Stoic Thinker

I came across this site recently - George Orwell - Eric Arthur Blair. Novels. Essays. Articles. Reviews. Biography. Bibliography.
It contains all of George Orwell's writings, and a biographical section on the great man.
What more could one ask for?

The Bear

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BonnieDundee

Stoic do you hold similar political and economic views to the great writer?

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"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."
-Bruce Schneier

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; build your own cabin and p*ss off front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
Edward Abbey

Leopold Kohr.

C_steam

No...................that's the river. Flowing liquid is highly incapable of writing novels.

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The Bear

Some of Orwells works are a load of flowing liquid though!

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I am an old man. I have eaten much salt.

BonnieDundee

Which ones? I found them very good. Homage to Catalonia is excellent.

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"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."
-Bruce Schneier

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your TV; build your own cabin and p*ss off front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
Edward Abbey

Leopold Kohr.

The Bear

IMO “Animal Farm” is very overrated, and “1984” missed the point. It failed to consider the events and forces in anywhere enough detail that might have led up to the emergence of the society it describes.

Now Bertrand Russell, there’s a REAL thinker!

Mind you, my views on philosophers in general pretty well resonate with those of Python.

Bruces' Philosophers Song

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Stoic Thinker

Bertrand Russell did say some worthwhile things - one quote comes to mind:

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. "

Akria

I'm not sure that 1984 missed the point itself, but I do often get the feeling that everyone else missed Orwell's point in the novel.
I am convinced that the book was not so much an attack upon the totalitarian society it described, but on the stability of that society - the inability to change it.
I once began writing an essay on the stability of various political and economic systems; I didn't finish it, but I think the introduction makes my view on 1984 clear.

"There is today a significant portion of the more politically minded members of society who hold the opinion that the world is changing. It is, in their view of things, becoming more authoritarian; it is abandoning the liberal democratic roots which have supported it for the past two centuries and is slowly becoming more fascist in its mode of government – indeed, not merely fascist but also more able to maintain these fascist tendencies in the face of the people. It is becoming dangerously similar to the world portrayed in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and, indeed, many of them use the Newspeak language invented in the novel to show both this viewpoint and their obvious disapproval of the direction in which both state and society are moving. Doublethink is rife, and one may be prosecuted for thoughtcrime; perhaps even, given the extent to which the move is occurring, facecrime, and anyone who is not in line with the establishment's general set of guidelines governing physical appearance will be punished severely.

In some ways we might consider this to be a broadly accurate view of the direction in which the world is heading. Some of the more basic characteristics are indeed present in some limited form, and they would certainly appear to be progressing; the ability to monitor the ordinary person - and, indeed, the apparent degree to which it is undertaken - is in fact more developed than ever before, and given the scare stories we see in the media we may be forgiven for believing that we have in fact reached the so-called 'surveillance society', and that perhaps Big Brother is watching us indeed.

However, although we may debate both the veracity of these stories and their implications for days upon end, what I find much more interesting is the degree to which we have in fact reached the Orwellian state described in the book.

It is my intention to argue that we have not, by any means, even began the transition to such a state, for I believe that those claiming otherwise miss Orwell's point completely – the scary thing about Airstrip One is not the lack of political or personal freedom, even to the extent that the Party can change your mode of thought; it is not even the fact that it controls the past, although this is important. Those are merely unpleasant and undesirable, as well as unconducive to the progression of civilization and humanity; they are not the really scary thing.


The really scary thing is instead the stability of the Party in its role as government.

It is the sheer inability to combat the system, the knowledge that whatever one does the Party rules, has always ruled and will continue to rule as long as humanity survives. There is no way of bringing the Party down, no way of ending the torment which is the authoritarian state of the novel.

This is the worst situation humanity can face: the inability to change something.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori goes the old lie, as if dying was something to be proud of, as if it were a brave action.
It is not. Dying, in the case of a deliberate self-sacrifice for a cause, is the easy way out; you immediately end the suffering you are undergoing. The torments affecting the rest of humanity cannot affect you when you are a corpse.

No, the true bravery is in living. It is in continuing the suffering in your attempts, day by day, to change things for the better. It is in the suppression of despair and in the harbouring of hope – the hope that one day things will change, and that your suffering will not have been for nothing.

This is not to say that those who sacrificed themselves for a cause should not be admired, or their deaths not be honoured.
Indeed, precisely the opposite, because they have given up the chance of seeing that change come about!
It is merely that their actions were not truly brave, but instead admirable.

It is hope which gives meaning to suffering, which provides the only real solace in those hours of despair.
And it is thus through the removal of hope that humans are destroyed.

We may consider that, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, such a state of affairs did not exist. As we saw throughout the novel, Winston for a long time harboured some hopes of changing things; he believed that eventually change would come, that either Goldstein and his group would overthrow the Party or else that the proletariat would rise up and similarly overthrow the Party.

Indeed, such was his belief in the latter that he spoke it even to an Inner Party member, O'Brien, regardless of the possible consequences of these dissenting thoughts.

However, this is then neglecting the later events of the novel – the crushing of any such hope in the Ministry of Love. Not even a false hope is left by the end, and Winston becomes another slave of the Party, unable to even conceive of unorthodox concepts.

The Party, then, is stable. Hope cannot survive in its realm, and it takes steps to ensure that it does not; it crushes humanity by removing hope, and its ability to do this is a result of its stability.

..."

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I look forward to the days when people will define themselves by their humanity rather than their country.

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Stoic Thinker

I agree with a fair number of his writings - do you?

One excellent piece, IMO, is his 'Notes on Nationalism', which attempts to address what Orwell sees as the hypocrisy of those who claim to have foregone nationalism, yet who inevitably transfer their nationalism elsewhere.

George Orwell: Notes on Nationalism -- Index page