Orwell, Huxley and the Emerging Totalitarianism

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Monday, May 20. 2013

Orwell, Huxley and the Emerging Totalitarianism

This is what has been going on: Orwell, Huxley and the Emerging Totalitarianism:

Several aspects of modern life seem to have been very accurately predicted by both Orwell and Huxley. Orwell’s idea of “New Speak,” for example, the deliberate remoulding and distortion of the English language by Big Brother, has been rightly compared to the politically correct manipulation of language that has become all too familiar in western societies over the past twenty to thirty years. The political purpose of “New Speak” is to control the thinking of the populace – not too different in aim from the new terms and words coined by political correctness. Huxley does not go into the language issue in the same way as Orwell, though we note too that in the Brave New World certain “offensive” words – such as “cross” – have been eliminated from public use. Thus for example Charing Cross Station in London has been renamed “Charing T Station” – after Henry Ford’s Model T automobile.

Posted by The Barrister in Our Essays, Politics at 14:42 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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The Washington Monument has been renamed "Eric Holder's Dildo"

#1 model_1066 on 2013-05-20 17:09 (Reply)

The theory was still strong then - and re-emerges every decade - that language controlled thought, and the language one learned directed what one was able to think. Sapir and especially Benjamin Whorf are associated with it.

It's a fun concept, and brings oohs and ahhs to the undergraduates and all those who want desperately to show that Western Civilization is inferior in some respect and just does not have the love, or patience, or kindness, or interpersonal complexity of Some Other Culture. It turns out not to be true, however. A few bits at the margins of culture at the very most.

It's not the language. Would that it were so easy, and easily treatable. To become unable to think certain thoughts, a person has to embrace and re-embrace evasion a thousand times. We don't fall into the gorge by accident of language - we climb down the cliff yard by yard, in an echo of the never confessed, and so Unforgivable Sin.

#2 Assistant VIllage Idiot (Link) on 2013-05-20 20:28 (Reply)

a re read of Fahrenheit 451 (especially Capt Beatty's monologues) would come in handy in these times.

#3 walt moffett on 2013-05-20 21:16 (Reply)

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Monday, May 20. 2013

Orwell, Huxley and the Emerging Totalitarianism