Tag: 1984

Orwell Predicted This: Parent Shocked to Find Son’s “Creepy” List Documenting Peer’s Anti-Woke Behavior

Our mainstream culture is so saturated with wokeness and social justice that it’s become far more normalized than it should have ever been. One bit of fallout from this hyper-sensitive and constantly outraged trend is “cancel culture,” the idea that anyone who steps out of line from the approved social guidelines should have their lives destroyed.

It doesn’t always take but even one person destroyed is too many, and there are far too many cases where cancel culture wins the day.

We can easily describe our current culture as authoritarian, even despotic. Everyone from individuals to major corporations is afraid to step out of line for fear of facing the wrath of the woke mob, the media, and the politicians answering to permanently outraged. If you were an alien observing America from afar, you’d guess that the most powerful force in the country is the extreme-left, who managed to normalize anti-science, violence, racism, sexism, and irrationality, and then make too many obedient to it.

While this has affected many, it’s done a real number on Gen Zennials, the generation currently making their way into adulthood. So saturated with this woke mentality is this generation that many don’t see its hypocrisy or evil in it. In fact, they too become zealous in their enforcement of it. While this may be a trend among the young, it’s a tale as old as time.

Using children to push extremist politics has been a strategy of despots and tyrants for ages. We can now see this happening in America thanks to a concerned parent writing to an advice column at Slate.

The mother discovered an excel spreadsheet on her 14-year-old son’s laptop that had his classmates featured on it. Written next to their name were bits of data under dates. This data was descriptions of non-woke behavior and the times they did it.

Keep reading

The Definitive List Of How We’re Living In “1984”

While some may think we’re living more of an Animal Farm existence (pigs hatch a coup and overthrow the humans, only to end up in worse shape thanks to a dictator named Napoleon who uses propaganda to obscure his incompetence), Sarah A. Downey – operating partner at Accomplice VC (and Dune fan, gamer and cosplayer) has assembled a comprehensive Twitter thread on why we’re actually living in Orwell’s other notable work – 1984, a cautionary tale of life under communism.

Presented for your edification (and click here or scroll to the bottom for Downey’s July 2020 interview with Benjamin Boyce where she opines on free speech, cancel culture and more).

Keep reading

George Orwell made a prediction that came true…

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

George Orwell

George Orwell’s 1984 Has Become a Blueprint for Our Dystopian Reality

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”— George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21, 1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

Keep reading

The Prescience Of George Orwell — ‘1984’ Is Here

If you read George Orwell’s fictional novel “1984” when you were young, now is an opportune time for a second look. It’s the language of “1984” that’s of particular use.

The book is perhaps most applicable for its exploration of the relationship between nuanced language and thought, and the way dishonest, inaccurate language leads to a breakdown of identity and capacity for independent reasoning.

Curiously, Orwell was originally planning on titling the book “The Last Man in Europe.”

Orwell demonstrated astonishing prescience when he wrote his book about a cartoon and clown world, one we are witnessing today.

By creating nonsensical jargon, called “newspeak,” that’s only understood by the few workers who employ it, the Crime Syndicate kakistocracy limits the potential for communication. When newspeak becomes the only language spoken, the kakistocracy’s control over the population becomes total and absolute.

Keep reading