bah no wonder someone placed a hold on my copy I had from the library (3 weeks ago there were no holds when I got it but now there are a bunch of Pple in line)
It's a pity for most people this will be the only Orwell's book they will read, personally I find it one of his weaker ones, I liked "Animal farm", "Down and out in Paris and London" and his essays much more, and his biggest literary achievement is probably "Homage for Catalonia".
It's true that Orwell was a much better writer of nonfiction than he was of fiction, but, oddly, reading Burmese Days is what made me realize that. I think it's my favorite of his novels because it's so personal. (Although you can almost get everything you need to know about Burmese Days in much less time by reading "Shooting an Elephant.")
It's interesting how little improvement in the characterization of power structures heavily intent on limiting individual liberty has occurred over the last half century. 1984 was written in 1948 and Brave New World in 1932. There have certainly been newer works in the same vein, such as V for Vendetta, but they generally have just used the same palette, the same terminology, the same ideological formulations.
However, I think those formulations are out of date and their out-of-dateness is harmful to this critical discussion about the nature and importance of liberty and its relationship to governance.
Our terminology, our mental models, even our archetypes are best-suited to the world of the 1930s and '40s, not to today. We throw around terms like fascism and tyranny and they lose a lot of their force because they are not really applicable. That's not to say that there is no danger of the industrialized, democratic nations slipping into forms of governance which are every bit as bad as tyranny or fascism, but we must recognize that when we use terminology that is not 100% applicable it makes it that much easier to dismiss or ignore.
History is replete with examples of tyrants who have ruled harshly to further their own self-interests or out of a sense of megalomania. But I think we need to recognize that limitations to personal liberty need not be due solely to tyranny or fascism and so forth, there are other forces, other modus operandi at play. People have tried using the term "nanny state", but that has the opposite problem of lacking sufficient gravitas.
There is a very real movement that has been underway for over a century to limit individual liberty in the service of the greater good. The war on drugs is an extension of this phenomenon, as are the worst excesses in the war on terror. But lacking good terminology makes this discussion that much more cumbersome and difficult.
Stalin's Russia is no longer the touchstone it once was, in other words. I don't think that you can't apply the critique in 1984 to current events. There is just a generation gap.
GWB is a kind of touchstone for the modern generation, helpless while events swirl around him, grasping for a measure of control at all costs. And what costs they were: torture, surveillance, war, a Manichaean division of the world into heroes and villains.
Instead of intentions of powerful men, you have the psychoses of bureaucracies created by individuals for all the right reasons, full of unintended effects, ultimately achieving the opposite of their stated goals.
In 1984, there is a malevolence at the back of Big Brother. In 2013, there need not be anything but a decentralized system, harnessing the latest technologies, manipulated by the knowledgeable, but ultimately storyless, aimless, and inhuman.
I view it as sort of a zombified religion. There's everything there. Institutionalized morality. The concepts of "sin" as an absolute evil even when at best only self-harm is involved. The idea of individual needs and freedoms being subservient to the needs and even desires of the collective. The idea that everyone should live and be bound by the same moral and ethical code.
And, of course, the ideas that true independence, heterodoxy, and privacy are threats to the established social order (they often are) and should be reined in as tight as possible.
A lot of these ideas are still rattling around in the socio-cultural baggage of the west, even after their mooring to organized religion has drifted away and become less relevant. Yet all of these things are problematic for the same reasons they've always been, but without the wires tying it directly to a bunch of stories about an omnipotent sky-being suddenly people have lost the ability to understand or gauge their level of threat to essential personal liberty.
I found the excerpts from the fictional The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism some of the most interesting parts of 1984 as although straight infodumps about, as you put it, the nature of the system.
I guess I meant the inner circle, who were complicit and aware of it, and dissociating the fact. That came from the myth of Lenin that a small, pure cadre could run the whole show. Oceania follows this design.
Today we need no such evil and aware of it crew to see the same systematic abuses, merely the banal evils of everyday.
oddly, Atlas Shrugged is along a similar vein but many here seem to dance around it, as if it were taboo. An overpowering bureaucracy is bad regardless if it manipulates an individual or a group of them.
There are similarities between 1984 and Atlas Shrugged, but some big differences too. I like them both but Ayn Rand's work seems more fantastical. Orwell's seems closer to reality in some fundamental way.
