8 ms·

All Is Orwell

63 points by lermontov 5y ago

santaclaranews 5y ago
Even Orwell couldn't have predicted this fascist totalitarian state we are currently living in. The worst thing is 90% of the people on this site are begging for it. Unbelievable.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>By my unscientific count, more words have been written about George Orwell than any other writer in the English language besides Dickens and Shakespeare. James Joyce.
- yakubin 5y ago
  You're right. But I'm afraid J. K. Rowling beats both Orwell and Dickens in this contest. :) https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Orwell,Rowling,Shakespeare,Dickens,Joyce https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Orwell,Rowling,Sh...
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    I suppose it depends on whether you, like the author of the linked article, implicitly define "words written about" as synonymous with "the flow of publications", translated to sales of mainstream hard-copy published books. Google Trends is one way, sure, but there's also Fanfiction.net, which contains some 8,932 entries in the Harry Potter category. Some of those are compilations, some are just a couple thousand words, but many are super-novels at hundreds of thousands of words. You don't have to do much math to realize that's orders of magnitude larger than five biographies and 'several' publishers eyeing the 20-year expiration.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      I think the internet favors newer books, as most people favor books by authors that are contemporaneous with them, and the internet allows all that writing that in previous generations would have been ephemeral and have a very short distribution to perhaps have greater permanence (perhaps not) but definitely a much wider distribution.
everybodyknows 5y ago
> state capitalism An interesting term not heard much nowadays. The Economist applied it to China’s governance model, back in 2012: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2012/01/21/the-visible-hand https://www.economist.com/special-report/2012/01/21/the-visi...
- not2b 5y ago
  You hear it a lot from left-anarchists who oppose Communism as practiced by the USSR, and they mean it differently from the way the Economist means it. They would say that under the USSR, the state owned the factories but the workers had no more power than they do in a western capitalist country: like the ending of "Animal Farm".
- Animats 5y ago
  Now Britain is moving towards state capitalism, with "Great British Railways". This is in the tradition of British "lemon socialism" - have the government run the troubled industries. In the 1950s, the government owned the steel, coal, and rail industries. "How Asia Works", by Joe Studwell, is worth reading. How East Asia moved into the 21st century is detailed, country by country. There were two startup phases: 1) Fix agriculture so it doesn't take most of the workforce, 2) Get export industries going. Countries which got those two right did well, and those which did not, didn't. Getting it wrong often involved the military running businesses, usually for the benefit of generals. The "Asian tigers" are now past that. It's not as clear on what the next phase is. China has formal five year plans. Currently, the 14th five year plan, 2021-2025, is in progress. Unlike the USSR's five year plans, China's plans from the Sixth Plan (1981-1985) forward have been generally successful. The current plan has, as usual, a number of components. One is to catch up in some specific areas - aircraft, advanced semiconductors. That's coming along well. Another is "dual circulation" - building up internal demand and not being so dependent on exports. The US generally avoids the government actively running businesses, but it's not that rare in other countries. [1] https://groveatlantic.com/book/how-asia-works https://groveatlantic.com/book/how-asia-works
  - pjc50 5y ago
    "Lemon socialism" is such a good phrase. I do sometimes find it odd how the UK has absolutely zero recognizable "industrial policy".
opaque 5y ago
Interesting article, but some of the arguments are pretty weak. >“Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.” >"Capitalism led to the creation of monopolies ..., to food lines, and to war" The author seems to think these two statements are a damming contradiction, which proves > "When it came to recognizing unpalatable truths, it seems that Orwell had as much difficulty as the next man." However, both Capitalism and Communism can be flawed (and are), there is no contradiction here. The ability to critique both is probably why Orwell's work endures.
- padobson 5y ago
  I completely agree. His review [0] of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom [1] illustrates his capacity for nuance combined with his willingness to face those unpalatable truths. As a sample, he was a socialist who also wrote this: It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of. [0] https://maudestavern.com/2008/10/09/george-orwell-review/ https://maudestavern.com/2008/10/09/george-orwell-review/ (Not sure where to find the original, but I've read it several times, and this looks like a faithful copy) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    The article also quotes this line, the next paragraph for context: > Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter. I'm not sure why more democracy doesn't solve both issues, while retaining the benefits of both, which seems to be where most modern nations are broadly headed, in fits and starts.