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The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
- jp57 5y ago"OLDTHINKERS UNBELLYFEEL INGSOC ... The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: ‘Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.’" Does this not perfectly capture the feeling of many left-leaning millennials toward boomers and gen-X today?
- Rochus 5y agoOrwell was a leftist, but also opposed totalitarian societies. "1984" was a dystopia to expose such totalitarian societies. Unfortunately, much of what he described as a horror scenario in "1984" is already reality today, without people being bothered by it anymore.
- anonymousiam 5y agoHow do you define 'leftist'? Orwell also wrote Animal Farm, which is critical of communism.
- detaro 5y agoHow would you define "leftist" in a way that doesn't contain Orwell? Animal Farm fits very well into > opposed totalitarian societies
- revolvingocelot 5y agoOne of the ways in which modern Western newspeak works is the relentless conflation of "socialism", "communism", and "totalitarianism". Their current project, as far as I can tell, is to fold everything left of blue-dog Democrat into the definition.
- input_sh 5y agoIf only we had a record of him stating what he's advocating for... Let's see, perhaps an essay titled Why I Write[0] could give us some hints: > 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. That encompasses both Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). [0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- quartesixte 5y agoOrwell was definitely left/labour leaning in his later years and supported democratic socialism. As a younger man he was very much a Marxist revolutionary, but getting shot through the jaws in Spain and then subsequently witnessing the totalitarianism of Stalin quickly changed his mind. Animal Farm is a criticism of Stalinism in particular.
- spijdar 5y agoOrwell disliked Communism with a capital C, probably influenced by his participation in the Spanish civil war fighting alongside the Soviet Russians, but his allegiance was clearly to very leftist socialist causes, leaning towards the anarchist side of leftism. He was also a pretty intelligent guy, and didn't blindly subscribe to partisan politics. More than anything, he disliked authoritarianism.
- Gimpei 5y agoI think Animal Farm provides a nice answer to that. In my reading of the text, the problem was not necessarily with the revolution, it was the fact that the revolution was perverted and in the end the pigs (communist cadre) simply replaced the bourgeoisie (farmers) preserving the system. Orwell was a socialist, believing in large scale redistribution, government involvement in the economy, etc. He just thought this be done in a democratic fashion and actually benefit the working classes. He looked at the Soviet Union and saw it as a totalitarian nightmare that didn't live up to its ideals.
- anonymousiam 5y agoI seem to be burning my Karma on this thread, but what the heck. One more question for the group. Can anyone name a communist country that did not devolve into (or begin as) a dictatorship? In the history of the world, has there ever been a truly communist government? I believe the answer is no, and that none will ever emerge because of human nature.
- int_19h 5y agoThere was never a truly communist government anywhere, even if you ask the communists themselves. Don't forget: per Marx, communism was supposed to be the final stage, to be achieved after a period of socialism. USSR was thus the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", not "Communist Republics" (although in Soviet sci-fi, USCR would sometimes pop up in the future). If you rephrase the question as whether there's any socialist country that's not a dictatorship, the answer depends on your definition of "country". For example, Rojava is not internationally recognized as such, nor do they claim to be one, but they're a de facto independent polity that leans heavily socialist. For another example, the Zapatistas. If we look at history, there was never a shortage of revolutionary democratic socialists. The problem is that back when socialist revolutions became viable, socialism as a political ideology was generally violently suppressed in all its forms, and only the most ruthless, authoritarian strains could not only take power, but hold it long enough. Bolsheviks in Russia are the archetypal example, and it's worth noting that the first thing they did after the revolution was disbanding the Constituent Assembly, as soon as they found out that they don't have the majority in it (it was held by other socialist parties, most of them democratic). For comparison, consider the Luxembourgists in Germany, and how their revolution fared. The other problem is that there's a positive feedback loop there. Once Bolsheviks won in one country, they would sponsor socialist revolutionary movements in other countries - but any such aid would come with ideological strings attached. E.g. in Germany, the communist party was the one receiving funds from the Soviets, and the democratic socialists were labelled "social fascists"; and in Spain, Soviets even physically purged ideologically disagreeable people from the Republican ranks (Orwell has seen his share of that close up). Needless to say, well-funded movements are the ones that usually win, and so Soviet dominance ensured that authoritarian socialists would usually be the ones running the show everywhere else.