Her heros are more unreal, like demigods. Having those perfect heros makes the parody less poignant. I do think hers is a valuable parody as well. The cowardly, opportunistic looters are probably more realistic than Orwell's unbeatable bad guys. The heads-I-win-tails-you-lose dynamic she describes is very good. She messes up (IMO) is in dividing the people into innate types. Also in her description of where this will all eventually lead. When the hero's escape to build their own society the other heros it looks like an extension of the heros' (shared) personality. The looter society left behind (now without heros to support it) devolves and regresses, cannibalizing then living in the ruins of the once great civilization. That doesn't feel all that convincing in the book^.
Even though Rand describes the process and Orwell describes the result, his (mostly inferred) process seems more realistic. His dystopian society resembled actual history more than either of her societies, and feels more like a stable state. I think it all comes back to more realistic portrayal of humans. Orwell seemed to undertand how humans work. The characters are products of their circumstances within their society. It feels realistic. More similar to the people you know. They can be moulded. They can be broken. The John Galts in Atlas Shrugged are real. In Orwell's world they exist as stories, like they do in ours.
^There are lots of example in the world and all through history of similar looking scenes. EG, medieval societies in the ruines of Roman cities washing in rivers that once fed aqueducts. These have inspired variations of The Great Fall stories for thousands of years(Planet of The Apes!).
Good post on a mobile and cant post on every point easily. But i think most of those terms can and will be used to describe what we are and have been seeing the last couple of decades. I think yes while a bit of context has muddied the water but in no way has the players or the game. The terms your bringing up never meant the same thing over all history in all instances but for the most part they all describe the same game to me.
To paraphrase a famous quote, I have no idea what fascism in US would look like, but I know it will involve the stars and stripes, and not brown/black shirts, Nazi uniforms, Confederate battle flags, Swastikas, or shaved heads. The essence of fascist and other totalitarian thought transcends this simplistic "shell".
Thing is, in the 1920s and 1930s fascism did not carry a strong negative connotation. Mussolini's regime was mostly viewed in a positive light by democracies until the invasion of Ethiopia and adoption of racial laws. This was social context when Brave New World was written (note the "Benito Hoover" character).
To me Nineteen-Eightyfour is mostly about power for the sake of power, and the role language plays in that (which extends to the ability to think), and I think in that sense it is sadly timeless.
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
Fascism, Nazism and the dominant, authoritarian forms of Marxism grew quickly, in a short time span and had similar philosophical and cultural roots. Modernism, industrialism, internationalism, the Great Wars, etc.
Their symbolism and many aspects of their modus operandi were very similar to each other. A "holy book" a founding figure, paternalism, revolutionism, populism, ideology, enemies, uniforms, monologues, youth groups. By 1948, Hitler in 1938 looked like a caricature of a dictator. Orwell was incredibly sharp in seeing the commonalities between that generation of dictators and seeing it as early as he did. The relationships between the ideology and control, the axis of cultural control. I think starting with a literal parody was useful approach. But, in 1948 he was describing something that had happened and had largely already (though he didn't know it then) reached its peak. Even though he was clearly skeptical, critical and wary of authoritarianism going back to his days in the Spanish civil war a decade earlier, he didn't have that sharp, simp effective vocabulary that exposes and characterizes the thing until it had passed its peak.
The authoritarian states that did survive were/are tended to be descendants of those 1920s-1940s systems, often in cultural backwaters. Orwell's terms hold up pretty well for describing North Korea, Baathist Iraq/Syria, Nasarist Egypt, Maoist China, Central Asain Former Soviet Countries or Ghadafi. Remarkably well.
My point (poorly made) is that whatever authoritarianism is/will rise out of this data gathering, corporate-government surveillance euthorotarianism model is only now taking shape. It hasn't peaked yet. It isn't fully formed. We don't yet know what its central themes are or how it works. We don't know how it maintains power or dampens opposition. It may never even come. I hope it won't.
We won't have the right vocabulary until its too late. The Romans were on the lookout for potential Kings. They didn't know to watch out for Caesars.
I can make some guesses but I really don't know what the symbols of this new tyranny are. I don't know how to parody it.
Symbols of this new tyranny are highly sophisticated propaganda/subversion and bureaucratic repression. So, unlike standard totalitarian systems which are, in a sense, straight and clean, this system is not - you could say it's opportunistic. Bureaucracy is just formal execution of their will inside legal system (some people call that justice, but it's just tool of repression towards people). As you can see they are so strong that they can even play with constitutional rights.
"highly sophisticated propaganda/subversion and bureaucratic repression" is (1) a lot more general than what Orwell gave us and (b) could equally describe "standard totalitarian systems"
Yep, it's general, but no, it couldn't be applied to any other system.
