5 ms·

1984 is extremely naive. It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check. So foolishly optimistic

by juleiie 5mo ago

1984 is extremely naive. It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check. So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give freedom away if only they get a stable job and housing in exchange. Or if it hits these other guys they don’t like at the moment. It’s all much, much less dramatic than Orwell. It is an ordinary, everyday erosion of your rights until one day you will realize that you lost something very important but it will be no longer possible to say it out loud. One such example is China where all dissent was eliminated because people there prefer comfortable cage. Or Singapore. Seemingly majority doesn’t give a flying dick as long as government buys them. Maybe the Orwellian times were different but it is what it is. It’s easier than ever to just buy people.

amiga386 5mo ago
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty and forced labour regardless of wage. But Stalin ruled through fear, within his party and without. His secret police looked everywhere for dissent and punished it severely. They bugged people, followed people, cultivated informers, asked children to inform on their parents, tried to instill loyalty to the state over and above their own family... they "disappeared" people (either shooting them or sending them to gulags), sometimes entire families. To send a message to any other potential rebels. And unsurprisingly, people wanted out. It was already illegal to leave the USSR without permission, the Berlin Wall was just the most prominent part of that. One of the reasons people stayed in the USSR was because even if they had a chance to escape, they knew the party would punish their family. This is the real world that Orwell amped up. The "memory hole" is code for Soviet censorship, which was rife - see the NKVD commissar vanish here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So... You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country? Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?
- juleiie 5mo ago
  I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already. I spend too much time on Reddit where it seems they like China a lot and want to become China. (Is this AI generated sentiment?) Though none of them seems to be moving to China now that I think about it. Look, it’s extremely hard to remain some kind of objective nowadays on the internet. I no longer know what is true and what is false. Truth has lost all meaning and was replaced by politics. Even history books written by scientists are routinely under attack. In my country of Poland a Nobel prize winner, someone that my teachers said was a hero, suddenly became the villain. I never got my head around it. It still puzzles me. Like a some thorn in my side. He was a national hero? Now he is the bad guy? Why? It’s strange and unsettling how fast narrative changed to serve some political goal and everyone just went with it. I am not resistant to narratives but I seem to routinely miss them. Then I wake up and everyone is saying some strange extreme things and are angry at each other and it seems fabricated to me many times. Such as in my city was recently some uptick of anti car sentiment. Yeah like discussion is normal and we want to live in best possible environment but this wasn’t discussion. It was just people throwing shit at each other and extreme tribalism. It’s unsettling to see this. Social media has been doing something terrible to people. And I think it all serves somebody’s interests. Someone benefits from these divisions and wars. We need to collectively unplug and get a grip
  - ryandrake 5mo ago
    > I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already. Try visiting if you get the chance and see for yourself how things are. Depending on your workplace you may also have many Chinese coworkers who would be glad to tell you what life is like there. Definitely don’t listen to Reddit, but also don’t listen to the countless other forums trying to convince you it’s a North Korea like dystopia.
    - johnny22 5mo ago
      I want an honest assessment on public criticism of the government in china. Can i have a comedy tv show where i satirize government actions I don't like? Can you point me to one?
miki123211 5mo ago
Which is why I like "Brave new World" a lot more. It actually asks hard questions and explores the tradeoff of an "utopian dystopia." In contrast to the society Orwell describes, where the government is cartoonishly evil, the one of "Brave New World" genuinely cares for the happiness of its subjects, and most of its subjects are genuinely happy, even if we disagree with the methods that it uses. This is by design; I read somewhere that Orwell wanted to position 1984 in explicit contract to Huxley, killing any debate on whether his described society was better or worse than the one the book was written in. I think he heavily underestimated the human ability to ferret out the truth when the only thing the state gives them is lies. Even without access to reliable news sources, most people will at least realize that the news is lying to them. Even if they don't know what the truth is, they'll know that it's not what they're told it is. I think the key to a working dystopia is to genuinely make people's lives pleasant. We care about the economics a lot more than we care about the politics. If you're a free democratic socialist republic and decrease people's monthly meat rations, citizens will riot and demand true democracy. If you are a democracy and the price of meat goes up due to the bird flu epidemic, people will riot and demand communism and wealth redistribution.
- protocolture 5mo ago
  >and most of its subjects are genuinely happy, even if we disagree with the methods that it uses. This is basically describing 1984s proles?
SwtCyber 5mo ago
Most people probably don't "give away freedom" in some explicit bargain. They accept one small exception at a time: this restriction is for children, this one is for safety, this one is only for bad actors, this one is temporary
- tEem21 5mo ago
  Agreed. First, they came for the communists...
- HerbManic 5mo ago
  Back 2001-ish there was an uproar about how Windows XP would profile your system and upload this to Microsoft. This was done to ensure that it got the right security update (32/64bit - home/enterprise). That was the only thing it did. Now 25 years later, they know who you are talking too, what you are talking about, where you are almost in real time, what websites you browse, books you read, music you like, podcasts you indulge in, what social media trends you follow, general political points of view, sexual orientation, what you look like and so on... It was all taken one little inch at a time and now we have mass apathy about it all. And once they have taken that little bit, they will never let it go by choice. Here in Australia, there are now ID proof of age requirements for Social media (still a little loosely enforced)and pornography. They have their foot in the door, you can see where it is going next.
tim333 5mo ago
I don't think 1984 is naive and there's maybe a certain naivete in comparing the UK protecting kids from porn to the 1984 type stuff - torture chambers for thought criminals and the like.
- eastbound 5mo ago
  Tommy R was thrown feces upon him in a jail cell for 8 months (along with noise torture and losing 15% of his body weight out of food privation). Torture chambers fully exist for thought criminals in UK.
  - rand846633 5mo ago
    Never heard of this individual. After a bit of googling I could not find any sources that support these claims. Can you please point me to them? (Text, not video) I found no source for: * feces thrown on him (for 8 months) * “noise torture” * “torture chambers for thought criminals”
    - billynomates 5mo ago
      Also he is not a "thought criminal". He has convictions convictions for crimes such as assault, threats, harassment, fraud and contempt of court.
    - tim333 5mo ago
      Feces etc. https://5pillarsuk.com/2018/08/03/tommy-robinson-i-had-excrement-thrown-through-my-jail-window/ https://5pillarsuk.com/2018/08/03/tommy-robinson-i-had-excre... Non thought crimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson#Criminal_offences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson#Criminal_offenc... including "Robinson kicked the officer in the head as he lay on the ground" etc.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    So close!! That is a domestic terrorist. Which doesn't excuse feces-throwing, but might explain why he was in jail.
protocolture 5mo ago
>It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check. No it doesn't make that assumption? The crazy tricks are for the engaged, for the outer party members. The proles just get bread and circuses.
spwa4 5mo ago
I always thought in the 1984 story people get into trouble despite themselves. The main character is not trying to overthrow the state at all. He wants the girl, and writes down his thoughts, making it easy to accuse him. Nothing about what he thinks about strikes me as odd or unique in the least. He has simple and obvious reasons for doubting the state ... and only for a little while.
- spwa4 5mo ago
  I actually went a bit through the book again and this is discussed, at length, in the book. The state security services explain (as if they would ever explain that in reality) that going after innocent people is a feature, not a bug. They're going after supposedly disloyal people just to put the fear in everyone, despite knowing perfectly well that these people aren't actually disloyal. That they know perfectly well the accusations they make are false. The accusations are not the point. Well, occasionally there are actual criminals where it is the point but in the 99% case is isn't the point.

