Then it truly says something about the rest of humanity that even with tuberculosis, Orwell was a brilliant and insightful commentator on the state of the world who grasped many basic truths that elude many people even today.
I did not like the article, it was like the author was trying to connect the environment Orwell experienced to the book. IMO this is just guesswork, speculation and worst of all denying the author the intellectual prowess. Think about it, if you were to write a book you would not want the circumstances to affect the work and you’d be conscious about it. Saying that author somehow slipped in text because of the condition he was in paints him as a moron.
These sort of biography inspired essays are just BS, dragging us with a promise of a bit of mystery and mysticism. The truth is that nobody knows and we try to satisfy our curiosity with the best sounding/fitting story.
Animal farm and 1984 and others have something that resonates well with us. And we get the gist and we are a bit more careful and vigilant in our lives thanks to it.
If you read much Orwell, you'll see most of the elements that went into 1984 are present in his earlier writing as well.
"Such, Such Were the Joys" is obvious; other influences I recall are bits of "You and the Atomic Bomb", Down and Out.., Homage..., "Notes on Nationalism", "The Spike" and probably a few I'm forgetting.
What surprises me is how many people think Smith is meant as a sympathetic character; recall what crimes he's willing to commit!
It's really not subtle. Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left. Orwell fought on the side of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the betrayal by the Soviet Union soured him on the prospect of its interpretation of communism. This doesn't even require reading his biography, he explicitly wrote about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia.
Where it falls apart is when people try to analyze his works as critiques of communism from the right because while he hated the Soviet Union, that didn't make him anti-communist, quite the opposite. Maybe this explains why his works still resonate with people (at least by pop cultural reference, as most people citing 1984 don't seem to have actually read it): because they're critiques from the left, they also lend themselves to critiquing capitalism (surveillance capitalism and tepid liberalism in particular).
> Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left.
I'm sure this is accurate and I've heard it before. In practice though, at least 1984 feels like a non-partisan criticism of power hungry bureaucracy run amok. I think that's why it's timeless, it criticizes political systems in practice more than making any argument for a particular ideology. There's would be lots of disagreement on the solution, but we mostly all agree the Party and the world it creates are bad, as are the similar things we see in real life, which again aren't really party specific but are part of all systems of government.
Animal Farm is as well; what is a farm but a piece of geography containing multiple living beings but organised for the ultimate benefit of only a few of them?
Remember: very few dystopias are as much about the other, as they are about the society in which they were written.
Animal Farm is the book-length exploration of what in 1984 gets a single sentence: "Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.", while 1984 depicts why the pigs (the former Middle) just become the High with no real attempt to produce animal equality.
Goldstein poses the question "why should human equality be averted? ... Here we reach the central secret. This motive really consists..." and after that cliffhanger we get the torture, in the frame story, of Part 3, revealing the answer (an answer which young EAB may have implicitly learned at his boarding school?) to Goldstein's question: the cruelty is the point.
I thought power was the point and cruelty what the way of exerting power - at least that's roughly my memory of O'Brien's explanation. That's why I think it aligns so well with any bureaucracy, because they're all self-organizing towards gaining and exerpting more power for it's own sake. (The big difference of course being the conscious awareness of this the party has, whereas in real life it's mostly just emergent behavior)
I'll have to go back and look up O'Brien; you're probably right that he phrases it as power.
However, I say "cruelty" because I was thinking of the Bartle taxonomy[0] for video game players, and the Killer ♣ quadrant. Both Killers and Achievers ♦ aim for power, but only Killers are cruel: Achievers aim for power over scores or things; Killers aim for power over other players. We call that "prey drive" when it occurs in other species; compare the roles the species play in Animal Farm.