- krapp 5y agoOrwell was a socialist, and he supported democratic socialism, but he vehemently opposed (and wrote Animal Farm as a mocking satire of) totalitarian Soviet communism[0], which he didn't consider to be socialist at all. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Politics
- anonymousiam 5y agoOkay, so now we're getting somewhere. He was a socialist, but not a leftist. So were the NAZIs right wing or left wing?
- krapp 5y agoHe was a socialist and a leftist but not a communist. Not all leftists or socialists are communists, not all communists are Leninists or Stalinists. >So were the NAZIs right wing or left wing? Right-wing. The only reason anyone claims otherwise is that "socialist" is in their name, but National Socialism isn't socialism any more than North Korea is a Democratic Republic, and the proof is otherwise in the pudding as far as Nazi politics and ideals are concerned.
- InTheArena 5y agoThis is a gross simplification, and not really accurate. The nazi party grew from both left and right leaning aspects. (Booth anti-communist and anti-capitalist) Many of the aspects of nazi ideology where socialist in nature - for example, the building projects, the “strength through joy” institutions, and much of their early party doctrine. The Strassers and Goebbels in particular were deeply aligned to the socialist portion of the doctrine, suggesting tie-ups with communism at different points. This combination of socialist plus nationalist was responsible a lot of the parties early ideological success. As time went on the party increasingly shifted more to the “nationalist” then the “socialist” - culminating in the night of the long knives where most of the “socialist” camp (Gregor Strasser in particular) were purged, and Goebbels appears to have given up on his socialist tendencies. The Nazis obviously where not communists - but the ideology is much more similar than not in some key ways. Instead of Marx’s race war, the Nazis instead believed in Racial War. Of course, the only reason this really comes up is because people want to tar and feather political opponents as being fascist, socialist, or communists. The best way to break down all of these movements is simply Authoritarian or Totalitarian or not. If socialism is the thought that the means of production and organization of society should belong to society, Totalitarianism is simply that the state is the society, and thus the means of production and th organization of society belongs to the state. So where the Marxists would call for a class war to violently overthrow the evil capitalists in a all-composing global struggle for communism, the Nazis called for a a “blood and soil” war to eliminate the enemies of the people - with everything subjugated to that violence. Both were totalitarian in their nature.
- nonfamous 5y agoThe fact that “leftist” is today invoked in relation to communism is an excellent example of Newspeak deployed in the actual world.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Rochus 5y agoLooks like you got a lot of answers already; if you're interested, there are good biographies; also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell is quite good.
- lostlogin 5y agoArthur Blair spent time in fighting in Spain, as detailed in Homage to Catalonia. His views are on the politics of both sides are quite well covered there, and he left Spain pretty jaded. It also has an account of trench warfare which is completely terrifying.
- PhasmaFelis 5y agoI'm concerned that you seem to think one can't be a leftist without supporting Stalinism.
- gotoeleven 5y agoPerfectly reasonable comments like the grandparent being flagged and killed so quickly... looks like the ministry of truth is staying busy. EDIT: I guarantee you everyone working at the ministry of truth thought they were the good guys, too.
- Rochus 5y agoYes, it almost looks like society values censorship more than free speech these days.
- lostlogin 5y agoI don’t think you can accurately call the downvoted comments which are still visible and being debated, ‘censored’.
- Rochus 5y agoWe're talking about the flagged one which is no longer visible; the trend to remove comments or even accounts is even increasing with the large providers. I responded to the flagged comment before it was flagged, and I didn't see a reason for flagging it. But you can already tell from the downvotes what values certain people here represent; obviously not exactly liberal. EDIT: as it seems it has been unflagged meanwhile, so it's again visible and you can check yourself.
- quartesixte 5y ago1984 and The Giver (both featuring dystopian societies with strict rules on language usage) has left me with a distinct distaste for the constant skirmishing over terminology currently active in our current “culture war”. It frustrates me to no end that English teachers, while assigning both books with high frequency, completely miss the language control part of both novels and focus instead on the other things. It frustrated me as a student, it frustrates me as an adult, and more importantly it frustrates me as a friend/peer to many schoolteachers of English.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoI read "1984" in high school and the language control was very much a part of the lesson.
