1984

1984, GeorgeOrwell, [ISBN 0452262933 (amazon.com, search)]

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A modern ScienceFiction classic by Wiki:GeorgeOrwell. Despite having been written more than 50 years ago, any time you read or watch the news you will be reminded of it. Our despots and secret power brokers study it closely. Thanks a load, George!!

"Newspeak" is alive and well.

That's "lifeful and good", comrade.

Doubleplusgood, even

You can find 1984 on line here: http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/

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It is interesting to compare and contrast 1984's "Newspeak" with a situation touched on in TheBookOfTheNewSun? by GeneWolfe where the citizens of a country were forbidden to speak anything other than quotes from the official revolutionary text to prevent them from backsliding into counter-revolutionarism. The citizens distorted the language of the quotes to their own purposes. -- GeoffBurns

It is also interesting to compare and contrast 1984's "Newspeak" with today’s situation were the 'emotional invoking' and 'intention getting' power of terms and phases has become another commodity with various commercial and political groups vying to hijack laden terms for there product or cause. -- GeoffBurns

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Interesting 1984 trivia: the original title was 1948, but Orwell was persuaded by his publishers to change it to a more distant date to be less "scary".

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Doublethink is a very main concept of this book like "Freedom is Slavery" "War is Peace" "Ignorance is strength" <- Arrow person 4rm Cali Rm D Ths Eng H

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I have a different interpretation of NineteenEightyFour. I don't know whether I arrived at it myself or copped it off of a reviewer at some point, but in this interpretation of the book, Orwell isn't speaking literally about political totalitarianism, but rather about the middle class of his era. He once said "In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep.." That, and his message that if there is hope it is in the proles, to me, seems to point toward a message about what people do to themselves to participate in society. -- MichaelFeathers

A friend of mine who's a bit of an amature Orwell scholar has a view that partly agrees with your, Michael. One of the source texts for 1984 seems to be TheManagerialRevolution?. Google for "orwell managerial revolution" and dig in.

In TheTheoryAndPracticeOfOligarchicalCollectivism? Orwell's sock puppet Goldstein explains how Engsoc (and the other two indistinguishable ideologies) grew out of the thinking of

[..] bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.

In British society today there exists a bosy of people, mostly lower-middle class, identifiable in characture as readers of the DailyMail? and DailyExpress?---middle brow right-wing newspapers--and absolutely terrifying. These are the folks who are all for the mushroom-like growth of CCTV in the city centers they never visit for fear of the other, be they young, foreign whatever. These are the people who act, for instance, as volunteer informers against those in the grey economy. These are the people who, it seems, would acively embrace the life of an Outer Party member if that was what it took for the idle youth, the illegal immigrant, the drug dealer, the peadophile, the islamic terrorist, and all the other (largely indistinguishable, you'd easily think) enemies of decency to have to live that way to. They're a blood-curdling, spine chilling bunch.

Now, TMR was written in the early years of the second world war by a raving Trotskyite and contains some pretty whacky (and wrong) stuff. But the core message is that, in Orwell's own words, "Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it". What is replacing it is totalitarian manegerialism, a merging of governance with private enterprise into something that's none of laissez fair capitalism, nor democracy nor traditional public ownership. And which--being run by largely ideologically neutral technocrats and administrators--is concerned only with the aquisition, exercise and maintainance of its own power structure. This is the key thing that Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had in common, and it's the thing Orwell abstracted out as the key feature of the society of 1984. Big Brother's party isn't really for anyhthing but its own exercise of absolute authority, nor is it against anything much except any threat to its own continuation.

Think of the diference between a company run by an entrepreneur with a vision and one run by a hired-in professional manager. Now think what a political system run by professional political technicians will look like... --KeithBraithwaite

That resonates with me. I spend a lot of time thinking about teams and social systems and it seems that there is something interesting that happens when you delegate a task to someone else and they achieve your goal but in a way that you wouldn't. There is this little moral gap that can occur in delegation.. it has great utility, but it can cause a great deal of trouble.

Re the rest of your comments, they remind of of a book I'll eventually get to writing a review of, a flawed but extremely thought-provoking book called TheLuciferPrinciple?. It is about all about how groups of people act as organisms. It's something that occurs to most people at some time in their lives, but the author takes the time to expand on that view and drive it home bringing additional insights along the way. If we look at society as an organism, we might arrive at the notion that the current spate of terrorism is competitive strategy. Wars between nation-states have settled as they have found an equilibrium, so the next biological competitive strategy is viral, action at small scales.. and that is what terrorism seems to be. The net effect will be that existing societies will develop more internal structure and very reactive immune systems to combat infection. That seems to be where we are in the US and UK are now. -- MichaelFeathers

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Another BookOnTheBookshelf, depicting VisionsOfWonder and a UniverseOfTerrorAndTrial. Could cause TheGreatDepression.