Beneath the dark clouds gathering today, a re-reading of One thousand nine hundred eighty four Shows how the otherwise revealing George Orwell was wrong to think that people would have to be tortured into submission. Half of America (still psychologically locked down, cranky and cranky) wouldn’t have it any other way.
the world of One thousand nine hundred eighty four He is gloomy in a way that 2022 will understand. The people of Orwell’s future want to be ruled. They came to prefer it. Freedom of choice makes them feel safe. People get tracked and their communications censored. They think about everything with a sense of the inevitable – the only way to stay safe if they think about it at all. The all-seeing screens in their homes and the snitches and spies embedded in their lives are for the better, really. Language itself changes not only to stifle resistance but to make it impossible.
B One thousand nine hundred eighty four, The government controls and changes all means of communication, sending events from the past that are no longer politically correct to the memory hole. Today, we have the old media to do it for us. We can no longer read a newspaper or watch a documentary with any expectation that any part of it is true. Americans revel in fake news. To take just one example, the truth is that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. It was all complex, doublethink embellished with scary “details” like the pee tape so absurd they wouldn’t make it into a B-movie script. Michael Cohen never went to Prague. The FBI had to lie to get a FISA warrant to spy on Trump associates. However, a huge number of Americans still believe it’s all true, and look to the media to cling to the edges of the story. 2+2 can equal 5, if you believe so.
To take another example, Hunter Biden benefited financially from replacing his father. He made millions from China and Ukraine by selling influence. However, the media worked with the full support of about half of Americans to suppress the story and influence the 2020 election. After being pushed underwater, the story did not return in time, and perhaps not in the 2024 competition.
When I google Hunter’s name, I find alternate sympathetic stories about his struggles with various addictions. Most Americans welcome the arm exercise. They don’t want another scandalous administration. They want censorship to clean it up. The government should not control it; In America, journalists demand the suspension of other journalists’ First Amendment rights based on ideology, if things go off the mark.
Orwell’s two minutes of hate was when the public was told to express hatred towards the enemies of the state, whether it made sense or not. The Brett Kavanaugh hearings were a welcome version of this, using a gathering of Diogenes victims, politicians and the MSM who hyped up the crowd. Social media, especially Twitter, serves the same ongoing purpose: We loved Andrew Cuomo as the anti-Trump until we were told to hate him as a sexual harasser. Is Dr. Fauci a good guy or a bad guy this week? Your family is also a target as white allies are told to “text your relatives and loved ones and tell them you won’t visit them or answer their phone calls until they take meaningful action in support of black lives.”
B One thousand nine hundred eighty four, Criticizing the party was the worst sin, the punishment of which is loss of status, loss of job and loss of self (cancellation). Although America so far does not include the physical torture part (in newspeak, enhanced investigation) of One thousand nine hundred eighty four– style cancellation, the other tools are active. Party orthodoxy is replaced by the sin of criticizing diversity and being denounced as a racist. Entire industries – academia, media, entertainment – are dominated by issuing double-plus-good anti-racist badges. Most of the media we consume, and what our children learn in school, is filtered, judged and censored by an ideological mob.
If you want to keep your job in these areas and more, you must embrace Big Brother variety, and most are more than happy to do so. Those who come out of lack of sympathy with the party inside 1984 Become “impersonal”, disappear when all evidence of their existence is destroyed. In 2022, they are disbanded. Institutions do not punish resistance but seek to make resistance impossible.
Orwell envisioned the need for a huge truth office to enact social control when in fact all it took was a bit of stupidity if calling covid-19 “Chinese flu” was racism and some articles falling from the sky. Make fear the problem and empowering shields become the solution. The message worked: you have to give up things for a safe company. If not, you are selfish; You committed a crime against your neighbors.
When Orwell wrote One thousand nine hundred eighty four, He could imagine no entity more powerful than the government, backed by the secret police and the army. He could not imagine the global media and its running dog companion, social media, screening what we read and providing tools to undo. He did not foresee the end point of global capitalism, a handful of people with almost all the money who can buy the laws and social changes they want.
Instead of adapting to this reality and pushing back, progressive Americans are cheering it on. They roll like dogs in the mud at the idea that while the government can’t censor Dr. Seuss, a corporation can. They enjoy the ignorance of pretending that such censorship isn’t censorship, because for now, at least, only things they don’t like are censored. They enjoy pretending that it is It doesn’t matter if it is done by a private party.
In America 2022, we not only accept voluntary tracking, but we want more of it because it makes shopping easier. We spend thousands of dollars to buy and maintain 24/7 devices on our person that track our locations, record our communications, learn and analyze our personal habits from porn preferences to fashion choices, all so that Amazon can recommend products to us. Tracking us was sold first as a way to keep us safe from terrorist attacks that never came, then to catalog our associations to keep us safe from a covid-19 crisis that remains on the boil for as long as possible. We want Big Brother to know where we’ve been so he can warn us not to associate with the “sick” people there. Immunize vaccination passports for labeling and reward those who meet the requirements? Yes, please, if it means we can go to ball games.
We love surveillance technology when it helps arrest the “right” people. We hammer out how cell phone data was used to locate people during the Capitol riots, along with facial recognition against images pulled from social media, aided by brazen loved ones, to arrest them. There’s even a do-it-yourself version of progressive facial recognition used to help law enforcement identify rioters. The goal was to jail people if possible, but most trustees seemed equally happy if they could make someone lose their job.
In my youth I visited Soviet Eastern Europe. I lived in China and Taiwan under a dictatorship. I spoke with survivors of the Cultural Revolution and torture victims from the years of Seoul’s military rule. I’m much older now, and I know when I’ve seen something before. Orwellian? Orwell was an amateur.
