{"id":9954,"date":"2019-07-02T15:56:50","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T22:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=9954"},"modified":"2019-07-06T16:03:47","modified_gmt":"2019-07-06T23:03:47","slug":"doublethink-anew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2019\/07\/02\/doublethink-anew\/","title":{"rendered":"Doublethink Anew"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The Atlantic<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

What\u00a01984<\/em>\u00a0means today<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GEORGE PACKER<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
OLIVER MUNDAY<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

No novel of the past century\u00a0has had more influence than George Orwell\u2019s\u00a01984.\u00a0<\/em>The title, the adjectival form of the author\u2019s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc\u2014doublethink<\/em>,\u00a0memory hole<\/em>,\u00a0unperson<\/em>,\u00a0thoughtcrime<\/em>,\u00a0Newspeak<\/em>,\u00a0Thought Police<\/em>,\u00a0Room 101<\/em>,\u00a0Big Brother<\/em>\u2014they\u2019ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It\u2019s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to\u00a01984.\u00a0<\/em>Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered,\u00a0How did he know?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 <\/em>in 10th-grade English class. Orwell\u2019s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World<\/em>, whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 <\/em>came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell\u2019s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn\u2019t go back to 1984<\/em>. Since high school, I\u2019d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already \u201cknew\u201d the book. It was too familiar to revisit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read: Teaching \u20181984\u2019 in 2016<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when I recently read the novel again, I wasn\u2019t prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of\u00a01984<\/em>. It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And\u00a0in the Trump era<\/a>,\u00a0it\u2019s a best seller<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at The Atlantic<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Atlantic Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined What\u00a01984\u00a0means today GEORGE PACKER No novel of the past century\u00a0has had more influence than George Orwell\u2019s\u00a01984.\u00a0The title, the adjectival form of the author\u2019s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc\u2014doublethink,\u00a0memory hole,\u00a0unperson,\u00a0thoughtcrime,\u00a0Newspeak,\u00a0Thought Police,\u00a0Room 101,\u00a0Big Brother\u2014they\u2019ve all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}