Horses are not carnivores and don't have the same prey drive as dogs, but they do have a dominance spectrum. If you put out 8 piles of hay for 10 horses, the 2 weakest won't get to eat. If you put out 10 piles of hay, there will be peace (this is the key insight to feudalism as a socioeconomic structure) if the dominant animal chooses a pile first, and so on in order to the co-dominant, but plenty of violence if it's done the other way around. Now, depending upon the herd, there still may be some violence, because even if there's enough hay for everyone, a dominant horse will, like the Inner Party, chase a weak horse away from their pile just to show they can. If you don't care about herd hierarchy, and just put out 11-12 piles of hay, there will be complete peace, because each time the weak horse gets chased away, there's always an undefended pile it can eat from: the strong get to play strong but the weak still get to eat (this is the key insight to social democracy).
So, yeah, if only it were possible for us all to have lots of power over our environment[1] without seeking power over each other[2], that'd be great.
[1] I'd prefer moving a dozen tons of hay around with a frontloader all by myself, instead of bossing around lots of other people to do it a few kg at a time. As far as I can tell —or have merely been convinced?– the majority of humanity would prefer the latter.
[2] "Oh, it's blessed are the MEEK! Oh, I'm glad they're getting something, they have a hell of a time." –Mrs. B N
When I say "from the left", I'm specifically referring to "to the left of the Soviet Union".
There was a lot of active debate when the Bolsheviks took over in Russia on whether to support them or not because they were creating the first "communist project" at that scale. The disagreement was largely ideological and the criticism was eventually proven correct when the Soviet Union sided against the anarchists in Spain (as well as when they went after "Makhno's army" in Ukraine, as well as early on when they disbanded syndicalist groups and worker cooperatives, as well as later on when they went through rounds of ideological purges and so on). The most well-known discourse around this seems to be from German communists, where it was cut short by the killing of the Spartacus group.
When you say 1984 criticizes "political systems in practice" that is exactly right: the criticism of the Soviet Union wasn't that their stated goals were bad, in fact most of the left agreed on the ultimate goals. The criticism was that, like the pigs in the animal farm, by merely picking up the weapons of the oppressors they recreated the same oppressive power structures (i.e. systems). Anarchists on the other hand wanted to disband the power structures and replace it with one built from the ground up.
When you say "all systems of government" however, it's clear that you're likely unaware of anarchist theory: the problem is not government, the problem is the state. And it doesn't matter whether that state is a conservative or reactionary oligarchy, a liberal or Soviet bureaucracy, or an "anarchocapitalist" corporate board of capital owners: they all share the same structural problem of moving power from the subjects to the state and then using it against the subjects to legitimize the state's authority through violence.
In other words the point of Animal Farm isn't that oppression is inevitable but that switching out who's in charge won't make an oppressive system any less oppressive, it will just recreate the same oppression eventually.
One can be a very devout socialist while being anti-communist, given the subsumption of that word by the evils of Stalin/Mao/etc. Look at the life of Norman Thomas for example.
Thanks! Also read this story decades ago as a young man and it left a strong impression. More then once brought it up as a metaphor in a conversation. For some reason my memory attributed it to Kipling and a few times tried to find it and never could, now I know why, it was Orwell!
The article argues that Orwell’s greatest fear wasn’t torture or totalitarianism, but the loss of solitude, and he fled to Jura Island to preserve his inner life.
If he thought solitude was hard to obtain then, one can only imagine his reaction to today's constant connectivity.
I'm sure many people do their best thinking collectively, but I'm with Orwell, and value long periods of solitude and nurturing my inner life.
It seems to be a theme lately. One of the big ideas in Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu is that the only defense against the all-seeing-all-knowing superior being who intends to crush humanity like bugs is the inner thoughts of the Wallfacers.
Individuals must preserve their inner lives against constant assault by not only the state, but by bosses, coworkers, advertisers, friends and family. Maybe most modern psychological, social and even political problems can be traced to the collapse of individual interiority into the collective hivemind of social media and political parties.
The enemy isn’t Big Brother, the enemy is everyone.
