Tag: george orwell

Orwell’s Ideas Remain Relevant 75 Years After “Animal Farm” Was Published

Seventy-five years ago, in August 1946, George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published in the United States. It was a huge success, with over a half-million copies sold in its first year. Animal Farm was followed three years later by an even bigger success: Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In the years since, Orwell’s writing has left an indelible mark on American thought and culture. Sales of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four jumped in 2013 after the whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked confidential National Security Agency documents. And Nineteen Eighty-Four rose to the top of Amazon’s best-sellers list after Donald Trump’s Presidential Inauguration in 2017.

As a philosophy professor, I’m interested in the continuing relevance of Orwell’s ideas, including those on totalitarianism and socialism.

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Orwell’s 1984 As Manual For The Woke

On learning that Twitter sanctioned Rep. Jim Banks for daring to refer to Assistant Secretary of Health R. Levine as a man (and that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also referred, but without sanction, to Dr. Levine as a man) I turned, for insight on this peculiar assault on the concept of objective reality, to a classic novel on the nature of totalitarianism:  1984, by George Orwell.  Here are, I believe, relevant passages from the novel, from a torture scene, with torture applied to Winston Smith by O’Brien.

O’Brien to Winston Smith, undergoing torture: 

“Who controls the present, controls the past…” Signet Classic (paper), p.248

This is what Critical Race Theory is all about.

O’Brien to Winston Smith, undergoing torture, on the nature of reality:

“Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see  something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external.  Reality exists in the human mind,  and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”  Ibid, at p. 249

The Party says R. Levine is a woman; therefore, he is a woman.

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How The Left Has Redefined Words In The Covid Era

From the beginning of the alleged pandemic, the ruling class has been as dishonest as possible in their response to Covid. Much of their power over the hysterics has derived from the manipulation of language. At times it was counterintuitive, but fear overpowers reason in weak-minded people.

Stopping air travel from the epicenter was considered xenophobic. What is xenophobic about mitigating the spread of a supposedly terrible virus? No one asked. In the context of the Trump administration, xenophobia was merely a word loaded with pejorative meaning. Refusing the vaccine continues to be construed as selfish; don’t get it for you, get it for others, they say. What extra protection does my vaccination offer to others if it truly works and someone else already got it? Again, no one asks. In the context of vaccine status, the very concept of individuality is being erased in favor of the nebulous greater good.

Amazingly, even though the Biden administration has since allowed its lead scientists to admit on national television that cloth masks are wholly ineffective, that social distancing at six feet is completely arbitrary, that PCR tests need to be retired by the end of the year due to their worthless function as as a diagnostic tool, and that vaccines are not efficacious for anyone after just a few months, the majority of the herd – the brainwashed sheep – continue to chew unthinkingly on whatever government cud they can find.

Even when truth is acknowledged, it only becomes “the truth” when repeated ad nauseam on media and political outlets of a certain persuasion.

Now, it is not just that people have been brainwashed, though they have (the psychological term is mass formation). Society is increasingly full of people that not only don’t think for themselves but of people that can’t even if they want to. This is the result of controlling language. This is the Orwellian premise of thoughtcrime literally becoming impossible.

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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.

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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).

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Orwell and the Woke

Epigraph: “Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” George Orwell, “Animal Farm”

What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants?

Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a designer dress to the more than $30,000-a-ticket Met gala? Her entourage needs were certainly well-attended to by masked Morlock servants.

Did the leftist celebrities at the recent Emmy awards gather to discuss opening Malibu beaches to the homeless when the (unmasked) stars virtue-signaled their wokeness?

For answers about these hypocritical wokists, always turn first to George Orwell. In his brief allegorical novella, “Animal Farm,” an array of animal characters — led by the thinking pigs of the farm — staged a revolution, driving out their human overseers.

The anti-human animal comrades started out sounding like zealous Russian Bolsheviks (“four legs good, two legs bad”). But soon they ended up conned by a murderous cult of pigs under a Joseph Stalin-like leader. And so, the revolution became what it once had opposed (“four legs good, two legs better”).

Our own woke, year-zero revolution is now in its second year. Yet last year’s four-legged revolutionaries are already strutting on two legs. They are not just hobnobbing with the “white supremacists” and “capitalists,” but outdoing them in their revolutionary zeal for the rarified privileges of the material good life.

The Marxist co-founder of BLM, Patrisse Cullors, is now on her fourth woke home. She has moved on from the barricades to the security fences of her Topanga Canyon digs in a mostly all-white, all-rich rural paradise–the rewards for revolutionary service.

Professor Ibram X. Kendi has evolved from the edgy revolutionary work of flying all over the country, hawking his Orwellian message of “All racism bad! But some racism good!” Now he has mastered the art of zooming the wannabe woke for his $20,000 an hour avant-garde hectoring.

What of Colin Kaepernick, the mediocre second-string quarterback turned sudden firebrand? He refused to stand for the national anthem and spread his “take a knee” kitsch throughout professional sports.

Kaepernick became a boutique revolutionary multimillionaire. For $12 million a year, he pitches Nike sneakers, often made in Chinese forced-labor camps.

Woke NBA star LeBron James, from his $23 million Brentwood mansion, blasts America for its endless unfairness–in service to his totalitarian Chinese paymasters who will ensure his good life with an eventual lifetime $1 billion payout for hawking their goods.

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