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Could anyone summarize what the author is likely to mean by this part: > Why, then, did he determine that it was a fight worth fighting? Bravely, and at some cost to his health, he fought an unwinnable war for a unrealizable cause. But he still believed it was right to have fought and to have gone on encouraging others to continue doing so. Despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, the issue, in his view, was simple: “Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not?” > This explanation, entirely bereft of historical and cultural context, is bound to strike anyone half familiar with the history of the conflict as simplistic in the extreme, even simple-minded. Orwell wrote: “I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later . . . . That was the real issue of the Spanish war . . . and perhaps of other wars to come.” I mean, it's fair to say that any one sentence summary of a war is going to be somewhat simplistic, but if one side has monarchists, fascists and military dictators on it, then it seems reasonable to me. Just the way the author writes it, I feel I should know of some alternative take that it seems like I don't. What do the "mountains of evidence to the contrary" suggest (in this author's view)? Presumably something along the lines of fascism being better than risking communism, which seems to a strangely recurring historical motif.
- goatlover 5y ago
  The author claims Orwell had plenty of evidence the conflict wasn't winnable, which means it's a waste of life to fight it. Also that collectivism would have produced a worse tyranny, and potentially endangered representative democracy in Western Europe, given Spain would have had close ties to Moscow. The thesis of the article is that Orwell is admired so much by all political sides because of his contradictions. He was against fascism, but he also recognized totalitarian tendencies in communism. Thus the line about some animals being more equal than others in Animal Farm.
  - publicola1990 5y ago
    But loss would have not been good for representative democracy either in Spain. People speak now as if Western Europe is some bastion of Democracy, Spain and Portugal were not within living memory.
billytetrud 5y ago
The article talks about how contradictory Orwell was, and lists a bunch of examples. But I don't think a single example shows any contradiction at all. It simply showed that Orwell didn't live his life in black and white.
- banannaise 5y ago
  I think all of this says a lot more about the people who try to write about Orwell than it does about Orwell. He was not exactly a "both sides have their merits" sort of person. The guy literally joined a militia to throw grenades at fascists. You only find contraditions in his life if you try to apply tests of ideological purity rather than trying to meet him where he was.
  - billytetrud 5y ago
    Definitely
- correct_horse 5y ago
  I had the same reaction. I decided that those were examples that subverted the author's expectations instead of examples of contradiction.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it." -- George Orwell
- mrkstu 5y ago
  The question remains unanswered, whether democratic socialism is, in the long-term, compatible with avoiding totalitarianism.
  - aplummer 5y ago
    I mean what do you call long term. There are a lot of democratic socialist countries that don't even seem to be eeking towards totalitarianism. If anything, the EU is going the other way.
lanevorockz 5y ago
We allowed the end of privacy in exchange of our egos to not be hurt. I hope it's worth it.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
He wrote what he knew, and he dedicated time to knowing more.
Animats 5y ago
The first half of the 20th century was when none of the economic systems worked. Capitalism had the Depression, communism wasn't working all that well, and near-anarchy collapsed quite rapidly. We still don't know how to make an economic system that works anywhere near optimum, but have so much excess productive capacity that it doesn't matter as much.
Barrin92 5y ago
>How to account for the enduring interest in Orwell’s life and work? I actually have a fairly uncharitable take on why he's so popular in the English speaking world. One reason is Orwell's inherent technophobia and parochialism which is arguably the dominant theme in American and English speculative fiction, what Leo Marx dubbed 'the Machine in the Garden' myth. It's about the idea of modernity, industrialization and urban society intruding an idealized agrarian culture. You find in in LOTR, Brave New World, 1984 with its waxing over natural chocolate and ink-pencils. Asimov addresses this in his pretty scathing critique of the book[1]. It also still pops up in virtually every English-language piece of dystopian fiction. Another reason is the political aspect of his work in the US in particular. Orwell's politics was to a large degree a personal feud with Stalinism due to his experiences in the Spanish civil war. This unorthodox critique of Soviet communism coming from a socialist made him pretty much the ideal figure in the anti-communist discourse of US 20th century politics on both sides of the political spectrum. Rebellious enough to appeal to the liberal side, but actually pushing deeply conventional, conservative ideas. Also mirrored in Hitchens personal trajectory, who was a big admirer of Orwell. [1]http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
thazework 5y ago
Orwell addressing his inner contradictions: 'I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.'
chj 5y ago
The author tried to paint Orwell just as "next man", but he can't even write half as clearly as Orwell does.

