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Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888),
Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the evolution of society. But it were ridiculous to assert that the Iron Heel was a necessary stepping-stone. Rather, to-day, is it adjudged a step aside, or a step backward, to the social tyrannies that made the early world a hell, but that were as necessary as the Iron Heel was unnecessary.
Out of the decay of self-seeking capitalism, it was held, would arise that flower of the ages, the Brotherhood of Man. Instead of which, appalling alike to us who look back and to those that lived at the time, capitalism, rotten-ripe, sent forth that monstrous offshoot, the Oligarchy.
Marx: money pools in capitalisms, thus oligarchy
Small wonder that I am restless. I think, and think, and I cannot cease from thinking. I have been in the thick of life so long that I am oppressed by the peace and quiet, and I cannot forbear from dwelling upon that mad maelstrom of death and destruction so soon to burst forth. In my ears are the cries of the stricken; and I can see, as I have seen in the past,2 all the marring and mangling of the sweet, beautiful flesh, and the souls torn with violence from proud bodies and hurled to God. Thus do we poor humans attain our ends, striving through carnage and destruction to bring lasting peace
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“You pleased me,” he explained long afterward; “and why should I not fill my eyes with that which pleases me?”
“Go on,” they urged, and Dr. Hammerfield said: “We do not mind the truth that is in any man. If it is sincere,” he amended. “Then you separate sincerity from truth?” Ernest laughed quickly. Dr. Hammerfield gasped, and managed to answer, “The best of us may be mistaken, young man, the best of us.”
Got em'
universe.”
Inductive vs deductive
“Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods?
he is mopping the floor with him
“That’s another way of saying that you live up in the air. But you come back to earth at meal-time, I am sure, or when an earthquake happens along. Or, tell me, Doctor, do you have no apprehension in an earthquake that that incorporeal body of yours will be hit by an immaterial brick?”
his clap backs are savage
“The Church is not teaching Christ these days,” Ernest put in quickly. “That is why the workingmen will have nothing to do with the Church. The Church condones the frightful brutality and savagery with which the capitalist class treats the working class.”
I do believe his whine was congenital. He was a man beaten at birth.
“All my reading and studying of them has taught me that law is one thing and right is another thing. Ask any lawyer. You go to Sunday-school to learn what is right. But you go to those books to learn . . . law.”
“But it is expedient doctrine. I am a revolutionist, and it is a perilous vocation.”
The more I thought of Jackson’s arm, the more shaken I was. I was confronted by the concrete. For the first time I was seeing life. My university life, and study and culture, had not been real. I had learned nothing but theories of life and society that looked all very well on the printed page, but now I had seen life itself. Jackson’s arm was a fact of life. “The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!” of Ernest’s was ringing in my consciousness.
When their morality is questioned, they grow only the more complacent and superior.
“I am answered,” Ernest said quietly. “It is the only answer that could be given. Power. It is what we of the working class preach. We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you tread upon the faces of the poor. So we have preached power. By the power of our ballots on election day will we take your government away from you—”
“It is a bribe,” he said. “Behind it is the fine hand of Wickson, and behind him the hands of greater men than he. It is an old trick, old as the class struggle is old—stealing the captains from the army of labor.
The mental processes of the man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong.
“Poor simple folk,” Ernest said to me in an undertone. “They see clearly as far as they see, but they see only to the ends of their noses.”
You are doomed to perish as all atavisms perish.
“Then,” Ernest answered, “you, and labor, and all of us, will be crushed under the iron heel of a despotism as relentless and terrible as any despotism that has blackened the pages of the history of man.
“You see, labor has nothing concrete of which to be despoiled. Its share of the wealth of the country consists of clothes and household furniture, with here and there, in very rare cases, an unencumbered home. But you have the concrete wealth, twenty-four billions of it, and the Plutocracy will take it away from you. Of course, there is the large likelihood that the proletariat will take it away first. Don’t you see your position, gentlemen? The middle class is a wobbly little lamb between a lion and a tiger. If one doesn’t get you, the other will. And if the Plutocracy gets you first, why
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George Carlin has a joke about it
Orwell believes the proletariat can ever only be manipulated. It is too burdenedsecuring its own biological necessities to educate itself, so it can only ever be used as an instrument by the other classes to secure plurality.
For that matter, the professional men and the artists are at this present moment villeins in everything but name, while the politicians are henchmen.
“Joy upon joy and gain upon gain Are the destined rights of my birth, And I shout the praise of my endless days To the echoing edge of the earth. Though I suffer all deaths that a man can die To the uttermost end of time, I have deep-drained this, my cup of bliss, In every age and clime— The froth of Pride, the tang of Power, The sweet of Womanhood! I drain the lees upon my knees, For oh, the draught is good; I drink to Life, I drink to Death, And smack my lips with song, For when I die, another ‘I’ shall pass the cup along. “The man you drove from Eden’s grove Was I, my Lord, was I, And I
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Such a war would virtually put the Oligarchy in possession of the world-market. Also, such a war would create a large standing army that need never be disbanded, while in the minds of the people would be substituted the issue, “America versus Germany,” in place of “Socialism versus Oligarchy.”
Yep
When everybody was guilty, how was anybody to be punished?
“And the howling folly of it is that we are so helpless that such idiots really are managing our interests,”
CHAPTER XIV
Monologue
“The knell of private capitalist property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”
“The surpluses will have to be expended somehow,” he answered; “and trust the oligarchs to find a way. Magnificent roads will be built. There will be great achievements in science, and especially in art. When the oligarchs have completely mastered the people, they will have time to spare for other things. They will become worshippers of beauty. They will become art-lovers. And under their direction, and generously rewarded, will toil the artists. The result will be great art; for no longer, as up to yesterday, will the artists pander to the bourgeois taste of the middle class. It will be great
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“Social evolution is exasperatingly slow, isn’t it, sweet-heart?”
In fact, so terrible did we make ourselves, that it became a greater peril to betray us than to remain loyal to us.
“I know nothing that I may say can influence you,” he said. “You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party. There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittlers and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy. You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel.”
and who is still with us with eyes lifted to to-morrow’s sun, that heralds in the new age.
It is far easier to see brave men die than to hear a coward beg for life.101
“Yes, by your law,” the terrorist replied significantly. “But by our law, believe me, it is quite lawful. You must accustom yourself to the fact that you are in another world than the one of oppression and brutality in which you have lived.”
Heaven and hell may be the prime factors of zeal in the religion of a fanatic; but for the great majority of the religious, heaven and hell are incidental to right and wrong. Love of the right, desire for the right, unhappiness with anything less than the right—in short, right conduct, is the prime factor of religion.
Hartman was jubilant. “Well done! well done!” he was repeating, over and over, in a whisper. “The proletariat gets its lesson to-day, but it gives one, too.”
Thereafter we looked with speculative comprehension at the windows. Any of them contained possible death. Each building was a possible ambuscade. This was warfare in that modern jungle, a great city. Every street was a canyon, every building a mountain. We had not changed much from primitive man, despite the war automobiles that were sliding by.
And why not? The people of the abyss had nothing to lose but the misery and pain of living. And to gain?—nothing, save one final, awful glut of vengeance.
diffferent situation, but this sums up the thinking of those who commit mass murder
Prior to that, death to me had been a theory; but ever afterward death has been a simple fact that does not matter, it is so easy.
