may have lasted a thousand years.

But basically I agree, I don’t think Orwell intended 1984 as a prediction, it was more of a warning to others who like him were in love with the intellectual concepts of the left (Sartre, GBS etc.) without recognising where it could lead to.

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Please don’t say that. To compare the current governments of first world countries to the Party in 1984 only weakens any argument against the restrictions of freedoms these governments attempt to introduce. 1984 isn’t happening now, nothing like, but it is a warning to preserve our freedoms instead of letting them being eroded away in the name of the “war on terror” or other such guises.

1984’s great strength (apart from being a compelling, brilliant piece of writing) was that it gave us a powerfully real image of totalitarianism to which we could seek to protect ourselves against. To hysterically cry that “1984 is happening now” only undermines efforts to protect ourselves from efforts to restrict our freedoms.

The government allowing itself to hold people longer and longer, without charge, or to imprison people without trial? It’s not 1984, but it’s a step in that direction. We have to fight against it because we don’t want to end up in Orwell’s world, not because we’re already there.

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> In order to advance technologically … since a reasonable education must involve intellectual freedom
I don’t think technology necessarily must involve intellectual freedom, an artist needs freedom a chemist perhaps not; technology is just a suite of tools. Anyway this is just what doublethink is for; 2+2=5. “[O’Brien says] Do you think it beyond us to create a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according to what we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?” With doublethink you train yourself to hold two contradictory beliefs in your mind simultaneous, mind you that is not easy – it takes training, education.

>So, I suggest that when one is inclined to say “Big Brother”, one will say “KGB”. It’s much more offensive, too.
Thought Police is the pendant to the KGB, Big Brother is so much more – more akin to Uncle Joe. But both the KGB and Stalin are too rooted in their time and place. Thought Police and Big Brother are archetypical ever menacing valid.

40

Maybe we just see our societies in different ways - thought about that possibility? I’ll detail my view:

My Iraq joke was based on the fact that Saddam was our ally in the 1980s, back when he was gassing his people and the army of Iran. Now our government acts like we always hated him, even though we supported him when he was gassing the Kurds and the Iranian military.
And the military-industrial complex doesn’t exist to keep poor people poor. It exists to keep rich people rich.

Ah, but my memory goes far beyond 16 months, so I’m able to remember all the other threats we’ve recently faced. “Narco-terrorists” (uh, Noriega, another former ally), “ethnic cleansers” (in the former Yugoslavia), “Communist subversives” (Grenada, Nicaragua, et al ad nauseum). Trust me, there’s always going to be a threat, no matter how manufactured. Our society can’t survive without one.

I would argue that our reality is a mixture of both Orwell and Huxley’s visions.