63 points by lermontov 5y ago

Even Orwell couldn't have predicted this fascist totalitarian state we are currently living in. The worst thing is 90% of the people on this site are begging for it. Unbelievable.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>By my unscientific count, more words have been written about George Orwell than any other writer in the English language besides Dickens and Shakespeare. James Joyce.

yakubin 5y ago
You're right. But I'm afraid J. K. Rowling beats both Orwell and Dickens in this contest. :) https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Orwell,Rowling,Shakespeare,Dickens,Joyce https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Orwell,Rowling,Sh...
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  I suppose it depends on whether you, like the author of the linked article, implicitly define "words written about" as synonymous with "the flow of publications", translated to sales of mainstream hard-copy published books. Google Trends is one way, sure, but there's also Fanfiction.net, which contains some 8,932 entries in the Harry Potter category. Some of those are compilations, some are just a couple thousand words, but many are super-novels at hundreds of thousands of words. You don't have to do much math to realize that's orders of magnitude larger than five biographies and 'several' publishers eyeing the 20-year expiration.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    I think the internet favors newer books, as most people favor books by authors that are contemporaneous with them, and the internet allows all that writing that in previous generations would have been ephemeral and have a very short distribution to perhaps have greater permanence (perhaps not) but definitely a much wider distribution.

everybodyknows 5y ago

> state capitalism An interesting term not heard much nowadays. The Economist applied it to China’s governance model, back in 2012: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2012/01/21/the-visible-hand https://www.economist.com/special-report/2012/01/21/the-visi...

not2b 5y ago
You hear it a lot from left-anarchists who oppose Communism as practiced by the USSR, and they mean it differently from the way the Economist means it. They would say that under the USSR, the state owned the factories but the workers had no more power than they do in a western capitalist country: like the ending of "Animal Farm".
Animats 5y ago
Now Britain is moving towards state capitalism, with "Great British Railways". This is in the tradition of British "lemon socialism" - have the government run the troubled industries. In the 1950s, the government owned the steel, coal, and rail industries. "How Asia Works", by Joe Studwell, is worth reading. How East Asia moved into the 21st century is detailed, country by country. There were two startup phases: 1) Fix agriculture so it doesn't take most of the workforce, 2) Get export industries going. Countries which got those two right did well, and those which did not, didn't. Getting it wrong often involved the military running businesses, usually for the benefit of generals. The "Asian tigers" are now past that. It's not as clear on what the next phase is. China has formal five year plans. Currently, the 14th five year plan, 2021-2025, is in progress. Unlike the USSR's five year plans, China's plans from the Sixth Plan (1981-1985) forward have been generally successful. The current plan has, as usual, a number of components. One is to catch up in some specific areas - aircraft, advanced semiconductors. That's coming along well. Another is "dual circulation" - building up internal demand and not being so dependent on exports. The US generally avoids the government actively running businesses, but it's not that rare in other countries. [1] https://groveatlantic.com/book/how-asia-works https://groveatlantic.com/book/how-asia-works
- pjc50 5y ago
  "Lemon socialism" is such a good phrase. I do sometimes find it odd how the UK has absolutely zero recognizable "industrial policy".

opaque 5y ago

Interesting article, but some of the arguments are pretty weak. >“Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.” >"Capitalism led to the creation of monopolies ..., to food lines, and to war" The author seems to think these two statements are a damming contradiction, which proves > "When it came to recognizing unpalatable truths, it seems that Orwell had as much difficulty as the next man." However, both Capitalism and Communism can be flawed (and are), there is no contradiction here. The ability to critique both is probably why Orwell's work endures.

