My take on 1984's Winston Smith

[Ibn_Warraq]

@Grumman

This is an idea that has caused a lot of harm in the world, but it’s not actually true. Torture does not work that way. Torturers know it does not work that way.

I’m not sure what you’re saying here.

Are you saying that torture isn’t an effective way to get someone to give up information or are you saying that people who are tortured don’t suffer from some sort of pseudo-Stockholm Syndrome and adopt the cause of their torturers or something else?

[Maastricht]

@foolsguinea

The first sentence of Anthony Burgess’s response to 1984, 1985, is, “1984 is a comic book.” (That is, it is a joke, not that it’s a graphic novel.)…

@Crafter_Man

Another (slight) hijack: 1984 was published in 1948. Was the novel a big hit in the late 1940s/1950s? Or has the book become more popular over time?

Burgess book “1985” was my favourite as a young adult. The first half of it is a very good analysis of Orwell’s 1984. He writes all sorts of interesting stuff about the inspirations of Orwell in writing it, including the bleak years shortly after the war. When the post war euphoria was over, people got fed up with the economic bleakness and enforced austereness, and the beginning of the Cold War. 1984 is a comic (funny) book in the sense that it magnifies and parodies many aspects of the post-war period. But to us readers who got interested in the early eighties, when the book got popular again, those cultural references are lost and so we can’'t see what is funny about the book.

The second half of Burgess’ 1985 is his own novel about a dystopic England. An England overrun with youth criminality and violence, over-powerful unions (the protagonists wife dies in a fire because the firemen were on strike in sympathy with the other unions), Arab money taking over England, and laughably bad education, made bad because no-one wants to be an elitist and actually seem to have knowledge. Orwells doublespeak is replaced in Burgess England with “official workers English” a sort of cockney without any interlectual words in it.
It was a fun read in the eighties, and I’m happy that many of Burgess fears have been proven, by recent history, to have been unfounded.

[Evil_Captor]

I can’t read about Orwell’s doublethink without thinking of all the US political leaders who refuse to dispute some ancient cleric’s estimate of the world as a few thousand years old, or their dismissal of evolutionary theory in favor of Biblical literalism. They must know in some part of their minds that what they are espousing in factually wrong, yet they doublethink it away. And their followers are not much better. A study conducted a few months ago showed that viewers of Fox News are less well informed than people who follow no news at all. The Ministry of Truth exists, my friends, or at least, its beginnings.

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

@Evil_Captor

I can’t read about Orwell’s doublethink without thinking of all the US political leaders who refuse to dispute some ancient cleric’s estimate of the world as a few thousand years old, or their dismissal of evolutionary theory in favor of Biblical literalism. They must know in some part of their minds that what they are espousing in factually wrong, yet they doublethink it away.

Heck, that’s not even an extrapolation; IIRC, that’s pretty much word-for-word. Consider the bit right after O’Brien patiently explains that the world “is as old as we are, no older” while handwaving away evidence of the dinosaurs:

“What are the stars?” said O’Brien indifferently. “They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.”

Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:

“For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'”

Orwell is delighted to point out that such beliefs can easily persist so long as folks compartmentalize 'em away whenever accuracy is called for.

[Alysa]

“Orwell is delighted to point out that such beliefs can easily persist so long as folks compartmentalize 'em away whenever accuracy is called for” but to me that’s exactly the point O’Brien is revelling in the thought that he’s able to make belief whatever nonsense he’s willing to communicate to Winston!