George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens
brainpizza.substack.com
brainpizza.substack.com
Would you trust someone who makes the kind of decisions Smith makes? Or advocates some of the courses of action he suggests to O'Brien? Are there more likely explanations for everything in the first two sections than Smith's narrative?
Edited to add direct link to the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, as referenced at the end of the article:
I found the link to download an ASCII version of 1984 by reading the readme.txt file, the anchor link seemed broken.
Hope this helps another seeker:
https://orwell.ru/Download/1984/e84_asc.zip
One of the cool things I think about 1984 that occurred to me while re-reading the appendix now as suggested by the article is that in order for Orwell to say something very new about our civilization, or at least to say something old but to many new people, he needed to invent his own language to do it. In a sense there's mirror between what Orwell is doing with his book, in telling our society about itself, and what Ingsoc was doing to Oceania, in limiting thought to goodthink. They both invented a new language in order to relate a new meaning. I like that, and there's something...peculiar about books that invent a lot of new terms. Like LOTR and Harry Potter. There's something "generationally transformative" about such books, maybe. In a sense sci-fi is all-in on this sort of word coining, Matrix, Terminator, Star Trek.
Nineteen Eighty-four is sort of sci-fi. It's set in the future. And then the appendix, is set even further in the future talking in staid and "encycolpaedia"-like tone about the time of the events of the book as if it is in the past. What if Orwell was a time traveler, who wrote 1984 after a visit to a possible future, and was told that by writing this book, that future would not persist. Then on his second trip back to the future he verified he'd changed that timeline by writing his book, and lifted the appendix to 1984 from an encyclopedia on "the rise and fall of English socialism" from the future after the collapse of the political system his book had helped undo. Closed time like curves.
Examine the world of 1984 from Goldstein on out, and it's an excellent example of what might happen if one took Plato's Republic[0] and attempted to practically implement it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[0] I'm not sure if the Republic referents are direct, or indirect due to Orwell's second rate boarding school having stanned the greeks.
Certainly I believe that he could chuckle over Animal Farm being eagerly taken up and sold as an anti-communist, rather than an anti-dog-and-pig, book.
It's not newspeak that causes crimestop. It's that "quiet desperation is the english way", it's the middle class attitudes of the title of "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", etc. that cause crimestop. Orwell was aware of crimestop from his own experiences, and he was aware that he lived in a world with, admittedly, bureaucratese, but without newspeak.
When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.
Along these lines, the basic idea behind Newspeak was to create a language where "the existing dialect" would "do the job for" the Party, by making the expression of desirable thoughts not merely the natural result of lazily-chosen expression, but the automatic result of any admissible expression, by simplifying, not only the language itself, but the underlying body of ideas it was capable of expressing.
[1] https://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
By the end of the war his opinions had expanded as he understood the common thread of manipulation that ran through the governing systems of capitalism, fascism and communism. His subsequent, and final book, Animal Farm was about how communist systems, due to human nature, can tend to to end up just as bad as the others. It’s unclear to me if he ever gave up on his hopes for socialism (and if he had, if he despaired of any alternative) but it’s his weakest book in an extraordinary corpus.
1984 is often taken as a denouncement of socialism, but it’s more broad than that.
* Blair’s journey to socialism parallels the earlier journey that made socialism an acceptable doctrine in the UK at all, the trenches of WWI. That was the first time many of the upper class (all officers of course) had ever interacted closely with members of the lower classes and really developed even an inkling of what their lives were back home.
It's specifically a denouncement of Stalinism and the paths that led there. The tendency of people to conflate everything from Blairism through Fabianism to Stalinism into the same "socialism" makes it hard for them to see that it's not a denouncement of all of those things at once.
The live representation of old Russian anecdote about what West thinks about Russians. ;)
The anecdote is one-liner: History teacher in English school "...tsar Ivan Groznyj who was nicknamed Vasil'evich for his brutality". ("Groznyj" means "fearful" and "Vasil'evich" is a patronymic name)
Koba was a nickname of Stalin during his Tsarist Russia work with Bolsheviks. So to refer to Stalin as "Koba" is about to refer to Obama as "Barry".