Sure but you need to be careful not to reflexively reach for modern-style revanchist individualism as the solution. All of our notable achievements have been the result of people acting together, and maintaining a collaborative, even collectivist approach is reconcilable with deeply private individual inner lives.
Not that, reading your comment, I think you're approaching it that way. But I could easily imagine someone reading this and being like "yes exactly that's why libertarianism" or whatever.
What popped into my head at your mention of the libertarian outlook is
I was watching an anthropology/history show about all historical
cultures/tribes having something similar to Aboriginal "going
walkabout". In Nordic tribes and native Americans too, its okay to
just go "tread the earth". The point being to feel joy and gratitude
returning to the group. In fact I'm sure it's a biological hard-wired
need. I often have to just pack a bugout bag and go wild with no phone
etc. It's always lovely to come home to family and friends.
But isolated urban living of the technological libertarian seems like
an attempt to do that all the time, alone within the group. I think
that's a mistake because one is stuck in limbo, neither alone nor in
company, getting the joys of neither.
And yet an irony is that generation suffer from deep loneliness.
I guess we always knew that 1000 Facebook friends and constant IMs
doesn't add up to a single IRL friend if you're physically isolated in
your room. The mind-body knows the difference.
Maybe we have to make a better distinction between
connectedness/company and being disconnected/alone for that
conversation to make sense?
It's quite a common concept in existentialist philosophy. Heidegger's
"The They" and Sartre's "The Gaze". In psychoanalysis Lacan's "Big
Other" is related. (I actually have no idea whether Orwell riffed on
that.)
Not to get into it deeply, but it's a force that has two sides. One is
external, the group's desire to overwhelm the individual a la
communism/the Borg. And another is internal, the fear of being
overwhelmed by the group, stripped of identity. Of course that whole
concept is itself the flip side in tension with its opposite;
affinity/coviviality/socialbility and love/belonging of the group.
A tangent but Lacan just distinguished Autre and autre (Other and other), but more recent philosophers in English (especially Zizek) popularized the more pronounceable distinction between the big and the little other.
To be fair though, “l’objet petit a” does occur in Lacan, though, so he wasn’t above the “big”/“little” terminology himself
The small 'other' is just the other people in life, as regular people.
The capitalised Big Other is the organized, concrete and symbolic forces created/imposed by all other people into the individual: law, culture, social obligations, morality, language.
It's the organised imposition/force of others, also called as "the symbolic order".
The quality of the discussion here is diminished by ad hominem attacks on theorists and those who discuss their ideas in good faith. The discussion might be elevated by reasoned counterarguments instead of unsubstantiated insults.
There's an automatic conformity within us, which is useful for communication, learning, trade, custom and law. e.g. It's helpful that we try to use the same words for the same things.
But we can't think outside our frameworks with this conformity engaged. Hence, the need for solitude.
I think the greater problem of a "person on business from Porlock" (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_on_business_from_Porlock) was not the interruption itself, but that it engaged Coleridge automatic conformity... and so, without moorings, his imagined unreality drifted away like a dream on waking.
I must add that this is a higher human intellectual need - but we are also gregarious by deep mammalian nature, and if isolated, will invent and converse with imaged persons.
This perspective is well received; made a bit serendipitous by the unexpectedness of it (for me).
It came as an insightful thing to think about when linking it to the idea that we, humans, are a just a Darwinian biological system, and the rate at which we accelerated away from the eons in which basic tribalism ruled our pretty static social environment and cognitive real estate, was a giant shock to it.
I kinda love with silly endearment all the neat things we discovered to help our feeble little homunculi try to engage and wrangle it all; feudalism, monarchies, democracy, socialism, communism, cults, religion —- c’mon, you’ve got to give us animals a little credit for being quirky.
But oh!!! When you manage to glimpse at the mass representing the futility!