padobson 5y ago
I completely agree. His review [0] of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom [1] illustrates his capacity for nuance combined with his willingness to face those unpalatable truths. As a sample, he was a socialist who also wrote this: It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of. [0] https://maudestavern.com/2008/10/09/george-orwell-review/ https://maudestavern.com/2008/10/09/george-orwell-review/ (Not sure where to find the original, but I've read it several times, and this looks like a faithful copy) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  The article also quotes this line, the next paragraph for context: > Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter. I'm not sure why more democracy doesn't solve both issues, while retaining the benefits of both, which seems to be where most modern nations are broadly headed, in fits and starts.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Could anyone summarize what the author is likely to mean by this part: > Why, then, did he determine that it was a fight worth fighting? Bravely, and at some cost to his health, he fought an unwinnable war for a unrealizable cause. But he still believed it was right to have fought and to have gone on encouraging others to continue doing so. Despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, the issue, in his view, was simple: “Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not?” > This explanation, entirely bereft of historical and cultural context, is bound to strike anyone half familiar with the history of the conflict as simplistic in the extreme, even simple-minded. Orwell wrote: “I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later . . . . That was the real issue of the Spanish war . . . and perhaps of other wars to come.” I mean, it's fair to say that any one sentence summary of a war is going to be somewhat simplistic, but if one side has monarchists, fascists and military dictators on it, then it seems reasonable to me. Just the way the author writes it, I feel I should know of some alternative take that it seems like I don't. What do the "mountains of evidence to the contrary" suggest (in this author's view)? Presumably something along the lines of fascism being better than risking communism, which seems to a strangely recurring historical motif.

goatlover 5y ago
The author claims Orwell had plenty of evidence the conflict wasn't winnable, which means it's a waste of life to fight it. Also that collectivism would have produced a worse tyranny, and potentially endangered representative democracy in Western Europe, given Spain would have had close ties to Moscow. The thesis of the article is that Orwell is admired so much by all political sides because of his contradictions. He was against fascism, but he also recognized totalitarian tendencies in communism. Thus the line about some animals being more equal than others in Animal Farm.
- publicola1990 5y ago
  But loss would have not been good for representative democracy either in Spain. People speak now as if Western Europe is some bastion of Democracy, Spain and Portugal were not within living memory.

billytetrud 5y ago

The article talks about how contradictory Orwell was, and lists a bunch of examples. But I don't think a single example shows any contradiction at all. It simply showed that Orwell didn't live his life in black and white.

banannaise 5y ago
I think all of this says a lot more about the people who try to write about Orwell than it does about Orwell. He was not exactly a "both sides have their merits" sort of person. The guy literally joined a militia to throw grenades at fascists. You only find contraditions in his life if you try to apply tests of ideological purity rather than trying to meet him where he was.
- billytetrud 5y ago
  Definitely
correct_horse 5y ago
I had the same reaction. I decided that those were examples that subverted the author's expectations instead of examples of contradiction.

pmoriarty 5y ago

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it." -- George Orwell

mrkstu 5y ago
The question remains unanswered, whether democratic socialism is, in the long-term, compatible with avoiding totalitarianism.
- aplummer 5y ago
  I mean what do you call long term. There are a lot of democratic socialist countries that don't even seem to be eeking towards totalitarianism. If anything, the EU is going the other way.

lanevorockz 5y ago

We allowed the end of privacy in exchange of our egos to not be hurt. I hope it's worth it.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

He wrote what he knew, and he dedicated time to knowing more.

Animats 5y ago

The first half of the 20th century was when none of the economic systems worked. Capitalism had the Depression, communism wasn't working all that well, and near-anarchy collapsed quite rapidly. We still don't know how to make an economic system that works anywhere near optimum, but have so much excess productive capacity that it doesn't matter as much.

Barrin92 5y ago

>How to account for the enduring interest in Orwell’s life and work? I actually have a fairly uncharitable take on why he's so popular in the English speaking world. One reason is Orwell's inherent technophobia and parochialism which is arguably the dominant theme in American and English speculative fiction, what Leo Marx dubbed 'the Machine in the Garden' myth. It's about the idea of modernity, industrialization and urban society intruding an idealized agrarian culture. You find in in LOTR, Brave New World, 1984 with its waxing over natural chocolate and ink-pencils. Asimov addresses this in his pretty scathing critique of the book[1]. It also still pops up in virtually every English-language piece of dystopian fiction. Another reason is the political aspect of his work in the US in particular. Orwell's politics was to a large degree a personal feud with Stalinism due to his experiences in the Spanish civil war. This unorthodox critique of Soviet communism coming from a socialist made him pretty much the ideal figure in the anti-communist discourse of US 20th century politics on both sides of the political spectrum. Rebellious enough to appeal to the liberal side, but actually pushing deeply conventional, conservative ideas. Also mirrored in Hitchens personal trajectory, who was a big admirer of Orwell. [1]http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

thazework 5y ago

Orwell addressing his inner contradictions: 'I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.'

chj 5y ago

The author tried to paint Orwell just as "next man", but he can't even write half as clearly as Orwell does.