More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
These versions emphasized his political engagement, discordant relations with some of his peers, and exceptional insight into how propaganda and authoritarianism fed each other and how they threatened rights and freedoms,
Feeding
What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life?
Quest
from 1946: “Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Politics
impecunious
Define
George Orwell was one.” Like William Morris, he believed that paradise was behind us, in the old ways of life, and in the organic world, rather than ahead of us in an urbanized and industrialized future.
Orris
In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses.
Lofe
Most of writing is thinking, not typing, and thinking is sometimes best done while doing something else that engages part of you. Walking or cooking or laboring on simple or repetitive tasks can also be a way to leave the work behind so you can come back to it fresh or find unexpected points of entry into it. If
Writing ross gay
struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”
Animalfarm idea
George Woodcock
Lookup
puissance
Lpokup
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.”
Socialiam
“Bread for All, and Roses Too”
Refrain for sufferage
Roses in these declarations stood for the way that human beings are complex, desires are irreducible, that what sustains us is often subtle and elusive.
Bread amd roses
“what the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist—the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art.
Women
In that essay on toads and spring and pleasure, he identified the other standard objection to the enjoyment of spring or nature or the rural: “This is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.”
Orwell on achimes
ways he was not a modernist. He believed socialism could build a better society by changing social relations and the distribution of wealth and power but was skeptical about industrialization and urbanization. He loathed centralized authority and believed that the natural world was something to which we should turn our faces, not our backs.
Beliefs
Milan Kundera wrote not long after he escaped communist Czechoslovakia in 1975, “Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden.
Quote
Orwell took on the subject again in a 1943 Tribune essay he published under the pseudonym John Freeman,
Lopkup
“We know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,” Orwell declares at the end of “The Prevention of Literature,”
Quote
His version of socialism doesn’t involve captivity. He writes, “The real objective of Socialism is not happiness. . . . The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood . . . a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.
Orwlell
Stalin was surely Orwell’s principal muse, if not as a personality then as the figure at the center of a terrifying authoritarianism wreathed in lies.
Muse
“His primary liberty,” Baker said of scientists, “is freedom of inquiry. Without that he is as you would be if a dictator could control even your imaginations.
Baker Joh r biologist
When scientific autonomy is lost,” said Baker, “a fantastic situation develops; for even with the best will in the world, the political bosses cannot distinguish between the genuine investigator on the one hand and the bluffer and self-advertiser on the other.” And scientific autonomy had been lost.
Baker
Vavilov
Nicholi
Lysenko
Trofim
Lamarckism,
Lookup
“Socialism is a theory which presupposes natural equality for people, and strives to bring about social equality. . . . Darwinism, on the contrary, is the scientific proof of inequality.”
Look
Darwin himself did portray evolution as a struggle between members of a species competing for scarce resources. That was warped into a confirmation that free-market capitalism and personal selfishness were natural, inevitable, and even good by those who liked them.
Darwin
anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin’s conclusions from his time in Siberia, where survival was not an individualistic competition for resources, which were abundant, but a cooperative enterprise of coping with harsh conditions. He called that intra-species cooperation mutual aid, charted its roles in animal and human life, and emphasized that evolution and cooperation were often intertwined, not opposed, but his 1902 book, Mutual Aid, did not sway the arguments of the time. Contemporary evolutionary science has come closer to Kropotkin’s version. The natural world is looking more and more
...more
Lpkup
But in Orwell’s day, evolution was Darwinism and Darwinism too often social Darwinism.
Yyy
The western scientists had their own sins. Many who presumed that Darwin’s ideas of evolution confirmed the social status quo—the superiority of the rich to the poor, the aristocratic to the plebeian, the white to the nonwhite—became eugenicists, advocates of the notion of inferior and superior human groups and sometimes of ways of cultivating the latter and eradicating the former through punitive social controls or outright genocide.
Eugenics
Britain’s Eugenics Educational Society.
Fff
Holodomor,
Holodomor
As Orwell would convey more powerfully than almost anyone before or since, one of the powers tyrants hold is to destroy and distort the truth and force others to submit to what they know is untrue.
Trump
“When the national census showed that his reign of terror was shrinking the country’s population, Stalin ordered the members of the census board shot. The
Coolingthe bools
The first victim of war is truth, goes the old saying, and a perpetual war against truth undergirds all authoritarianisms from the domestic to the global. After all, authoritarianism is itself, like eugenics, a kind of elitism premised on the idea that power should be distributed unequally.
Big bro
That year he planted the roses, he wrote, “In order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs,
Orwll
Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.” Suspect as a sign of the consciousness and pleasure the party sought to eradicate,
1984
commodified,
Add
The slogans were in that genre often called Orwellian, which is to say they were ominous in their insincerity and unsettling in their contradictions and their imposition on workers who seemed unlikely to agree wholeheartedly with them or to be wearing them by choice.
Slpgans
The workers have a slogan, “The lovers get the roses, but we workers get the thorns.”
Slpgam2
Form cannot be separated from function. And the beauty—or the hideousness—can be in meaning, impact, implications, rather than appearance.
Author
Most workers make about $256 a month, and overtime is the only way to earn more.
Imcetive?
Another word for broken contracts is lies. Lies gradually erode the capacity to know and to connect.
Truth
Another word for broken contracts is lies. Lies gradually erode the capacity to know and to connect.
Truth
Authoritarians often coerce people to go along with what they know are lies, making them reluctant coconspirators who may be deceiving yet other parties. Knowledge is power, and the equitable distribution of knowledge is inseparable from other forms of equality.
Authority
In recent years, the term gaslighting for the attempt to undermine someone’s perceptions has migrated from private life, where it’s most often about a man bullying a woman into losing confidence in her own perceptions, into what demagogues do to whole societies. Sissela Bok, in her landmark book on lying, writes, “Deceit and violence—these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings. Both
Gaslighting
Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
Are dt
Arendt to say that the potent enemy of totalitarianism is she who is passionate and clear about the distinction between fact and fiction, truth and falsity, and stands on the reality of her own experience and capacity to bear witness to it.
Arendt2
To have total power is to have power over truth and fact and history and to reach for it over dreams and thoughts and emotions. He continues, “From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.
Orwell
