Tag: quotes

Something I love to do when reading is underlining my favorite quotes. Sometimes they inspire big thoughts along the lines of their content, thoughts I would like to share.

Here are some of my favorite insights and quotes from 1984:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

Wow. What a fucking quote. These are the sorts of moments when you wonder what would have happened if someone had told Orwell to dial back and leave it on the cutting room floor. Frankly, every line and loop and contradiction does exactly what it’s supposed to do – it draws the reader into the maze of doublethink. It leads you to questioning: does this really happen? Are there people that do this now, that brainwash themselves in order to maintain tacit ties of loyalty to specific groups? I would say, the answer is a resounding yes. I think of my racist grandparents. (Prejudice in general seems rife with this “doublethink” business) Both would love to blame people of other ethnicities for their problems, for the troubles with the US economy, with crime and the dissolution of American moral values or what have you. Yet they love and respect several people that fit within the exact category they hold contempt for by justifying it within their heads, by effectively making concessions that contradict their absolutist mentality.

Now maybe it’s the absolutism of not questioning a very narrow set of beliefs which actually leads to these sorts of conundrums. Hmmm…

The book within the book holds a number of really compelling gems of text.

“…the object of waging war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.” 

How true that was, especially in the post Great War era. This statement still holds water today, as it is what our perpetual warring state is basically striving for from all angles (even in wars that have nothing to do with it).

“The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.”

Imagine: War for war’s sake. But not just for war’s sake, but for the sake of turning a profit. Sound familiar? One of those things that makes Orwell’s writing stand the test of time – exhibit A!

“The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called ‘class privilege,’ assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been short-lived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. 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.”

The merge of religion and secular party doctrine made me realize how a party and a religious organization could serve the same purpose using the same tools to lull and buffer the masses, mostly by having them accept and inculcate beliefs which contradict themselves and go against the rational welfare of those same masses. As someone that leans towards socialism and radicalism, I totally reject this use of the term as anything other than an example of the perversion of the ideals the term “Socialism” represents by those who know full well that ain’t socialism. But the devil is in the details. That exact logical contradiction and confusion is what could make the masses rally around something that innately does not benefit more than a minority.

Furthermore, this shows the self-sustaining and preservationist attitude of capitalists, even as the system of capitalism is at times unpredictable and haphazard depending on the general economic boom of the moment. Regardless, it’s not about who holds the power but how they are able to obtain and maintain their position. Which is what makes charity and trickle-down thinking useless and most benevolent acts within this system ill-fatedly self-serving, no matter the intention.

“And the people under the sky were also very much the same – everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same – people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!”

So much good. We are all the consumers, really. The proles described in the novel. The ones that have limited means of production yet are forced to do most of the labor, that go off and die in wars that mean nothing to them based on ideals that have been fed to or sometimes beat into them. And we are all the same. This system is not an isolated one. It has no borders. Yet we are taught to hate based on those imaginary divisions. And as long as we accept we are taught and hate, we fail to see just how same and united we are. And if we, the proles, realize how strong we are when we are united, we would bring an end to the very system that we feed, the one that oppresses us.

Class consciousness, people. This is straight out of Marx. And I quote:

“Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later, it would happen: strength would change into consciousness.”

“‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.'”

I feel this speaks for itself. The idea of re-writing the past to benefit the party that happens to hold power at the time is an old one. Orwell saw it happening in his day, and we can easily pick it out today. It starts with the way children’s history books frame things, always in favor of white, nationalist America, the victors of the World Wars and the sponsors of many others. Those who hold the power write the history books and tell the stories and control the media. They control the present and the past, and that’s what shapes our grim-looking future.

“‘We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.'”

Imagine a politician standing up to give their speech, to sway the masses and promote themselves and their world view as they often do–imagine them saying this. That would, of course, be cognitively dissonant as it would go against everything it means to be a politician. In effect, this is the ugly truth. Power is what those capable of obtaining it seek. It is one of the strongest drugs as it impacts an entire society.

“‘Reality is inside the skull. …Invisibility, levitation–anything. I could float off this floor like a soap buble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-centry ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.”

Anti-intellectualism is another theme that appears in 1984. There’s a whole rant towards the end of the book, an argument between Winston and a powerful member of the party about the state of reality. If records are altered and nobody officially “remembers” an event, did it really happen? Does it really exist? Of course, Winston’s answer is yes, as is the answer of any rational person. But the answer of those controlling the masses via media and spreading lies to a subconscious level of acceptance is a self-assured “no.” The reality of people on a mass scale can be altered and led astray. However, as Winston asserts, that doesn’t make the facts any less apparent to a rational human being.

To quote outside of the book, the themes of 1984 call to mind the song “Savages” by Marina and the Diamonds and its description of the brutality of human nature. “I’m not afraid of God. I’m afraid of man,” she states in the bridge. The endless wars. The extremes we are able to go to in order to merely survive. And not only to survive, but to dominate that which we call home, the very Earth, with our every whim. This too is the essence of 1984. Bureaucracy, party-worship, roles that we play do not mask some of our most base features. It points to a fact which is often overlooked even though it has happened from culture to culture and throughout disparate contexts in history: we invented the gods to benefit us, not the other way around.

And yet, we are also rational beings capable of distinguishing logic from falsehood. Given the right amount of assessment, as Winston’s inability to suppress his own logical rejection of doublethink suggests, human’s are able to understand innately and articulate via education and exposure the lies that are fed to them. That being said, one must first have the education and exposure to think critically. It is a learned rather than innate skill, so it is quite conceivable that a society that wishes to stamp critical thought out could simply try to mold generation across generation not to question anything, to focus on the world painted by the media and dressed up by celebrity.

Orwell had an incredible way of writing about these Political and Social Science themes. He made them both accessible to a casual, curious reader and completely analytical and inspiring for those familiar with the theories they are based around. His style is clear and concise yet layered with history and truth.

Do you have a favorite quote from one of Orwell’s works? I would love to hear it and discuss any analysis of it or the concepts discussed that it inspired as well.