For a start, most repressive systems in history were phisical, not bureocratic. In them the boreocracy existed mainly to feed data to the police, and the police supported the regime. Our current ovespecialization made it impossible to survive outside of the system, thus the bureocracy grew real teeth and the importance of the police reduced. Nowadays a government can almost kill a person just by making it impossible for him to use a bank account.
And them, the hightly sophisticated part... Well, it probably would be better described as hightly technological propaganda. Sistematic research on propaganda started arount the 30's, and high tech one is quite new. So new that I have no idea how it looks like, and if the current actions are it or not.
Thanks for posting this. The most obvious point (to me) is that it would be very hard to install a 1984-style regime in a nation where almost every educated person has read 1984.
Anything that even has the slightest overtone of old-school totalitarianism gets mocked and derided by the media and the educated classes. No-one intelligent takes the "war on terror" seriously, for example.
In a democracy, whoever influences public opinion is basically in charge. We live in a weird society where most media outlets are controlled by big business, and yet most people who work in media are very progressive (you might not believe me, but it's true: Fox News/the Daily Mail/etc do not have some secret source of right wing humanities graduates, and so most of their reporters are typical young, metropolitan, educated liberals). That makes the media a weird Rorschach test where from one perspective it's under the thumb of big business and from another it's under the thumb of the "liberal elite".
The best model I could come up with to understand Western society is that there are basically two power structures that rarely openly compete but continually grind against each other like tectonic plates. One power structure consists of large corporations, finance, the military, and so on. The other consists of the media, academia, many government agencies (most government workers are again, progressive) and various international organisations. Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, is considered a left-wing outpost in right-wing capitalism, which is why Marc Andreesen was condemned for coming out as Republican, and why tech employees can be fired if they offend the enforcers of "social justice".
The best evidence I can give of this is one paper that studied the policies of right-wing and left-wing governments. They found that right-wing policies favoured the top 2% of society. Left-wing policies tend to favour the top 5%.
This post http://www.macroresilience.com/2013/04/08/radical-centrism-u... explains the paper and how our current system basically gives us the worst of both worlds: "Where the government was the sole operator, such as prisons and healthcare, “pragmatic” privatisation leaves us with a mix of heavily regulated oligopolies and risk-free private contracting relationships. On the other hand, where the private sector was allowed to operate without much oversight the “pragmatic” reform involves the subordination of free enterprise to a “sensible” regulatory regime and public-private partnerships to direct capital to social causes."
I have no idea how this will end, but I'm not optimistic about the future of democracy. Too many people squabbling over deckchairs while the Titanic keeps sailing towards the icebergs (whether or not Sesame Street retains its government funding is irrelevant, when both military and social security spending keeps going up and up).
The successful governments of the twenty-first century will probably be a mix of corporate nationalists, like China and Russia, (basically Fascism with some self-control) and pragmatic city-states like Singapore.
Post-script: Two of my favourite bloggers describe the same conflict between society's elites. Mencius Moldbug describes them as Optimates and Brahmins. Michael o'Church describes them as E1 and G1. Oddly enough, although they describe the two sides almost identically, they're on opposite teams (Moldbug seeing the left-wing elite as all-powerful, and Michael o'Church seeing the opposite).
> Thanks for posting this. The most obvious point (to me) is that it would be very hard to install a 1984-style regime in a nation where almost every educated person has read 1984.
The fact that people think so is one of the reasons that its not true.
> Anything that even has the slightest overtone of old-school totalitarianism gets mocked and derided by the media and the educated classes.
Ineffectually, usually, and with a very big "boy who cried wolf" effect.
> No-one intelligent takes the "war on terror" seriously, for example.
Either there aren't very many intelligent people in the country (so that that statement doesn't matter), or that statement isn't true in any substantive sense that demonstrates resistance to totalitarianism.
> We live in a weird society where most media outlets are controlled by big business, and yet most people who work in media are very progressive
Its not all that weird that the serfs support the downward distribution of resources and power while the lords don't.
The weird thing is treating it as if the influence of the former was actually a counterbalance to the latter.
> Fox News/the Daily Mail/etc do not have some secret source of right wing humanities graduates, and so most of their reporters are typical young, metropolitan, educated liberals
Who very quickly learn what side their bread is buttered on. So, they are practicially neutered, however they continue to self-identify.
Chomksy's book, Manufacturing Consent, goes a long way to explaining how U.S. mainstream politics works in conjunction with the media, even though it was written over 2 decades ago.
