This is 1984
I’m hardly the first person to have these thoughts, but they were meaningful to me today, so I don’t really care if I’m late to the game in writing them.
Like many people, I have watched the erosion of privacy and the increase in government secrecy with some healthy skepticism. A high school reading of Orwell’s 1984 has stuck with me over the years and has been no small part of my feelings of consternation. The notion of Big Brother watching over you, the Though Police, and the Two Minutes Hate are not hard to forget and something we should be working to avoid to avoid.
I recently picked up a copy of 1984 from the library and started in on it again. While the main themes are as I remember, I was struck today by a specific quote from the first chapter that rang so true for me. The three slogans from the Ministry of Truth are bad enough:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
I feel like I could write quite the diatribe on those alone in the context of the Global War on Terror, but they weren’t what stopped me reading and had me staring out the bus window for a while, depressed:
… an attack so exagerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taking in by it.
If that doesn’t perfectly describe our current level of political discourse in this country, I don’t know what does. It seems like every debate and campaign quickly devolves to the level described by that quote. I can cite instances from the Iraq war debate, discussion of illegal immigrants, the 2004 elections, and the Democratic party’s 2008 nomination battle.
The Hate needs to end; I just don’t know how it ever will.