>>> In place of anything like a novel proper, we get a would-be bildungsroman breaking through to the surface in disparate fragments. These scraps are Winston’s yearnings, memories, sensual instincts, which have, as yet, somehow gone unmurdered by the regime. The entire state-sponsored enterprise of Pavlovian sadism in Oceania is devoted to snuffing out this remnant interiority.
The details of Orwell's life were interesting, but the above-quoted paragraph lands as highbrow prose that doesn't say much. I had to look up bildungsroman "A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character". Oh my. It was/is a proper novel. I disagree that it should be characterized as bildungsroman, with all the caveats and flourishes. In fact, it's more about the protagonist's discovery of the truly moral depravity of the culture he lives in. The creative element of the ugliness of the culture is made even more compelling for me by the fact that the storyline avoids the conventional "Shape of Stories" patterns described by Kurt Vonnegut. It ends with the protagonist having all creative life and individuality crushed out of him. Not an easy end to encompass. No happy ending here.
I think the tortured prose comes from an effort to acknowledge 1984 isn't a conventional "good novel" but still avoid saying that Orwell's popularity comes because his writing has a lot of relevance because the modern world can certainly seem "Orwellian".
This quote gives an idea how much the author discounts the validity Orwell's political insight: The meeting had been ominous to Orwell: It placed in his head the idea of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin divvying up the postwar world, leading to a global triopoly of super-states. The man can be forgiven for pouring every ounce of his grief, self-pity, paranoia (literary lore had it that he thought Stalin might have an ice pick with his name on it), and embittered egoism into the predicament of his latest protagonist, Winston Smith.
44 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 95.5 ms ] threadThese sort of biography inspired essays are just BS, dragging us with a promise of a bit of mystery and mysticism. The truth is that nobody knows and we try to satisfy our curiosity with the best sounding/fitting story.
Animal farm and 1984 and others have something that resonates well with us. And we get the gist and we are a bit more careful and vigilant in our lives thanks to it.
"Such, Such Were the Joys" is obvious; other influences I recall are bits of "You and the Atomic Bomb", Down and Out.., Homage..., "Notes on Nationalism", "The Spike" and probably a few I'm forgetting.
What surprises me is how many people think Smith is meant as a sympathetic character; recall what crimes he's willing to commit!
Where it falls apart is when people try to analyze his works as critiques of communism from the right because while he hated the Soviet Union, that didn't make him anti-communist, quite the opposite. Maybe this explains why his works still resonate with people (at least by pop cultural reference, as most people citing 1984 don't seem to have actually read it): because they're critiques from the left, they also lend themselves to critiquing capitalism (surveillance capitalism and tepid liberalism in particular).
I'm sure this is accurate and I've heard it before. In practice though, at least 1984 feels like a non-partisan criticism of power hungry bureaucracy run amok. I think that's why it's timeless, it criticizes political systems in practice more than making any argument for a particular ideology. There's would be lots of disagreement on the solution, but we mostly all agree the Party and the world it creates are bad, as are the similar things we see in real life, which again aren't really party specific but are part of all systems of government.
Remember: very few dystopias are as much about the other, as they are about the society in which they were written.
Animal Farm is the book-length exploration of what in 1984 gets a single sentence: "Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.", while 1984 depicts why the pigs (the former Middle) just become the High with no real attempt to produce animal equality.
Goldstein poses the question "why should human equality be averted? ... Here we reach the central secret. This motive really consists..." and after that cliffhanger we get the torture, in the frame story, of Part 3, revealing the answer (an answer which young EAB may have implicitly learned at his boarding school?) to Goldstein's question: the cruelty is the point.
However, I say "cruelty" because I was thinking of the Bartle taxonomy[0] for video game players, and the Killer ♣ quadrant. Both Killers and Achievers ♦ aim for power, but only Killers are cruel: Achievers aim for power over scores or things; Killers aim for power over other players. We call that "prey drive" when it occurs in other species; compare the roles the species play in Animal Farm.