20 word summary:
Carefully study incentives throughout every part of the system, and it becomes clear why individuals do what they do.
So - it's not that we have a small or even large number of individuals doing bad things. It's that we have thousands of incentives, some obvious, some not, that collectively produce systemic behavior whose end result is in many cases not desirable.
If your choice is between doing something that plagues your conscience a bit, or getting fired, which do you choose?
The movement that limits individual liberty in the service of the greater good also creates a system that could provide turnkey tyranny. Today is different than the 1930's and '40s, but human nature hasn't changed one bit. Is it worth the risk?
I'd like to know the names and addresses of the people who ordered it. Does anyone have a phone number for someone in the Department of Homeland Security I can ask?
Well-deserved...is there a high school classic that is so thematically substantive and yet also such an accessible, enjoyable page turner? Yes, in retrospect, of course there wasn't going to be a revolution, but you weren't so pessimistic and cynical back in 10th grade. Also, I think I owe my latent fear to rodents to that book's finale.
"Shooting an Elephant" also deserves to be mentioned almost as much as 1984, in terms of lessons in civics and human psychology.
Ah, the irony: 1984 was the first book to be removed from Kindles using the remote Amazon kill switch [1], another plain violation of many basic human rights (first of all, the "right to read" [2]).
When people ask why I pirate pdf's, I point to instances like this.
I want full control over my hardware, my software and the like. The fact this happened gives in my opinion, more ammunition to the side claiming piracy is equal to actually owning your content, drm free.
Are works like "1984" or "Brave New World" presenting to us such fundamentally touching truths that they actually become self fulfilling prophesies?
Are those so elementary truths that they become building blocks of our thinking, shaping our above mentioned [1] terminology, our mental models, even our archetypes?
Is there any fiction presenting us with a future outlook we would actually want to be become self fulfilling prophesies?
What is social fiction in contrast to science fiction?
71 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadIf you're in the USA it may even be illegal to know that it's available for free elsewhere, so delete the knowledge from your mind.
Also "As of 10:16 p.m. EDT, sales of Orwell's "1984" are up 126 percent on the Amazon list"
Edit: assuming he runs for office...I guess I'm jumping the gun a bit
We proudly announce that, using our PRISM system, we just obtained personal information of anyone who just bought the "1984" from Amazon.
Teams have already been sent out to ensure that those terrorists do not harm our country and are not allowed to take away our freedoms.
We'd like to thank you for your cooperation in ensuring that our nation continues our democratic traditions, and send our best wishes to you.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt
Now it says 2 hours. I'm a third of the way done.
Thank you.
Also, if you'd like to read Homage to Catalonia:
http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/index.html
I highly recommend it.
http://www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_an_Elephant
However, I think those formulations are out of date and their out-of-dateness is harmful to this critical discussion about the nature and importance of liberty and its relationship to governance.
Our terminology, our mental models, even our archetypes are best-suited to the world of the 1930s and '40s, not to today. We throw around terms like fascism and tyranny and they lose a lot of their force because they are not really applicable. That's not to say that there is no danger of the industrialized, democratic nations slipping into forms of governance which are every bit as bad as tyranny or fascism, but we must recognize that when we use terminology that is not 100% applicable it makes it that much easier to dismiss or ignore.
History is replete with examples of tyrants who have ruled harshly to further their own self-interests or out of a sense of megalomania. But I think we need to recognize that limitations to personal liberty need not be due solely to tyranny or fascism and so forth, there are other forces, other modus operandi at play. People have tried using the term "nanny state", but that has the opposite problem of lacking sufficient gravitas.
There is a very real movement that has been underway for over a century to limit individual liberty in the service of the greater good. The war on drugs is an extension of this phenomenon, as are the worst excesses in the war on terror. But lacking good terminology makes this discussion that much more cumbersome and difficult.
GWB is a kind of touchstone for the modern generation, helpless while events swirl around him, grasping for a measure of control at all costs. And what costs they were: torture, surveillance, war, a Manichaean division of the world into heroes and villains.
Instead of intentions of powerful men, you have the psychoses of bureaucracies created by individuals for all the right reasons, full of unintended effects, ultimately achieving the opposite of their stated goals.
In 1984, there is a malevolence at the back of Big Brother. In 2013, there need not be anything but a decentralized system, harnessing the latest technologies, manipulated by the knowledgeable, but ultimately storyless, aimless, and inhuman.
Help with this acronym?
