(He eventually figures out that he personally has seen ships disappear over the horizon and that the way this happens wouldn't make sense unless the Earth were round But this is a privilege he has because he's always lived near the ocean, he could easily not know that)
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"Knowing" things just because you were taught them is what he finds deeply troubling It's why he did a very "woke" "SJW" critical review of those old Boys' Own Adventure books (that they existed to inculcate an imperialist, xenophobic worldview in British children)
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Like you understand he was a leftist, a radical, somewhere on the anarchist spectrum He despised conservatives (he refused to say the word "Tory" in his writing as opposed to the slur "blimps")
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I remember the feeling of reading one of my childhood favs tearing hard into another one of my favs Orwell's review of CS Lewis' Mere Christianity, which he said was not only intellectually worthless but "sinister"
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This highly educated Oxford don adopting this avuncular, charming, informal tone to reassure the plebs that the world isn't complicated, it's simple That this reactionary theistic worldview the Church has shoved down our throats for centuries is common sense, it stands to reason
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This disbelief in progress - moral progress, intellectual progress, material progress ("I have seen both, in an egg, we call it going bad in Narnia") This dismissal of the idea that the human race, over time, continues to learn things
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Hence everything that's happened since Aquinas wrote the Summa Theologica is just modern fluff and nonsense It's all heresies refuted by theologians long ago You can forget about it The truth is obvious, it's common sense, it's what we've always known for a fact
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This brand of conservatism - its sheer *laziness*, the smugness of its incuriosity and intellectual indolence - Orwell had no respect for He straight up did not think it could survive the 20th century, period, not with the massive constant change outside your window
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Hence the "right wing", as such, just isn't there in 1984 He predicted the Tories, the Church, old school tradcons, just wouldn't survive, they'd crumble and vanish and the choice was authoritarian vs liberatory revolution
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That was a massive miscalculation on his part, and it's why I think 1984, despite being a classic, is such a flawed book The fact that Orwell hated conservatives so much and yet conservatives adopted him so readily obviously means he fucked up
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But in any case, you are the Party in this analogy, you understand You've turned truisms like "2+2=4" into a *slogan*, something you just say without thinking about what it means, and getting mad when challenged to do that thinking That's what Newspeak is
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A chopped down, simplified language to, as you put it, maintain a single common coherent point of view without ambiguity He thought that was a bad thing
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Newspeak was a "language of tautologies" To be a doubleplusgood duckspeaker was to just say a bunch of shit that conveyed no information other than the signal "I am speaking obvious truths"
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