Horses are not carnivores and don't have the same prey drive as dogs, but they do have a dominance spectrum. If you put out 8 piles of hay for 10 horses, the 2 weakest won't get to eat. If you put out 10 piles of hay, there will be peace (this is the key insight to feudalism as a socioeconomic structure) if the dominant animal chooses a pile first, and so on in order to the co-dominant, but plenty of violence if it's done the other way around. Now, depending upon the herd, there still may be some violence, because even if there's enough hay for everyone, a dominant horse will, like the Inner Party, chase a weak horse away from their pile just to show they can. If you don't care about herd hierarchy, and just put out 11-12 piles of hay, there will be complete peace, because each time the weak horse gets chased away, there's always an undefended pile it can eat from: the strong get to play strong but the weak still get to eat (this is the key insight to social democracy).
So, yeah, if only it were possible for us all to have lots of power over our environment[1] without seeking power over each other[2], that'd be great.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
[1] I'd prefer moving a dozen tons of hay around with a frontloader all by myself, instead of bossing around lots of other people to do it a few kg at a time. As far as I can tell —or have merely been convinced?– the majority of humanity would prefer the latter.
[2] "Oh, it's blessed are the MEEK! Oh, I'm glad they're getting something, they have a hell of a time." –Mrs. B N
There was a lot of active debate when the Bolsheviks took over in Russia on whether to support them or not because they were creating the first "communist project" at that scale. The disagreement was largely ideological and the criticism was eventually proven correct when the Soviet Union sided against the anarchists in Spain (as well as when they went after "Makhno's army" in Ukraine, as well as early on when they disbanded syndicalist groups and worker cooperatives, as well as later on when they went through rounds of ideological purges and so on). The most well-known discourse around this seems to be from German communists, where it was cut short by the killing of the Spartacus group.
When you say 1984 criticizes "political systems in practice" that is exactly right: the criticism of the Soviet Union wasn't that their stated goals were bad, in fact most of the left agreed on the ultimate goals. The criticism was that, like the pigs in the animal farm, by merely picking up the weapons of the oppressors they recreated the same oppressive power structures (i.e. systems). Anarchists on the other hand wanted to disband the power structures and replace it with one built from the ground up.
When you say "all systems of government" however, it's clear that you're likely unaware of anarchist theory: the problem is not government, the problem is the state. And it doesn't matter whether that state is a conservative or reactionary oligarchy, a liberal or Soviet bureaucracy, or an "anarchocapitalist" corporate board of capital owners: they all share the same structural problem of moving power from the subjects to the state and then using it against the subjects to legitimize the state's authority through violence.
In other words the point of Animal Farm isn't that oppression is inevitable but that switching out who's in charge won't make an oppressive system any less oppressive, it will just recreate the same oppression eventually.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
The account of hand to hand trench warfare is horrifying.
Down and Out in Paris and London is good too - that he lives the life he described is just bizarre. A driven man.
I've had beers with the homeless and with billionaires, and I've slept rough and lived in five stars.
But compared to Blair, I've only ever been a tourist; whether posh or tramp, he committed.
At least he didn't go as far as cup-less Diogenes, in his tub.
If he thought solitude was hard to obtain then, one can only imagine his reaction to today's constant connectivity.
I'm sure many people do their best thinking collectively, but I'm with Orwell, and value long periods of solitude and nurturing my inner life.
It seems to be a theme lately. One of the big ideas in Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu is that the only defense against the all-seeing-all-knowing superior being who intends to crush humanity like bugs is the inner thoughts of the Wallfacers.
Individuals must preserve their inner lives against constant assault by not only the state, but by bosses, coworkers, advertisers, friends and family. Maybe most modern psychological, social and even political problems can be traced to the collapse of individual interiority into the collective hivemind of social media and political parties.
The enemy isn’t Big Brother, the enemy is everyone.
Not that, reading your comment, I think you're approaching it that way. But I could easily imagine someone reading this and being like "yes exactly that's why libertarianism" or whatever.
