Thought Crime
1Liner
: George Orwell wrote his cautionary book titled Nineteen Eighty-Four about what progressive lefists would become.
|
|
In 1949, George Orwell wrote his cautionary book titled Nineteen Eighty-Four[1], positing what a world would look like by the year 1984. After all, he’d seen what the trends of Socialism had done to the world around him (in England and the U.S., USSR, Germany, China, and so on). And I'm not talking about just the economic devastation, but the broader cultural intolerance, purges, revisionism and demanding conformity that is a prerequisite to enable Social ownership (and the resulting loss of individual liberty). So he just imagined and documented where the current cultural trajectory would most likely lead, if unimpeded.
Intro[edit | edit source]
In Orwell's book, IngSoc (English Socialism) would spread and the U.S and England would merge into a tyrannical single-party dystopia, epitomized by Big Brother. Following Socialism’s normal mode of operation, the state would spy on everyone, demand conformance, and use their politically-correct invented language, called Newspeak[2], as a litmus test to validate conformity and capitulation (there was no freedom of thought or expression going on). Any variances from proper uses of the continually shifting terminology (or re-invented histories and word-meanings) was classified as "thoughtcrime"[3]; which meant those perpetrators were worthy of torture and re-education.
Since the shifting history, language and truths were impossible to keep coherent, there would be contradictions between them — but acknowledging those contradiction was akin to blasphemy, so the people were taught to accept them as doublethink[4]: that two conflicting party-truths could both be correct at the same time (even if logic dictated that one must be wrong). This is taken to a climax when the antagonist party-man (O’Brien) is forcing our protagonist (Winston), under torture, to admit that 2+2=5[5], because anyone who is free to admit the truth (that 2+2=4), is not yet a worthy subject to the state. Truth is what the party tells you it is.
While the non-fictional 1984 wasn't nearly as bad as all that, for most people, the parody still had too much truth to it. I’m not as concerned about the loss of privacy (though that has happened in spades). Nor of the unification of Europe under one super-national empire. I’m more concerned with the loss of intellectual thought, and the freedom to question things without safe spaces or people trying to imprison or un-employ you for what you said or think.
In the real-world 1984, I was a liberal kid attending college part time (while working), who wanted to be active in politics. But the more they tried to convince me of "the truth", the more I researched and questioned the mistakes in their alternate reality. The more I resisted the newspeak and doublethink (and offered my research and facts back), the madder the politically-correct got. I refused their fictions, and they hated the truths. That forced me to make a choice between accepting their reality or just accepting reality — thus I was force to evolve from being a youthful “liberal” (which to them meant an intolerant, unenlightened, conformist, conservative-hating enforcer of the party-dogma du jour), to becoming a classical liberal (a free thinking, libertarian’esque, high-tolerance, anti-progressive -or- a radical centrist as I started calling myself). Even the term liberal had succumbed to newspeak and now meant the opposite of what it had meant before. A true liberal could no longer be part of their club: no soup for me.
| My childhood was defined by a family that had a malleable relationship with the truth: early on I defined myself by NOT compromising truth for familial affection, better grades, or to stop the beatings, thus the milder comfort of peer pressure conformity (belonging to the clique), or scorn for defending the truth, held no power over me. |
Now I’m humble enough to realize I’m probably wrong on at least a few things I believe, but I’m smart enough to know when someone else is bullshitting: dodging, distracting or attacking to bluff their way out of admitting something they don’t like. I also know that it’s highly unlikely that I’m completely wrong in ALL of my knowledge at once. So the easiest way to figure out which side is brainwashed, is to offer nuggets of information and see who can correct it, and who changes the topic, uses fallacies, or attacks me for daring to say it. How they react to data that’s new or they don’t like (or the messengers), is a reflection on who they are. That doesn’t mean they have to agree, but how they disagree is what poker players call, “a tell”[6].
Below is a small sampling of just a few of the various topics where you have a choice of believing the popular opinion that 2+2=5 (Newspeak), or you can go with 2+2=4 (Reality). And the tell is how people respond to your disagreeing with the newspeak, or pointing out the reality — if either generates venom, distraction, pedantic attacks on the spelling or irrelevancies, or anything other than contemplation (and reluctant acknowledgement) of the bigger point, then you know you’re dealing with someone that’s go something going on: more ego than honesty, more party/ideology loyalty than to the truth, or they just prefer their world to the one the rest of us have chosen to live in.
| NOTES: (a) This is a living document (unlike the constitution), thus if there’s anything I haven’t thought of: offer suggestions. (b) I know there are examples that cut the other way (against far right ideology), and I might do an article on that smaller subset someday, but this is about the tidal-wave of thoughtcrimes that are enforced by the cry-bullies in social media and in our university safe-spaces (c) I realize some of these are not the most moderate beliefs, but the point is "how do they respond", and what does someone see in the Rorschach inkblot? Do the defend the radical revisionism and newspeak, or an un-moderate form of the truth? Can they accept that the tidal-wave of excrement coming from “progressives” might be agitating the resistance that the media sensationalizes? Or is all the other sides fault for wanting to be left alone, and daring to defend reality over their caricature of it? |
You can decide which is real or false, but a warming, if you question others on which is which, you might discover how “tolerant” some folks really are.
Conclusion[edit | edit source]
In George Orwell's 1984 Newspeak is using the sanctioned language that meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc). The idea is that if the progressive democratic socialists control the language, they can control the thoughts behind the language. So the purpose is to restrict free thought (and prevent thoughtcrime), by restricting free speech down to defining the language and defining out the improper history and facts that are not allowed. This ever shrinking vocabulary of acceptable words, is so asinine that the only people who will accept it are those participants are fully programmed until they can accept Doublethink (simultaneous opposing contradictions) like 2+2=5. If that's what the state tells you, then you speak it, because the alternative to denying their political correctness is gruesome torture.
Sadly, Orwell's writing was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual. But the far left, uses it as the latter. If it was just the annoyances of political correctness, I could roll eyes and ignore. But it is altering people's understanding of history, the present, the future. How they see their friends, family and neighbors who aren't seeing the world through their distorted lens of good = believes the left leaning media, versus bad = skeptical of fake news, or skeptical of the versions of history they were taught in indoctrination camp (e.g. schools, universities).
PragerU  |
|---|
| <html><iframe width="</html>320px<html>" height="240" align="right" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/</html>K-58HoTHWQk<html>" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></html> Control the Words, Control the Culture |
👁️ See also
🔗 More[edit source]
🔗 External Links
- Great PragerU video: https://www.prageru.com/video/control-the-words-control-the-culture/
- All’s Fair When Starting a ‘Conversation’ : http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436425/katie-couric-gun-documentary-lie
- Liberals Are Pretending To Care About Free Speech : http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/10/gawker-is-bankrupt-and-now-liberals-are-pretending-to-care-about-free-speech/
- 16 Democrat AGs Begin Inquisition Against ‘Climate Change Disbelievers' : http://dailysignal.com/2016/04/04/16-democrat-ags-begin-inquisition-against-climate-change-disbelievers/
- http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/26/the-liberal-case-against-peter-thiel-is-the-worst-kind-of-hypocrisy/
- Gawker argues for arresting Climate Change deniers : https://twitter.com/KevinWGlass/status/741327672731697152
- https://www.statnews.com/2016/06/29/butter-cardiovascular-saturated-fat/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak