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The hardest thing for my generation to understand is that the politics of our youth are no longer the politics of the present. To quote the many times canceled
by konjin 6y ago
The hardest thing for my generation to understand is that the politics of our youth are no longer the politics of the present.
To quote the many times canceled Orwell: And this tolerance or plain dishonesty means much more than that admiration for the USSR happens to be fashionable at this moment. Quite possibly that particular fashion will not last. For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet régime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- Bakary 6y agoI don't meant this as a personal attack but there is something faintly ironic about this statement Orwell is pretty the much the one-stop gramophone record for quotes when someone wants to express concern about censorship or authoritarianism in a vague, semi-lyrical way
- konjin 6y agoOnly if you know nothing about him or his life. He was cancelled in Britain from when he went to fight in the Spanish civil war until the end of WWII and the start of the cold war. Which is what makes his quote so noteworthy, he was right, his view became the dominant one, but it still wasn't an improvement because the people repeating it did so without thinking.
- Bakary 6y agoI'm not criticizing Orwell or the quote itself. I'm pointing out the irony of seeing this quote and others by the same author get regularly popped out following the very same gramophone mindset he warns about. People just pop an Orwell and call it a day. Could it be called recursive irony? I don't know if that's a thing.
- konjin 6y agoI look forward to the day that we can't use reheated arguments from last century about current events. It doesn't help that people who want to destroy our ability to think use Orwell as a manual - hate speech might as well be something he coined in 1984 for all the emotion and lack of logic behind it, that it's law today will be judged harshly by future generations.
- Bakary 6y agoHistory never repeats quite the same way. There are some low-hanging parallels to 1984, but if we limit ourselves to that frame of reference we miss a large range of elements that might prove to be enormously important. There's stuff like hate speech regulations and all that but there's also a million things going on elsewhere, and any patterns only seem obvious many years later in retrospect, if they ever become so. Future generations will probably have a frame of reference completely different from what we expect them to have now. Come to think of it, it would be hard to explain all the motivations of life in 2021 to someone in 1984 who had yet to live through the intervening years...
- konjin 6y agoThe rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the lapdogs of the 1% are using divide and conquer to keep this going. That is something Cicero would understand, let alone someone with a working brain from 1984. Of course one need to have a working brain first, something very few manage in any time.