by juleiie 5mo ago

amiga386 5mo ago

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty and forced labour regardless of wage. But Stalin ruled through fear, within his party and without. His secret police looked everywhere for dissent and punished it severely. They bugged people, followed people, cultivated informers, asked children to inform on their parents, tried to instill loyalty to the state over and above their own family... they "disappeared" people (either shooting them or sending them to gulags), sometimes entire families. To send a message to any other potential rebels. And unsurprisingly, people wanted out. It was already illegal to leave the USSR without permission, the Berlin Wall was just the most prominent part of that. One of the reasons people stayed in the USSR was because even if they had a chance to escape, they knew the party would punish their family. This is the real world that Orwell amped up. The "memory hole" is code for Soviet censorship, which was rife - see the NKVD commissar vanish here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So... You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country? Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?

juleiie 5mo ago
I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already. I spend too much time on Reddit where it seems they like China a lot and want to become China. (Is this AI generated sentiment?) Though none of them seems to be moving to China now that I think about it. Look, it’s extremely hard to remain some kind of objective nowadays on the internet. I no longer know what is true and what is false. Truth has lost all meaning and was replaced by politics. Even history books written by scientists are routinely under attack. In my country of Poland a Nobel prize winner, someone that my teachers said was a hero, suddenly became the villain. I never got my head around it. It still puzzles me. Like a some thorn in my side. He was a national hero? Now he is the bad guy? Why? It’s strange and unsettling how fast narrative changed to serve some political goal and everyone just went with it. I am not resistant to narratives but I seem to routinely miss them. Then I wake up and everyone is saying some strange extreme things and are angry at each other and it seems fabricated to me many times. Such as in my city was recently some uptick of anti car sentiment. Yeah like discussion is normal and we want to live in best possible environment but this wasn’t discussion. It was just people throwing shit at each other and extreme tribalism. It’s unsettling to see this. Social media has been doing something terrible to people. And I think it all serves somebody’s interests. Someone benefits from these divisions and wars. We need to collectively unplug and get a grip
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  > I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already. Try visiting if you get the chance and see for yourself how things are. Depending on your workplace you may also have many Chinese coworkers who would be glad to tell you what life is like there. Definitely don’t listen to Reddit, but also don’t listen to the countless other forums trying to convince you it’s a North Korea like dystopia.
  - johnny22 5mo ago
    I want an honest assessment on public criticism of the government in china. Can i have a comedy tv show where i satirize government actions I don't like? Can you point me to one?