Anyway, 1984 was about Britain and is a prediction based on what Blair endured working for BBC during WWII years.
I think I know. I don't think Orwell (Erik Blair) was writing a book about a dystopian future. No. I think he was writing about the dystopian present he was already aware of, and then projecting that a little into the future. From personal experience with the BBC, he knew what news and history really were. As a connected individual (allowed to finish his work on the private owned island of Jura) he was aware of the plans that were in place.
So, I don't see 1984 as a dystopian vision of the future. I see it as a far more straightforward projection of what was already in place. We may be unaware of our prison, but Orwell was not - and was telegraphing it to us.
And most of us still do not get it, and cannot see it. We are glad big Brother is making us wear masks to help us breath better, that we are keeping away from our families because of love, that we will be 'cured' by a 'vaccine'.
And if you draw attention to this around here, you won't be thanked! We're not coding a harder, more impenetrable prison - we're making a better future, right?
Correct. After signing up with the left-wing forces in the Spanish Civil War, and getting betrayed by the Stalinists, he was one of the left-wing British writers who could see what Stalinism was and wrote about it. The whole "memory hole" business is a reference to the removal of Trotsky from photographs, for example.
This has nothing to do with anti-maskism and COVID denialism.
(this comment is a tribute to https://xkcd.com/966/ )
If I frame all dysfunctional human interactions through the lens of “tyranny” then I see “tyranny” everywhere.
That is how all confirmation biases works. That is why they are all uninteresting.
Falsifying one’s own biases is much more fun...
The world today is less tyrannical (as per Orwell’s concept) than it was when he was alive. Only when you ignore all moral progress do you get to paint contemporary society with Orwell’s brush.
The question stands.
It stands a few lines below the answer.
Meaning... Looking for evidence AGAINST the very thing you've convinced yourself of.
My mind was attracted to this particular idea: "That is why they are all uninteresting."
I happen to believe that confirmation biases (and their various relatives) are infinitely interesting, and also that there is infinite value in understanding them and their systemic consequences. The irony(?) of the situation is that finding even one individual who shares this belief is exceptionally rare, and I have been through an extremely broad spectrum of communities. This also seems rather interesting as well.
SARS2-COVID-19 is a novel virus. True. Would we notice without modern medicine and rtPCR tests? I'm not convinced.
With all due respect, this statement tells me with near-certainty that you've never worked a patient-facing role in healthcare. The fact that you feel free to espouse your opinion on the subject directly related to patient-facing care should be a red flag to you.
I have worked in healthcare as a paramedic. My wife is a nurse. My mother is a nurse. My brother-in-law is an MD. The public-health policy makers usually have worked in patient-facing healthcare. My local public health director was one of the best and brightest physicians I've EVER met. He cut his teeth working on eradicating smallpox in his youth, and has remarkable depth in his knowledge of epidemiology. ...All of us agree that this definitely IS different than the status quo. It is NOT different from historical precedent though, and there are many people that are quite alert to these things. These same people would notice unusual clusters of patients suggesting a terrorist attack, chemical exposure, water contamination, etc. Just because it requires knowledge you do not have doesn't mean that experts wouldn't have identified this. Which, funny enough, is exactly what DID happen.
Eh, I probably would've noticed something's up.
If you're actually so sheltered that you cannot see it, you should give thanks. If not, I have nothing but contempt.
Either way, take your black propaganda somewhere else.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/03/happy-hypoxia-...
Not to diminish Orwell's prescience in any way, but Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We precedes Orwell's work by almost 30 years. It contains all the same themes, and without a shadow of a doubt, had a massive influence on Orwell's work.
No, they were not part of any plan if there was ever one. Yevgeny Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley were participants and observers of civil war, revolution, and its subsequent corruption by totalitarians. Their books are a testimony to that and a warning.
He was extrapolating mostly from Stalin's USSR. This is well-known.