Yes I thought I should read it- might as well...
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened
— that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He,
Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short
a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own
consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others
accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale —
then the lie passed into history and became truth. ’Who controls the past,’ ran
the Party slogan, ’controls the future: who controls the present controls the
past.’"
It is a very scary thing, when history could be erased just like that- and then we end up questioning ourselves whether it REALLY happened? Even though we have our own human experience speaking out against the lies... how strangely and easily we can be manipulated and made unsure...
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date."
"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian
literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and
astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental
songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind
of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section —
Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest kind of
pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member,
other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at."
"In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality,
only one word."
The power of language! It can even affect in what language we THINK- and if you can influence that, then you can influence thinking.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
"It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck."
"Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"
"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy."
"I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones."
"’When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’"
Sex is the antidote!
"It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that once inside it time could be arrested."
"What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself."
"If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them." [...] But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable."
What it means to be HUMAN.
"You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea."
"In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent."
"In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere
near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another."
"But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded."
"The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living."
"But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four."
"’How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ’How can I help seeing what is in frontof my eyes? Two and two are four.' 'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three.
Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’"
"We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves."
Basically doublethink is making solipsism true- that everything which you THINK in your mind will become reality. And if you can control that- you control reality. "What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens."
"Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on
an enemy who is helpless."
THE STATE
"’Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’
’I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’"
"For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free."
---
Very scary book- just imagine that this could be the future. And up until the end I still held some hope that MAYBE he was STILL human inside- that it was just hiding from himself.
I am sure many books were written about this one, and how they analyzed every single detail about it. But reading this- it just made an impression on me, that this COULD become real... that WE could be like these people... and is there anything to stop it? The main answer- as I got from it- is being human, and being compassionate, and loving... But even that- as we have seen- can be exterminated extremely easily- it is very flexible... But I think- it is in the soul- and something beyond us that makes us human. Something out of our control... and our soul will never die- it is immortal. Yes, I know, it is a very simple answer, but it is what makes us ALIVE and not just "alterable minds". It gives us us our peculiarity. And when you bring in the spiritual world into this, it just opens it up so much more. For there are spirits around us which are beyond our power. It's strange that God was not very seriously mentioned here- and that Winston did not believe in Him. I am not a crazy christian or anything (trust me, I used to be) but I think maybe if he had hoped in something that does not lie in himself but which will exist even if he won't- such as God... then I think he would have at least kept some essence of humanity. Sorry- if anyone would disagree. I do realize that this may be too naive... but in life- when things are just so out of control and everything dominates you- EVEN your THOUGHTS and all that makes you YOU- where can you run to? Into yourself? Because you will only find more confusion... but if you have something that exists outside of you with whom you can connect with- then you cease to become a human- but exist in spirit...
The concept of erasing history in this story is essential- I think, because it is one of the things that is happening today- realistically. One needs to remember the past, because that is how we can even have the slightest hope of changing the future and affecting the oncomming generations.
Also- war is something we can relate to today. War has become a business- and portraying the extreme (where war is continuous and the image of the "enemy" is irrelevant to WHO the enemy actually is) gives us a good picture of what things are truly like today. Enemies are very flexible, tomorrow these people are terrorists, the day after they are our allies and we support their newly-installed governments... nothing is really true anymore. The enemy is a convenient excuse for carrying out business and making money...
So! What conclusion can we derive from this? LET'S BE HUMAN! Let us think let us live let us feel let us make mistakes let us regret let us love let us hate let us cry... let us CHOOSE whatever we feel like doing and let us do it quickly- for we may not have much time!
--
Read it on pdf
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened
— that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He,
Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short
a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own
consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others
accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale —
then the lie passed into history and became truth. ’Who controls the past,’ ran
the Party slogan, ’controls the future: who controls the present controls the
past.’"
It is a very scary thing, when history could be erased just like that- and then we end up questioning ourselves whether it REALLY happened? Even though we have our own human experience speaking out against the lies... how strangely and easily we can be manipulated and made unsure...
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date."
"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian
literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and
astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental
songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind
of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section —
Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest kind of
pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member,
other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at."
"In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality,
only one word."
The power of language! It can even affect in what language we THINK- and if you can influence that, then you can influence thinking.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
"It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck."
"Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"
"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy."
"I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones."
"’When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’"
Sex is the antidote!
"It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that once inside it time could be arrested."
"What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself."
"If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them." [...] But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable."
What it means to be HUMAN.
"You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea."
"In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent."
"In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere
near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another."
"But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded."
"The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living."
"But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four."
"’How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ’How can I help seeing what is in frontof my eyes? Two and two are four.' 'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three.
Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’"
"We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves."
Basically doublethink is making solipsism true- that everything which you THINK in your mind will become reality. And if you can control that- you control reality. "What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens."
"Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on
an enemy who is helpless."
THE STATE
"’Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’
’I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’"
"For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free."
---
Very scary book- just imagine that this could be the future. And up until the end I still held some hope that MAYBE he was STILL human inside- that it was just hiding from himself.
I am sure many books were written about this one, and how they analyzed every single detail about it. But reading this- it just made an impression on me, that this COULD become real... that WE could be like these people... and is there anything to stop it? The main answer- as I got from it- is being human, and being compassionate, and loving... But even that- as we have seen- can be exterminated extremely easily- it is very flexible... But I think- it is in the soul- and something beyond us that makes us human. Something out of our control... and our soul will never die- it is immortal. Yes, I know, it is a very simple answer, but it is what makes us ALIVE and not just "alterable minds". It gives us us our peculiarity. And when you bring in the spiritual world into this, it just opens it up so much more. For there are spirits around us which are beyond our power. It's strange that God was not very seriously mentioned here- and that Winston did not believe in Him. I am not a crazy christian or anything (trust me, I used to be) but I think maybe if he had hoped in something that does not lie in himself but which will exist even if he won't- such as God... then I think he would have at least kept some essence of humanity. Sorry- if anyone would disagree. I do realize that this may be too naive... but in life- when things are just so out of control and everything dominates you- EVEN your THOUGHTS and all that makes you YOU- where can you run to? Into yourself? Because you will only find more confusion... but if you have something that exists outside of you with whom you can connect with- then you cease to become a human- but exist in spirit...
The concept of erasing history in this story is essential- I think, because it is one of the things that is happening today- realistically. One needs to remember the past, because that is how we can even have the slightest hope of changing the future and affecting the oncomming generations.
Also- war is something we can relate to today. War has become a business- and portraying the extreme (where war is continuous and the image of the "enemy" is irrelevant to WHO the enemy actually is) gives us a good picture of what things are truly like today. Enemies are very flexible, tomorrow these people are terrorists, the day after they are our allies and we support their newly-installed governments... nothing is really true anymore. The enemy is a convenient excuse for carrying out business and making money...
So! What conclusion can we derive from this? LET'S BE HUMAN! Let us think let us live let us feel let us make mistakes let us regret let us love let us hate let us cry... let us CHOOSE whatever we feel like doing and let us do it quickly- for we may not have much time!
--
Read it on pdf
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