Friday, September 01, 2006

I'm reading "1984" self-righteously! Help me!

George Orwell's book is exciting me - and I'm finding myself inhabiting its world, where a totalitarian regime, "Big Brother", does not merely host a few housemates for 13 weeks, but governs and monitors the lives of the whole nation. As Winston sees it, in the story, the only privacy he has is limited to the few centimetres squared inside his head! And even that is under threat, as the newly constructed language 'Newspeak' sets out to squeeze the number of words, so that Thought itself will be increasingly limited and confined. But I'm all too aware that this sharp political satire is giving me tools for criticising things outside of myself - the 'orthodoxies' to which other people are attached unconsciously; the way other people exercise "doublethink", simultaneously believing 'two contradictory opinions which cancel each other out'; the way the world outside of me directs its discontentment towards petty grievances rather than focusing on the larger evils of genuine poverty, prejudice and oppression. But might it be possible that I too am in the thralls of an orthodoxy which obscures me from particular oppressive realities? Might I too be complicit in doublethink, aware of my privileges but not quite committed to risking their end? Could it be true ...?

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