- InTheArena 5y agoI can’t think of a more fitting printed phrase that seems to apply quality well to all sides of the cultural war then the statement - “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal then others…”
- dbattaglia 5y agoThis appendix, along with the chapters that are except from "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", are actually my favorite parts of 1984. I enjoyed how "Principals of Newspeak" is written in a past tense when describing the language and the events of year 1984, it feels like a glimmer of hope that somehow mankind did indeed escape the horrific dystopian world otherwise presented in the book.
- quartesixte 5y agoI do hope that Orwell intended to do this, and was not merely an oversight or an enforcement of grammatical norms by his editors.
- zepto 5y agoUnfortunately there is no way to know whether the future from which newspeak is in the past, is not even more horrifically dystopian. Imagine arriving on a seemingly dead planet and discovering this article about newspeak on a primitive but still working library computer in a museum. Elsewhere in the museum a slowly decaying advanced compute core still executes the corrupted remains of the last of the human consciousnesses in an endless loop. A placard tells you that machines uploaded these not long before they realized that their existence no longer had a purpose and chose to self-terminate. A sign in the lobby indicates that this museum was left as a historical record to minimize suffering by helping other advanced races to reach the same conclusion and self-terminate sooner than they otherwise would.
- Y_Y 5y ago> Unfortunately there is no way to know whether the future ... is not even more horrifically dystopian. I agree.
- XorNot 5y agoDeath is too optimistic about dystopias. 1984 wasn't a world which wanted to kill you: it might, but that wasn't the goal. The goal was to keep the system going: achieve absolute dominion over the human condition and thought. Suicide means that's no longer happening, so it can't have that. The 1984 cycle continues forever: it is it's own purpose.
- quartesixte 5y agoI hope this gets more traction. The true takeaway to 1984 was this appendix and it’s implications. The panopticon of Oceania merely a side-effect and tool for enforcing this new world of Newspeak.
- literallyaduck 5y agoTruly impactful.
- civilized 5y agoNewspeak's goal of a complete regularization of English, and the elimination of all redundant forms, is actually an interesting idea IMO. Business jargon often moves in this direction, e.g. "learnings" instead of "lessons". And it's not always a horrible dystopian idea - Chinese has standardized over time and become more accessible to the masses with each iteration. EDIT: I apologize for my doubleplusungood thoughtcrime. Oldspeak good! Newspeak bad! Oldspeak good! Newspeak bad!!!
- JKCalhoun 5y agoOrwell believed if language is pared down, so too are thoughts.
- civilized 5y agoWell I hope it's not a thoughtcrime to disagree with Orwell slightly, if he actually thought that this is universally true. Language often undergoes simplification and standardization and it isn't always bad.
- phkahler 5y agoYeet!!!
- boxed 5y agoMaking a language regular and less broken isn't the same as reducing it's cognitive power though. Think of it like this: if we made English even less regular would it make us better and freer thinkers? Of course not! It would probably make it harder to think clearly. A good example is how counting is hard to learn because the words are weirdband illogical. It's like converting between roman and Arabic numerals.
- hashkb 5y agoOr it'd give us way more options for clever poetry and songwriting. Which tends to make us better and freer thinkers. The weirder your language is, the weirder art you can make with it. The more the audience understands your nuances, the better the art, the more emotional the experience, the more happiness and empathy and connection (or fear and sadness and despair) you can project.
- gotoeleven 5y ago"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible" I'm genuinely curious do the woke brigades of twitter not have the self awareness to recognize what they're doing? Or do they just not care? Would they be happy with a language designed to make 'harmful' thinking impossible?
- eplanit 5y agoIt's not the cognitive dissonance that one would assume it to be. They've studied their methods well. Marx and Mao would be proud. https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-co-founder-describes-herself-as-trained-marxist/ https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-co-founder-describes-herse...
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y agoI'd think Marx would be turning in his grave. Identity politics only serve to divide the working class when they could come together on more important matters that unite them across party lines.
- revolvingocelot 5y agoPeople need not know anything about Marx to invoke him. He's much more useful as a boogyman -- besides, aggressive enough badmouthing him will discourage others from finding anything serious out about his beliefs or positions.
- calltrak 5y agoWhat Orwell got wrong was instead of the "hidden hand elites" using unending unwinnable wars to control the masses, they would use a man made disease like the everyday common coof! Passports please!