miki123211 5mo ago

Which is why I like "Brave new World" a lot more. It actually asks hard questions and explores the tradeoff of an "utopian dystopia." In contrast to the society Orwell describes, where the government is cartoonishly evil, the one of "Brave New World" genuinely cares for the happiness of its subjects, and most of its subjects are genuinely happy, even if we disagree with the methods that it uses. This is by design; I read somewhere that Orwell wanted to position 1984 in explicit contract to Huxley, killing any debate on whether his described society was better or worse than the one the book was written in. I think he heavily underestimated the human ability to ferret out the truth when the only thing the state gives them is lies. Even without access to reliable news sources, most people will at least realize that the news is lying to them. Even if they don't know what the truth is, they'll know that it's not what they're told it is. I think the key to a working dystopia is to genuinely make people's lives pleasant. We care about the economics a lot more than we care about the politics. If you're a free democratic socialist republic and decrease people's monthly meat rations, citizens will riot and demand true democracy. If you are a democracy and the price of meat goes up due to the bird flu epidemic, people will riot and demand communism and wealth redistribution.

protocolture 5mo ago
>and most of its subjects are genuinely happy, even if we disagree with the methods that it uses. This is basically describing 1984s proles?

SwtCyber 5mo ago

Most people probably don't "give away freedom" in some explicit bargain. They accept one small exception at a time: this restriction is for children, this one is for safety, this one is only for bad actors, this one is temporary

tEem21 5mo ago
Agreed. First, they came for the communists...
HerbManic 5mo ago
Back 2001-ish there was an uproar about how Windows XP would profile your system and upload this to Microsoft. This was done to ensure that it got the right security update (32/64bit - home/enterprise). That was the only thing it did. Now 25 years later, they know who you are talking too, what you are talking about, where you are almost in real time, what websites you browse, books you read, music you like, podcasts you indulge in, what social media trends you follow, general political points of view, sexual orientation, what you look like and so on... It was all taken one little inch at a time and now we have mass apathy about it all. And once they have taken that little bit, they will never let it go by choice. Here in Australia, there are now ID proof of age requirements for Social media (still a little loosely enforced)and pornography. They have their foot in the door, you can see where it is going next.

tim333 5mo ago

I don't think 1984 is naive and there's maybe a certain naivete in comparing the UK protecting kids from porn to the 1984 type stuff - torture chambers for thought criminals and the like.

eastbound 5mo ago
Tommy R was thrown feces upon him in a jail cell for 8 months (along with noise torture and losing 15% of his body weight out of food privation). Torture chambers fully exist for thought criminals in UK.
- rand846633 5mo ago
  Never heard of this individual. After a bit of googling I could not find any sources that support these claims. Can you please point me to them? (Text, not video) I found no source for: * feces thrown on him (for 8 months) * “noise torture” * “torture chambers for thought criminals”
  - billynomates 5mo ago
    Also he is not a "thought criminal". He has convictions convictions for crimes such as assault, threats, harassment, fraud and contempt of court.
  - tim333 5mo ago
    Feces etc. https://5pillarsuk.com/2018/08/03/tommy-robinson-i-had-excrement-thrown-through-my-jail-window/ https://5pillarsuk.com/2018/08/03/tommy-robinson-i-had-excre... Non thought crimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson#Criminal_offences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson#Criminal_offenc... including "Robinson kicked the officer in the head as he lay on the ground" etc.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  So close!! That is a domestic terrorist. Which doesn't excuse feces-throwing, but might explain why he was in jail.

protocolture 5mo ago

>It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check. No it doesn't make that assumption? The crazy tricks are for the engaged, for the outer party members. The proles just get bread and circuses.

spwa4 5mo ago

I always thought in the 1984 story people get into trouble despite themselves. The main character is not trying to overthrow the state at all. He wants the girl, and writes down his thoughts, making it easy to accuse him. Nothing about what he thinks about strikes me as odd or unique in the least. He has simple and obvious reasons for doubting the state ... and only for a little while.

spwa4 5mo ago
I actually went a bit through the book again and this is discussed, at length, in the book. The state security services explain (as if they would ever explain that in reality) that going after innocent people is a feature, not a bug. They're going after supposedly disloyal people just to put the fear in everyone, despite knowing perfectly well that these people aren't actually disloyal. That they know perfectly well the accusations they make are false. The accusations are not the point. Well, occasionally there are actual criminals where it is the point but in the 99% case is isn't the point.