Self-destruction: An Overview

From The Atlantic.  This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

I hope people will find the bits I have quoted from this article sufficiently intriguing and provoking to go to the source and read it in its entirety.   It is well worth the time for both right and left wingers.   

Unlike the author of this article, I loved 1984 much more than Brave New World from the beginning.  I have always realized that the answer to the question, “How did he know?” lies in an error in the question itself. It’s not how did he know what would happen in politics, it’s how did he know the nature of human beings.   There is so much that is so very obvious if you step outside of your culture and your society for even a moment or two. But doing so is profoundly difficult for the vast majority of people.  >“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote.<

Today it doesn’t take much to make either the right or the left surrender their freedom and even their intelligence.  Rationality is not a valued commodity under any circumstances and in today’s fetid atmosphere of passions it has almost entirely vanished from public discourse. >Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.<

>Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”<

While the right wing’s abandonment of sanity is based almost entirely on fear and the resultant rage and so is easy to understand, the left wing’s movement in this direction is rooted in the desire for a perfect utopian justice. >Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice—a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value.<

The articles author points out that today >...intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police<

Finally,  I must agree with his conclusion that >Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. ...Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

Again, I suggest you read the original article, Conservative or Liberal, it is well worth your time.  As for me, to quote an old and rather silly parody song about the days of the Troubles in Ireland, “Me, being strictly neutral, I bashed everyone in sight.”

Note: my apologies for the poor proofreading. My health is really not good at the moment and I’m just not up to the effort.