But isolated urban living of the technological libertarian seems like an attempt to do that all the time, alone within the group. I think that's a mistake because one is stuck in limbo, neither alone nor in company, getting the joys of neither.
Yea, I think the very concept of this will be very difficult for anyone who's childhood was in the internet era.
I mean, imagine the horror of turning the cell phone off 8-)
I guess we always knew that 1000 Facebook friends and constant IMs doesn't add up to a single IRL friend if you're physically isolated in your room. The mind-body knows the difference.
Maybe we have to make a better distinction between connectedness/company and being disconnected/alone for that conversation to make sense?
Not to get into it deeply, but it's a force that has two sides. One is external, the group's desire to overwhelm the individual a la communism/the Borg. And another is internal, the fear of being overwhelmed by the group, stripped of identity. Of course that whole concept is itself the flip side in tension with its opposite; affinity/coviviality/socialbility and love/belonging of the group.
To be fair though, “l’objet petit a” does occur in Lacan, though, so he wasn’t above the “big”/“little” terminology himself
Edit: sorry tired and getting mixed up with Heidegger's being/Being
The capitalised Big Other is the organized, concrete and symbolic forces created/imposed by all other people into the individual: law, culture, social obligations, morality, language.
It's the organised imposition/force of others, also called as "the symbolic order".
But we can't think outside our frameworks with this conformity engaged. Hence, the need for solitude.
I think the greater problem of a "person on business from Porlock" (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_on_business_from_Porlock) was not the interruption itself, but that it engaged Coleridge automatic conformity... and so, without moorings, his imagined unreality drifted away like a dream on waking.
I must add that this is a higher human intellectual need - but we are also gregarious by deep mammalian nature, and if isolated, will invent and converse with imaged persons.
I remember reading about having a healthy life by maintaining boundaries, and the definition went into gray areas that made a lot of sense.
Healthy boundaries are not only about physical or emotional, but also digital, time and even energy boundaries.
It is ok if you don't have enough energy to cook.
It is also ok if you don't want to create and account, sign up for a newsletter or read an advertisement.
Sort of amazing that kindle e-readers make you pay for no advertisements, and carefully qualify the claim "Without Lockscreen Ads"
It came as an insightful thing to think about when linking it to the idea that we, humans, are a just a Darwinian biological system, and the rate at which we accelerated away from the eons in which basic tribalism ruled our pretty static social environment and cognitive real estate, was a giant shock to it.
I kinda love with silly endearment all the neat things we discovered to help our feeble little homunculi try to engage and wrangle it all; feudalism, monarchies, democracy, socialism, communism, cults, religion —- c’mon, you’ve got to give us animals a little credit for being quirky.
But oh!!! When you manage to glimpse at the mass representing the futility!
This is what Kafka was writing about all along, and specifically in The Trial.
Josef K's (and Kafka's, and ours) enemy is himself.
The mind traps itself. Within its own hologram.
The details of Orwell's life were interesting, but the above-quoted paragraph lands as highbrow prose that doesn't say much. I had to look up bildungsroman "A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character". Oh my. It was/is a proper novel. I disagree that it should be characterized as bildungsroman, with all the caveats and flourishes. In fact, it's more about the protagonist's discovery of the truly moral depravity of the culture he lives in. The creative element of the ugliness of the culture is made even more compelling for me by the fact that the storyline avoids the conventional "Shape of Stories" patterns described by Kurt Vonnegut. It ends with the protagonist having all creative life and individuality crushed out of him. Not an easy end to encompass. No happy ending here.
This quote gives an idea how much the author discounts the validity Orwell's political insight: The meeting had been ominous to Orwell: It placed in his head the idea of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin divvying up the postwar world, leading to a global triopoly of super-states. The man can be forgiven for pouring every ounce of his grief, self-pity, paranoia (literary lore had it that he thought Stalin might have an ice pick with his name on it), and embittered egoism into the predicament of his latest protagonist, Winston Smith.