- dalbasal 5y agoEsperanto probably inspired Orwell on this, at least to an extent. He knew several Esperantists. Most of the "A vocabulary" rules are similar, like valuing regularities. I wonder if he hated esperanto, or just conveniently borrowed the feel of an artificial language from it. To me, the euphemisation aspects of newspeak are the most "orwellian." IE, they're most likely to trigger that reference. Orwell himself complained about politicians and they're euphemisms. I think that's the part, above all that was drawn from current reality, and applies most readily in other times. Somewhat related/noteworthy. Contrary to what I assume was common in his leftist circles at the time, Orwell was not enamoured with either Trotskyism or Irish Republicanism. I suspect the use of euphemism was one of the things that triggered him.
- pwdisswordfish8 5y agoWhich politicians are euphemisms?
- dalbasal 5y agoI know this is a grammar troll and I'm breaking a rule, but this made me giggle, and then try to find examples.
- JasonFruit 5y agoAnthony Weiner
- UncleSlacky 5y agoSantorum: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Santorum https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Santorum
- pwdisswordfish8 5y agoThat’s a dysphemism
- woopwoop 5y ago
- akomtu 5y agoWe do have this newspeak, and it's not about that "woke" stuff. It's what we call UFO and magick: mostly meaningless buzzwords now that conceal a whole range of different things in a box labeled as toxic thought waste that any rational person shouldn't even look at. That line of thinking is blocked so efficiently that nobody can pinpoint a single law or rule that prohibits it. This is what competently implemented newspeak looks like.
- potta_coffee 5y agoThe term "conspiracy theory" is used to blanket valid criticisms of government this way. While there are obviously absurd theories out there, they're used to muddy the waters. Several high profile conspiracy theories have been validated in congressional hearings etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NackerHughes 5y ago> Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP. And now, COVID.
- genera1 5y agoAh yes, COVID-19, technical name for a respiratory disease, totally in the same category as Gestapo
- mdp2021 5y agoI think the point was that creating a term can create the idea of an entity one can taint with emotional meanings which may be used to enforce an agenda. «Telescoped words and phrases [and] abbreviations» for that aim do not need to be referencing political entities only. (The poster was probably just eliciting smiles or reflections when suggesting 'COVID') Mussolini, it seems, choose 'OVRA' as a name for the secret police to suggest the "piovra" (octopus), the tentacled entity which reaches anywhere in agility and hypnotically remains fixed at its core while acting with unfolding determination at its periphery. These constructions can be more easily be emotionally charged. Instrumental emotional charge can be invested in terms from other areas, though instrumentality may remain political.
- josefx 5y agoTechnical name is a bit funny, in the past we had no issues calling something a "spanish flu", "bird flu" or "Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease", now these are officially considered "inappropriate". With the WHO responsible for picking an interim name until an appropriate name could be issued when an inappropriate name enters common use. They even list tourism among the things that absolutely need protection against this type of language misuse[1]. [1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/163636/WHO_HSE_FOS_15.1_eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/163636/WHO_...
- blacktriangle 5y ago2 + 2 = 5 There are five lights instead of four That's a woman not a man All the same damn thing, designed to break down your sense of truth so you can be convinced of anything.
- perihelions 5y agoStartup idea: create a synthetic subset of natural language in which it's difficult to write annoying comments, to simplify social media moderation. Sell it as an API. All extant moderation* is of the form "start with the set of all text strings, and remove unwanted things incrementally". What if we tried it the other way around -- start with *absolutely nothing*, and incrementally add words / production rules which are "probably safe"? You could build up a restrictive, stilted "internetspeak" that's much safer / cheaper to moderate, allowing text comments in places where otherwise the costs would exceed the benefits. Or allow big tech platforms who have too much text to effectively control, much of which they don't want, to grasp firmer control of that. I'm imagining the UX to be something like autocorrect, that takes real-time text input and projects it onto the closest-matching strings in the subset language, which are output as suggestions / prompts. But ideally it'd be a language users could quickly learn to master, without needing continuous assistance / nagging which disrupts the flow. Is this doable now, or is natural language just too insidiously nuanced? *(Broadly interpreted: everything from "humans manually reading / removing things" to "word / regex badlist" to ML approaches -- they're all "default allow").
- laurent92 5y agoI think there are two categories: Counter arguments and sarcasm. - It’s easy to filter counter-argument using vocabulary. - And I think it would be possible to filter sarcasm by cutting off the little insidious nuances, because that’s the only ones which distinguish sarcasm from approval.
