When you dig through all the agony of George Orwell’s novel 1984, you get to the point where the inquisitor is forcing the main character to agree, under torture, that two plus is whatever he wants it to be. The poor tortured protagantists is screaming, “Please, just tell me what it SHOULD be!”
The essence of freedom, says Orwell, is to say that two plus two equals four.
#1 by Peter on 11/13/2005 - 10:08 pm
Freedom, what’s that?
We’re all conditioned to do whatever the boss wants. After all, he is the boss. How else do we pay our bills? Most of us have or will have hostages to fortune: children. And if we don’t like this system, can you remind us what are the odds of success starting a new business or what percent of farms are actually run or owned by farmers?
So everyone has a boss. A boss is a mini dictator. He controls your income, so he controls every aspect of your life. Getting a job elsewhere is like switching departments within the Soviet aparat. You are still submitting to a dictator. If you submit to a dictator, you aren’t free. The type of people who are attracted to controlling other people’s lives are nutcases. This is why they think they can demand your “110%” that doesn’t exist. And it you live in a large greyscape such as NY, LA, Denver, or Atlanta, you can expect to commute an hour or two one way and your life will consist of twenty minutes Sunday evening after you have partially caught up on your sleep. So you tell yourself you only really need five hours of sleep a night and that your kids are really happy when you give them twenty bucks to play with in the arcade at the mall. (don’t get me started on the hellacious prisons we call schools.)
Communism, on the other hand, consisted of people who did nothing at work but read pulp fiction. However, the Communists did kill people, perhaps one in three! of the USSR until Andropov, so our world could be worse.
If Communism killed quickly and Capitalism kills slowly, remember that Communism faded away but Capitalism kills a nation to extinction.
The Third World flees to the First because the First World is White. The First World does not flee because there is no where else to go.
Thanks, Bob, for the reminder of Orwell.
#2 by Peter on 11/13/2005 - 10:25 pm
Bob: That was an excellent reference to Orwell, by the way. Even when you say 2+2= whatever the boss says it is, you aren’t safe. He is under no obligation to reward you when you do exactly what he says. The point is NOT that 2+2= whatever the boss it is. The point is the boss can do to you whatever he wants!
If your boss had to treat you in the way he promised, then his power would be limited.
#3 by Derek on 11/14/2005 - 10:29 am
O’Brien used the one thing that one person fears the most to mold Winston: a caged rat. The PC priests use the one thing most everyone fears to control our thoughts now: a safe financial future for us and our kids.
Maybe Yale and Harvard are better at this sort of mass intimidation than the “Inner Party” was in the book.
#4 by joe rorke on 11/14/2005 - 3:06 pm
I know one thing. A man can only take so much torture. I’ll never forget the young fella that truly believed that a fly was going to take him away from his persecutors. He believed he was going to get out of the cage. One day he did get out of the cage. We saw them take him away. I’ll never forget him. And I’ll never forget what men can do to men. I sometimes wonder what finally happened to that young fella. Oh, there were others but this one kind of stood out. He was a good man on the inside. Sensitive. Caring. Not psychopathic like some of his comrades and some of his persecutors. Maybe he’s in Chillicothe. If he survived that long. But nobody can ask. It didn’t happen. It’s off limits. Maybe he’s free after all. Who knows? More importantly, who cares? I think I need a drink.
#5 by joe rorke on 11/14/2005 - 3:09 pm
Sorry, I got carried away on that one. There’s been a lot of talk about torture lately in the media. It’s not my favorite subject. I’m totally against it.
#6 by Peter on 11/14/2005 - 5:33 pm
Joe: Thank you. We need to hear the stories. We can’t fix what we don’t know about. When people start talking, maybe we can start fixing. This was perhaps the most moving piece I’ve read here.
What I wonder is what kind of information do you get from an Arab that hasn’t slept in three weeks? It must be pretty weird stuff. I grew up listening to what happened in Vietnam, to how bad those gooks were to our men in captivity. It was a basic proof of how we were good and the Communists were evil. But now all the “conservative” talk show hosts are saying how useful torture is. Do the Arabs talk about flies?