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That's too charitable. It's a rhetorical tool that Orwell uses to invoke a sort of comradery with the reader because it lends itself to the largely anti-establi
by Barrin92 4y ago
That's too charitable. It's a rhetorical tool that Orwell uses to invoke a sort of comradery with the reader because it lends itself to the largely anti-establishment points he tried to get across. It's the old Etonian going "I'm one of you guys" which has a long tradition in British political rhetoric.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoSo? You say it like it’s a bad thing to use rhetoric. But even pg has his own sharp set of rhetorical tools.
- Barrin92 4y agoit's a bad thing to mistake rhetorical skill for profundity. The same is true for pg. Most of what he writes is trite but he's popular because he's mastered the skill of talking to his audience in a tone that has convinced them they're all secret geniuses with access to forbidden knowledge. If Orwell was alive today, he'd probably have a thriving substack. In reality much of Orwell's output was the result of his personal feud with Stalinism, deeply conventional and elitist, and not that deep, and it's not surprising that he is today probably the most mindlessly-quoted writer around.
- magpi3 4y agoDo you really thing a book like 1984 is "not that deep"?
- adventured 4y ago1984 is a particularly shallow book. It borders on being so simplistic as to cater to a teen equivalent crowd intellectually. It'd be deep for a 12 year old reading it for the first time, maybe. It's a cartoonish dystopia, laughably absurd in structure; although it gets his points across, which is obviously important. Orwell paints the kind of fantasy dystopia one might envision if one knew absolutely nothing about totalitarianism firsthand. Its popularity over the decades owes primarily to being shallow, simplistic. People that otherwise can't or won't approach complex ideas can read 1984 and get it. It's also not very original, even Ayn Rand took a shot at the premise a decade before Orwell with her book Anthem (1984 is a better book however).
- strangeattractr 4y agoThis is what's so good about hacker news, morons that enjoyed the book can learn how deficient their minds are at grasping complex ideas in comparison to intellectual heavyweights such as yourself.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoI too was blessed by the above comment illuminating precisely how shallow and dumb I am.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoYou must be so lonely, being so intellectually superior.
- ahartmetz 4y agoOrwell was tremendously skilled at clear, elegant, vivid writing. Is that somehow bad? I will read something he has written just for that. There are books with interesting ideas that I won't read because they bore or even annoy me. Brave New World was somewhat boring and Babbitt I had to stop reading, the author was so unable to say anything well.