Orwell

All year, as the rhetoric spun further and further out, I've been intending to reread George Orwell's classic 1984. I finally got around to it this week.

I first read the book a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, so to speak. Actually, I think it was even before that phrase became a common reference, so it really has been quite a while. I remember it seemed bizarre and dark to my young mind. Now, reading it as an adult, particularly in the context of the Bush administration, it seems frighteningly realistic.

I'm nearly 200 pages in, and it's only just recently departed from being a slight to moderate exaggeration beyond current events, and that's only if you allow for the fact that the torturing our government is doing isn't actually happening in this country yet, the economy hasn't completely collapsed, and there didn't turn out to be a nuclear war in the 1950s. For a book published in 1949, that's pretty good.

As I was reading this evening, a couple passages struck me as worth quoting. First, a description of the practical use of doublethink, the novel's word for the power to hold two contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time, and accept both of them. Try not to think of certain people in the administration, or the people you see on Fox News, while you read this.

Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously,...

This passage made me think about the recent election:

Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

Doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo.

Anyway, if you haven't read it in a while, I suggest it's time. If you've misplaced your copy and want a new one, use the handy red Powell's Books search box in the right column, and your purchase can help defray the expenses of Ratiocination. (Shameless plug.)