From 1984 Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually, but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs were too vivid to ward off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like, "My Savior" she extended her arms toward the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer." Of course, no political power would overtly state such contradictory slogans, but in view of Orwell's penchant for satire, it is necessary to look at the satirical undercurrent of 1984. He is saying in his satirical way that the contradictions are so glaring to those who are still psychologically alert that leaders might as well be candid in the slogans they endorse in view of the fact that in our commercial environment our society has reached a point that it accepts as a matter of faith the belief that if enough people believe something to be true, it must be true... or "cool". President Bush's "New War" revolves around a legendary myth that just one man, Osama bin Laden is the single cause of the drastic change in all of society brought about by the 9/11 attack. We heard that on the airwaves and see it in the media constantly. We see his face everywhere. There is a striking resemblance between how bin Laden (then Saddam Hussein, and on and on) is portrayed and Goldstein in 1984 as we can see in the following pasage: "But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day, and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the thought police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State." The State of War, Orthodoxy and Split Intelligence Below is a passage from 1984 which to many people may eerily resemble the path that President Bush is leading us on. In this passage, you will see the word, "doublethink". My impression of what Orwell is saying in this book relates to how he uses it as a warning about how the elites use their control of language to control thought and perception. Notice the reference below to the requirement of Party members to "split their intelligence". For instance, we have seen a skyrocking rate of people diagnosed with "Bipolar Disorder" and Autism. For instance, on October 19, 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle reported a 273% increase of Autism cases in a 11-year span in California. My personal belief is that this "split intelligence" is already in evidence in our society, and has been among the elites with a trickle down effect for thousands of years and through every war in those years. Many people in today's society even express fondness for it in their use of the yin/yang symbol in tattoos and trinckets and posters. But those are my impressions. I hope you will read the passage from 1894 and form your own impressions from it. War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus of labor of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierachial society. What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but th morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and evben intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred and adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the inner party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are the strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is bding waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones, but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world. My comments There is a tendancy among a lot of atheists to sterotype theists and there are a lot of theists who tend to stereotype atheists. The inability of our intellectual leaders to establish an intellectual standard that would put an end to these endless, divisive dichotomies is what perpetuates intellectual orthodoxy, and keeps our society in a perpetual state of schizophrenia...constantly at war with itself. It is, worthwhile, however to comment on the different levels of conformity to orthodox belief systems, whether they be over religion or ideology. Some people insist that it is impossible for anyone not to have a belief in some kind, but I think that it is not an issue of what one believes but the ability of individuals to recognize the contradictions in their beliefs. Orwell, himself, alluded to this "split in human intelligence" in the above passage on the state of war where he reffered to the requirement of Party memers that they submit to a split in their intelligence. There are three ways in which this split has been accounted for in the whole spectrum of literature. The oldest way comes from the occult and esoteric literature. Yin/yang symbolism is about the crudest way in which this spl9it is accoutned for from esoteric literature. The most prominant aspect of split intelligence is the binary symbolism that is featured in the use of gender as symbolism of polarized aspects of human experience (male=abstract, aggressive, otherwordly, etc: female=concrete, passive, worldly, etc) Of course, there is an overlap from the esoteric and theology and philosphy where the intellectual history of philosophy has been profuse with mind/body dualism. The second way in which this split has been accounted for is in psychology, particularly with the ramifications of Freudian and Jungian theories of the unconscious. The third way has been the most modern development in cognitive psychology launched by Roger Sperry with his split brain experiments with epilyptics leading into his split brain theory which hypotheisized that there is a division of labor between the left and right hemispheres of the brain that is hard-wired. While subsequent brain research has since shown that the hemisphereic division of labor is not "hard-wired" but conditioned, aspects of the theory have, nevertheless, proven useful in applications of artificial intelligence. I develop further on the implications of all of that in, "Split Brain, Split Mind, and Contradiction". I personally believe that all thought is a matter of chemistry, and that is why I believe that the vocabularies of religion and philosophy should be removed from dictionaaries and placed in a reference book on the history of the meanings of obsolete words... a sort of museum of words. People who want to learn about human nature can find out everything they need to know in the natural sciences, not in religion and philosophy. This is all certainly relevant to understanding what Orwell was trying to get at in constructing a totalitarian scenario in 1984 engineered by an elite of linguistic engineers who mastered the use of language in such a way that created the impression that perception comes from words and not from the nervous system and senses. This belief has been pervasive throughout history. Christianity, itself, operates on the asumption that language has a life of its own. In that regard, Christianity has a lot in common with the Hermetic philosophy where we can see parallels between Moses and Hermes... the Ten Commandments and the Emerald Tablet. There is a growing distrust that I see of the "mainstream" media among many groups on the Internet. Someone posted a question in one of the egroups asking if there are other sources of news on the "war". The fact is that the most important source of news are our eyes and ears, but the media has been brainwashing people into believing that we must go by only what we are told and not what our own eyes and ears tell us. Conseqently, the nervous systems of the vast majority of people have atrophied to the point that most people are incapable of putting into words what they see with their eyes beyond the elementary reading level of, "See Spot run". Thanks to the influences of the Freemason dominance over the media and academia, most people are incapable of observations more complex, so they feel left in the dark. The media tell us so much, but people understand it less and less, yet comply with it unconsciously, not really knowing what they are complying with. See the Freemasons hypnotizing the masses with their slogan, "The Oneness of the Many". George Orwell describes in 1984 how mass media, including television can reduce the nervous systems of the masses of people to such a pitiful degree of dysfunction. The amazing thing about it is that he wrote 1984 long before the television became a part of the mass media. He and Aldous Huxley both envisioned technology that didn't even exist in his day. He also envisioned how easily the masses could be seduced with technology into believing that we must merge spirituality with technology. He detected it intuitively in the symbolic codes used by the media, and he called it, "Newspeak" in 1984. Notice the example of Newspeak in the passage from 1984 below. "Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South Indiia have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash--" When Osama bin Laden is finally killed or captured, we will see a similar news flash on our "telescreens" all over the world, but no doubt, we will be "asked" to tolerate more infringements on our civil liberties in order to win the next "glorious victory". A very real "news flash" today was the news of "anti-terrorist" legislation that will give the agents of the federal government the power to conduct secret searches of individuals suspected of terrorism,to expand the FBI's wiretapping and electronic surveillance of the email and all online activities. It also redefines what terrorist activities are in more general terms. Didn't we once hear someone say, "You can't say that we didn't warn you"? |
| George Orwell on the State of War--1984 & 2001 |
| Carrie L. Drake |
Links Mind Matters Review #45 Index Mind Matters Review #47: Index Links to biographies books, etc. on Orwell Commentary on 1984 Cultural War and the Binary System: A Study of Human Conflict |
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| The Parallel Between Big Brother in 1984 and George W. Bush |
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| News Flash |
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| When the Map Doesn't Match the Territory: the Mechanics of Doublespeak This article delves into how the elites use symbolic double meanings to manipulate public opinion, Big Brother style. |
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