And, of course, the ideas that true independence, heterodoxy, and privacy are threats to the established social order (they often are) and should be reined in as tight as possible.
A lot of these ideas are still rattling around in the socio-cultural baggage of the west, even after their mooring to organized religion has drifted away and become less relevant. Yet all of these things are problematic for the same reasons they've always been, but without the wires tying it directly to a bunch of stories about an omnipotent sky-being suddenly people have lost the ability to understand or gauge their level of threat to essential personal liberty.
1984 made it painfully clear that the actual existence of big brother was superfluous.
It wasn't his malevolence that made the system run as it did - it was the nature of the system itself.
Today we need no such evil and aware of it crew to see the same systematic abuses, merely the banal evils of everyday.
Her heros are more unreal, like demigods. Having those perfect heros makes the parody less poignant. I do think hers is a valuable parody as well. The cowardly, opportunistic looters are probably more realistic than Orwell's unbeatable bad guys. The heads-I-win-tails-you-lose dynamic she describes is very good. She messes up (IMO) is in dividing the people into innate types. Also in her description of where this will all eventually lead. When the hero's escape to build their own society the other heros it looks like an extension of the heros' (shared) personality. The looter society left behind (now without heros to support it) devolves and regresses, cannibalizing then living in the ruins of the once great civilization. That doesn't feel all that convincing in the book^.
Even though Rand describes the process and Orwell describes the result, his (mostly inferred) process seems more realistic. His dystopian society resembled actual history more than either of her societies, and feels more like a stable state. I think it all comes back to more realistic portrayal of humans. Orwell seemed to undertand how humans work. The characters are products of their circumstances within their society. It feels realistic. More similar to the people you know. They can be moulded. They can be broken. The John Galts in Atlas Shrugged are real. In Orwell's world they exist as stories, like they do in ours.
^There are lots of example in the world and all through history of similar looking scenes. EG, medieval societies in the ruines of Roman cities washing in rivers that once fed aqueducts. These have inspired variations of The Great Fall stories for thousands of years(Planet of The Apes!).
Thing is, in the 1920s and 1930s fascism did not carry a strong negative connotation. Mussolini's regime was mostly viewed in a positive light by democracies until the invasion of Ethiopia and adoption of racial laws. This was social context when Brave New World was written (note the "Benito Hoover" character).
I'd suggest reading these pieces:
1) "UR-fascism" by Umberto Eco http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html -- attempts to define salient features of fascism across the different regimes.
2) "Three New Deals", http://www.amazon.com/Three-New-Deals-Reflections-Roosevelts... -- title speaks for itself
And why arguments like "I have nothing to hide" are harder to dismiss than "jews control the world".
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
Their symbolism and many aspects of their modus operandi were very similar to each other. A "holy book" a founding figure, paternalism, revolutionism, populism, ideology, enemies, uniforms, monologues, youth groups. By 1948, Hitler in 1938 looked like a caricature of a dictator. Orwell was incredibly sharp in seeing the commonalities between that generation of dictators and seeing it as early as he did. The relationships between the ideology and control, the axis of cultural control. I think starting with a literal parody was useful approach. But, in 1948 he was describing something that had happened and had largely already (though he didn't know it then) reached its peak. Even though he was clearly skeptical, critical and wary of authoritarianism going back to his days in the Spanish civil war a decade earlier, he didn't have that sharp, simp effective vocabulary that exposes and characterizes the thing until it had passed its peak.
The authoritarian states that did survive were/are tended to be descendants of those 1920s-1940s systems, often in cultural backwaters. Orwell's terms hold up pretty well for describing North Korea, Baathist Iraq/Syria, Nasarist Egypt, Maoist China, Central Asain Former Soviet Countries or Ghadafi. Remarkably well.
My point (poorly made) is that whatever authoritarianism is/will rise out of this data gathering, corporate-government surveillance euthorotarianism model is only now taking shape. It hasn't peaked yet. It isn't fully formed. We don't yet know what its central themes are or how it works. We don't know how it maintains power or dampens opposition. It may never even come. I hope it won't.
We won't have the right vocabulary until its too late. The Romans were on the lookout for potential Kings. They didn't know to watch out for Caesars.
I can make some guesses but I really don't know what the symbols of this new tyranny are. I don't know how to parody it.
For a start, most repressive systems in history were phisical, not bureocratic. In them the boreocracy existed mainly to feed data to the police, and the police supported the regime. Our current ovespecialization made it impossible to survive outside of the system, thus the bureocracy grew real teeth and the importance of the police reduced. Nowadays a government can almost kill a person just by making it impossible for him to use a bank account.
