Re:George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens
by 082349872349872 on Sunday December 13, 2020 @11:06AM
(#25407478)
The whole Smith story is just fast-forward for what Orwell wanted to say, which is all contained in Goldstein.
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.
Re:George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens
by graderjs on Sunday December 13, 2020 @11:23AM
(#25407629)
I like your take. My take, is that Orwell is actually a closet totalitarian, and was singing the praises of such, albeit covertly and in the guise which he knew the public could fawn about and accept. I imagine Orwell smoking his pipe and chuckling to himself, "...and they thought it was against totalitarianism, that's why they swallowed it whole!" After all, the Party is really the victor and hero of the novel. The hopeful appendix could itself be a historical revision of a future "more perfect" incarnation of the Party. I think the 2-minutes hate against Goldstein, is the same 2-minutes hate against "Totalitarian States" that Orwell cynically evokes from a public he knew was ready to go rabid on this thing, against which, I think he believed, resistance was futile. I think he saw himself as greasing the wheels of that. So he's mocking his audience's gullibility while proving his point that totalitarianism is the only thing that can rule them, and selling them such via the backchannel of this novel everyone believes to be against that. I think, in this lens, Orwell is as the biggest political-social thinker of last 200 years, and he carried it off without being recognized as what he was doing, the ultimate power play, which makes it all the more impressive. I really shouldn't write this here, people will probably go crazy. But it's nice to see a fellow differentthinker, so I braved it. A final thought is that there's this concept call dramatic catharsis, in comedy, where the mockery of something is commonly seen as a way to remove its power, but in actuality simply provides a useless outlet for people's frustrations and further acclimates them to it. So, Italian plays mocking the state were how the people coped with it, but the state rolled on, better them cope than revolt. In that lens, 1984 is sort of a pre-catharsis that greases the wheels for the entrance of totalitarianism, by convincing everyone, as another commenter adroitly noted, "of the inevitable demise of English socialism". So Orwell was faking the death of totalitarianism in the mass consciousness, to provide cover for the introduction of totalitarianism. Sort of like that scene in the Dark Knight, where somebody brings the "body of the Joker" to Gambol's hideout, where the Joker promptly comes back to life and takes over.
Re:George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens
by 082349872349872 on Sunday December 13, 2020 @11:37AM
(#25407755)
Having read other Orwell works, in which he appears pretty pinko, I'm not sure about your take, but am happy to discuss its motivations.
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.
Re:George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens
by graderjs on Sunday December 13, 2020 @08:51PM
(#25412613)
Well, I think if you take that to the extreme you end up with totalitarian.
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.