Which we now know in hindsight is nonsense - the old oppressors are still there and never lost power It's 36 years after 1984 irl and we very much do still have capitalists, they aren't some ghostly memory of guys in top hats and tuxes
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
And that's why all the stuff in 1984 that aged poorly grates so much The paeans to common sense, to the past, to the memory of traditional ways of life People in the past had access to real truth and only the Party has destroyed it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
It's execrable stuff honestly Stuff that Orwell, in his earlier writing about people like Lewis (or like Wodehouse and Dickens) didn't believe There was an Orwell who saw how tacky and hollow and exploitable nostalgia is and it's a different guy than the one who wrote 1984
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
But I mean yeah If all you had was 1984, out of context, you could easily put it on the shelf next to Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man A Christian reading 1984 has no trouble seeing it as a defense of Christian faith against doubt
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
That's the whole problem You spend all this time warning me about people trying to kill my natural conscience and my basic common sense and my born capacity for reason Then it turns out some people think all of that shit leads to the Bible as the revealed Word of God
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
Turns out someone like Orwell, who thinks of that as superstitious nonsense holding people back, can't argue against it without asking you to question everything that seems obvious to you that underlies your worldview Which 1984 sloppily implied is something only bad guys do
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
It's a quandary It's why 1984 is a very powerful and evocative novel but as an argument of any kind it's not that great Tailor-made for the "I AM RATIONAL AND YOU ARE BRAINWASHED, WAKE UP SHEEPLE" chuds we now live with every day
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CorwinRowlette and
Y'know, it's been a long while since I read it, but I wonder sometimes if this might just be the point. Like, Winston is dogmatic. He has ideological rigidity coming out his ass. And he fails utterly to escape conversion
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Replying to @eggynack @arthur_affect and
Maybe when Winston says, "No, 2+2 is 4 and that's all it can ever be," that is what it would be in real life. A weakness to be exploited. Maybe he would have won, or at least held out longer, had his response been, "Sure. Where are you going with this?"
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Replying to @eggynack @CorwinRowlette and
Yeah I mean my take was always that 1984 is this really depressing book because it's all about questions and not answers, Orwell didn't think he had the answers Winston Smith doesn't actually have any tools to resist totalitarianism, no one in the story does
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I mean that's just it, if you take the book as some kind of manual of resistance, it tells you resistance is impossible Goldstein's book is a trap, Minitru created it, it's just another pathway to loving Big Brother
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Replying to @arthur_affect @eggynack and
I think on some level Orwell believed something like what Winston says with the 2+2=4 thing but in the context of the novel it *doesn't work* It's a big part of the point that it doesn't work
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Replying to @arthur_affect @eggynack and
You can say high-minded shit like that all you want, all the Party has to do is have a guy break your leg with a bat Argumentum ad baculum The debate with O'Brien is a joke, there is no "debate", he's in fucking jail The whole book is O'Brien sadistically playing with his food
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