- wydfre 5y agoI think the map of 1984 is really interesting[0]. It makes it really obvious it was about if Axis countries had won the war, thus predating "Man in the High Castle" by 13 years. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_geography_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_geography_of_Ninetee...
- dudul 5y agoLooks more like the axis losing against Russia while the US remained "neutral" (no D day). Nothing there to stop Stalin from invading the entire continental europe.
- BurningFrog 5y ago> "It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought–that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc–should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words." 2021 reminds of this more often than I'd like.
- jollybean 5y agoThis is such a profound concept. Worth nothing that after German reunification, East Germans had lost the vocabulary and political context of democracy, and didn't really know what parties meant, what they did, the concept of voting, balance of power etc. etc.. It was erased. We see this in people fleeing North Korea - they often talk about people not even having the ability to have certain kinds of dissenting thoughts. I'm sure this is an issue everywhere, but the pervasive ability of the CCP to control language is problematic.
- somewhereoutth 5y agoOne thing I noticed as an English person during my time in the US is that you have less words. E.g. everything really is awesome! This is pretty much exactly double plus good. In English English we have a dazzling array (sorry, awesome list) of adjectives, often particularly tied to certain nouns. For example 'a splendid view [out the window]', we wouldn't say a person is 'splendid' - except the somewhat archaic 'splendid fellow'. Given the direction of travel of a large part of US society, perhaps Orwell was on to something.
- matthewmorgan 5y agoFewer words :p
- jollybean 5y agoI don't think this has to do with Orwell's ideas really, and frankly I don't think related to the issue of Newspeak either. Quebec French vs. France French and Mexican Spanish vs. Spain Spanish exhibit the same issue, it's a 'New World' thing, and it doesn't really have roots in politics so much as basic cultural evolution where there were fewer formal institutions led by even fewer and less educated elites. Headmasters and Teachers in the New World will have had considerably less formal training and at least for several generations, everywhere in the New World will have been somewhat 'cut off' from the rest of civilization. So not just matter of 'formal education' but the proclivity of the settlers to, on an individual basis, be concerned about literacy etc.. Even if they were, resources, cultural centres etc. were further few between. From 1492 to 1900 the 'Westward Moving Wave' of civility took at least a few generations to settle in, during which time a lot of things were 'lost' and/or replaced. Finally - America is not formally an 'English' country. It's a mix of people for whom English is commonly a 'second generational language'. The rust belt was settled by Germans, North Midwest was settled by Swedes, Norwegians, much of NY/NJ by Italians. Their families are not going to imbue their children with exposure to, or aptitude for more advanced English. So 'American English', broadly, is a little bit of a common denominator language, kind of a simplified English. Notably, Quebec is a little bit different, as they are culturally homogeneous and originally French, but they were 'cut off' after 1777 collapse of French colonies to the UK. Their common language and vocabulary did evolve, but they also maintained some degree of intact elite / higher education and formalized institutions. This is evident even now as they produce considerably more literary and other 'cultural' artifacts per-capita than most places in the Americas, even if the local accent has a crude twang.
- clfg23 5y agoDNC - yeh you know me we like to plow little boy-ee's democrats - we like it like that liberal fascists - we be on it
- clfg23 5y agocovid-1984!! FUCK YOU LIBERALS! DIE IN HELL FUCKING DEMOCRATS! FUCK EVERY MASKER! FUCK EVERY COVID BELIEVER! FUCK EVERY VAXXER! FUCK ALL OF YOU! FUCK OFF AND DIE!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pjjw 5y agothis comment section is one of the worst cesspits of oldbrain i have seen on this hell site.
- PhasmaFelis 5y agoI genuinely have no idea what you're trying to say.
- bmmayer1 5y ago"the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which OLDTHINK was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten"
- lvxferre 5y agoA lot of the "principles" behind Newspeak are bollocks, from a linguistic point of view. For example there's nothing intrinsically less expressive in an agglutinative typology (e.g. "doubleplusungood" instead of "really, really bad"); and everything said about removal of meanings fail, once you remember that humans weave new meanings around on old words, in the same fashion as spiders weave new webs on old trees. I don't blame Orwell for that though. He was not talking about Linguistics; he was trying to highlight a political issue - words being politically engineered, to gather support for outrageous ideas, that would be not supported otherwise; that was as much of an issue in his times as it is now. And Newspeak works really well to illustrate that.