And them, the hightly sophisticated part... Well, it probably would be better described as hightly technological propaganda. Sistematic research on propaganda started arount the 30's, and high tech one is quite new. So new that I have no idea how it looks like, and if the current actions are it or not.
Anything that even has the slightest overtone of old-school totalitarianism gets mocked and derided by the media and the educated classes. No-one intelligent takes the "war on terror" seriously, for example.
In a democracy, whoever influences public opinion is basically in charge. We live in a weird society where most media outlets are controlled by big business, and yet most people who work in media are very progressive (you might not believe me, but it's true: Fox News/the Daily Mail/etc do not have some secret source of right wing humanities graduates, and so most of their reporters are typical young, metropolitan, educated liberals). That makes the media a weird Rorschach test where from one perspective it's under the thumb of big business and from another it's under the thumb of the "liberal elite".
The best model I could come up with to understand Western society is that there are basically two power structures that rarely openly compete but continually grind against each other like tectonic plates. One power structure consists of large corporations, finance, the military, and so on. The other consists of the media, academia, many government agencies (most government workers are again, progressive) and various international organisations. Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, is considered a left-wing outpost in right-wing capitalism, which is why Marc Andreesen was condemned for coming out as Republican, and why tech employees can be fired if they offend the enforcers of "social justice".
The best evidence I can give of this is one paper that studied the policies of right-wing and left-wing governments. They found that right-wing policies favoured the top 2% of society. Left-wing policies tend to favour the top 5%.
This post http://www.macroresilience.com/2013/04/08/radical-centrism-u... explains the paper and how our current system basically gives us the worst of both worlds: "Where the government was the sole operator, such as prisons and healthcare, “pragmatic” privatisation leaves us with a mix of heavily regulated oligopolies and risk-free private contracting relationships. On the other hand, where the private sector was allowed to operate without much oversight the “pragmatic” reform involves the subordination of free enterprise to a “sensible” regulatory regime and public-private partnerships to direct capital to social causes."
I have no idea how this will end, but I'm not optimistic about the future of democracy. Too many people squabbling over deckchairs while the Titanic keeps sailing towards the icebergs (whether or not Sesame Street retains its government funding is irrelevant, when both military and social security spending keeps going up and up).
The successful governments of the twenty-first century will probably be a mix of corporate nationalists, like China and Russia, (basically Fascism with some self-control) and pragmatic city-states like Singapore.
The fact that people think so is one of the reasons that its not true.
> Anything that even has the slightest overtone of old-school totalitarianism gets mocked and derided by the media and the educated classes.
Ineffectually, usually, and with a very big "boy who cried wolf" effect.
> No-one intelligent takes the "war on terror" seriously, for example.
Either there aren't very many intelligent people in the country (so that that statement doesn't matter), or that statement isn't true in any substantive sense that demonstrates resistance to totalitarianism.
> We live in a weird society where most media outlets are controlled by big business, and yet most people who work in media are very progressive
Its not all that weird that the serfs support the downward distribution of resources and power while the lords don't.
The weird thing is treating it as if the influence of the former was actually a counterbalance to the latter.
> Fox News/the Daily Mail/etc do not have some secret source of right wing humanities graduates, and so most of their reporters are typical young, metropolitan, educated liberals
Who very quickly learn what side their bread is buttered on. So, they are practicially neutered, however they continue to self-identify.
20 word summary:
Carefully study incentives throughout every part of the system, and it becomes clear why individuals do what they do.
So - it's not that we have a small or even large number of individuals doing bad things. It's that we have thousands of incentives, some obvious, some not, that collectively produce systemic behavior whose end result is in many cases not desirable.
If your choice is between doing something that plagues your conscience a bit, or getting fired, which do you choose?
"Shooting an Elephant" also deserves to be mentioned almost as much as 1984, in terms of lessons in civics and human psychology.
Here is the movie on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDbWtbCHt7g
Edit: I can't watch old movies... needs more special effects.
[1] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090717/1559425587.shtml [2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I want full control over my hardware, my software and the like. The fact this happened gives in my opinion, more ammunition to the side claiming piracy is equal to actually owning your content, drm free.
Are those so elementary truths that they become building blocks of our thinking, shaping our above mentioned [1] terminology, our mental models, even our archetypes?
Is there any fiction presenting us with a future outlook we would actually want to be become self fulfilling prophesies?
What is social fiction in contrast to science fiction?
__
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860077