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Orwell’s Escape

theatlantic.com

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Re: Orwell’s Escape

#31

Post by hyperthesis »

panarky wrote: post #13

The article argues that Orwell’s greatest fear wasn’t torture or totalitarianism, but the loss of solitude, and he fled to Jura Island to preserve his inner life. If he thought solitude was hard to obtain then, one can only imagine his reaction to today's constant connectivity. I'm sure many people do their best thinking collectively, but I'm with Orwell, and value long periods of solitude and nurturing my inner life…

There's an automatic conformity within us, which is useful for communication, learning, trade, custom and law. e.g. It's helpful that we try to use the same words for the same things.

But we can't think outside our frameworks with this conformity engaged. Hence, the need for solitude.

I think the greater problem of a "person on business from Porlock" (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_on_business_from_Porlock) was not the interruption itself, but that it engaged Coleridge automatic conformity... and so, without moorings, his imagined unreality drifted away like a dream on waking.

I must add that this is a higher human intellectual need - but we are also gregarious by deep mammalian nature, and if isolated, will invent and converse with imaged persons.

Re: Orwell’s Escape

#32

Post by andy99 »

082349872349872 wrote: post #30
andy99 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left. I'm sure this is accurate and I've heard it before. In practice though, at least 1984 feels like a non-partisan criticism of power hungry bureaucracy run amok. I think that's why it's timeless, it criticizes political systems in practice more than making any argument for a particular ideology. There's would be lots of disagreement on the sol…

Animal Farm is as well; what is a farm but a piece of geography containing multiple living beings but organised for the ultimate benefit of only a few of them? Remember: very few dystopias are as much about the other, as they are about the society in which they were written. Animal Farm is the book-length exploration of what in 1984 gets a single sentence: " Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable cha…

I thought power was the point and cruelty what the way of exerting power - at least that's roughly my memory of O'Brien's explanation. That's why I think it aligns so well with any bureaucracy, because they're all self-organizing towards gaining and exerpting more power for it's own sake. (The big difference of course being the conscious awareness of this the party has, whereas in real life it's mostly just emergent behavior)

Re: Orwell’s Escape

#33

Post by coldtea »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #29
alpinisme wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tangent but Lacan just distinguished Autre and autre (Other and other), but more recent philosophers in English (especially Zizek) popularized the more pronounceable distinction between the big and the little other. To be fair though, “l’objet petit a” does occur in Lacan, though, so he wasn’t above the “big”/“little” terminology himself

where capitalised (B)ig other is a more spiritial (God) thing? I don't read French so that's a nuance I miss. Thanks. Edit: sorry tired and getting mixed up with Heidegger's being/Being

The small 'other' is just the other people in life, as regular people.

The capitalised Big Other is the organized, concrete and symbolic forces created/imposed by all other people into the individual: law, culture, social obligations, morality, language.

It's the organised imposition/force of others, also called as "the symbolic order".

Re: Orwell’s Escape

#34

Post by m463 »

panarky wrote: post #13

The article argues that Orwell’s greatest fear wasn’t torture or totalitarianism, but the loss of solitude, and he fled to Jura Island to preserve his inner life. If he thought solitude was hard to obtain then, one can only imagine his reaction to today's constant connectivity. I'm sure many people do their best thinking collectively, but I'm with Orwell, and value long periods of solitude and nurturing my inner life…

I think peace is a necessity, like quietly reading a book.

I remember reading about having a healthy life by maintaining boundaries, and the definition went into gray areas that made a lot of sense.

Healthy boundaries are not only about physical or emotional, but also digital, time and even energy boundaries.

It is ok if you don't have enough energy to cook.

It is also ok if you don't want to create and account, sign up for a newsletter or read an advertisement.

Sort of amazing that kindle e-readers make you pay for no advertisements, and carefully qualify the claim "Without Lockscreen Ads"

Re: Orwell’s Escape

#35

Post by pinewurst »

hnbad wrote: post #20
sublimefire wrote: post #9

I did not like the article, it was like the author was trying to connect the environment Orwell experienced to the book. IMO this is just guesswork, speculation and worst of all denying the author the intellectual prowess. Think about it, if you were to write a book you would not want the circumstances to affect the work and you’d be conscious about it. Saying that author somehow slipped in text because of the condit…

It's really not subtle. Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left. Orwell fought on the side of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the betrayal by the Soviet Union soured him on the prospect of its interpretation of communism. This doesn't even require reading his biography, he explicitly wrote about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia . Where it falls apart is when people…

One can be a very devout socialist while being anti-communist, given the subsumption of that word by the evils of Stalin/Mao/etc. Look at the life of Norman Thomas for example.

Re: Orwell’s Escape

#36

Post by Der_Einzige »

alpinisme wrote: post #26
nonrandomstring wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite a common concept in existentialist philosophy. Heidegger's "The They" and Sartre's "The Gaze". In psychoanalysis Lacan's "Big Other" is related. (I actually have no idea whether Orwell riffed on that.) Not to get into it deeply, but it's a force that has two sides. One is external, the group's desire to overwhelm the individual a la communism/the Borg. And another is internal, the fear of being overwhelmed…

A tangent but Lacan just distinguished Autre and autre (Other and other), but more recent philosophers in English (especially Zizek) popularized the more pronounceable distinction between the big and the little other. To be fair though, “l’objet petit a” does occur in Lacan, though, so he wasn’t above the “big”/“little” terminology himself

Lacan is a massive charlatan, and him being taken seriously at all in any context indicts the entire idea of HN being a high quality discussion forum.

Re: Orwell’s Escape

#37

Post by philwelch »

FrankWilhoit wrote: post #4

[flagged]

Then it truly says something about the rest of humanity that even with tuberculosis, Orwell was a brilliant and insightful commentator on the state of the world who grasped many basic truths that elude many people even today.

Re: Orwell’s Escape

#38

Post by jrsdav »

panarky wrote: post #13

The article argues that Orwell’s greatest fear wasn’t torture or totalitarianism, but the loss of solitude, and he fled to Jura Island to preserve his inner life. If he thought solitude was hard to obtain then, one can only imagine his reaction to today's constant connectivity. I'm sure many people do their best thinking collectively, but I'm with Orwell, and value long periods of solitude and nurturing my inner life…

This perspective is well received; made a bit serendipitous by the unexpectedness of it (for me).

It came as an insightful thing to think about when linking it to the idea that we, humans, are a just a Darwinian biological system, and the rate at which we accelerated away from the eons in which basic tribalism ruled our pretty static social environment and cognitive real estate, was a giant shock to it.

I kinda love with silly endearment all the neat things we discovered to help our feeble little homunculi try to engage and wrangle it all; feudalism, monarchies, democracy, socialism, communism, cults, religion —- c’mon, you’ve got to give us animals a little credit for being quirky.

But oh!!! When you manage to glimpse at the mass representing the futility!

Re: Orwell’s Escape

#39

Post by Kubrick2001 »

panarky wrote: post #13

The article argues that Orwell’s greatest fear wasn’t torture or totalitarianism, but the loss of solitude, and he fled to Jura Island to preserve his inner life. If he thought solitude was hard to obtain then, one can only imagine his reaction to today's constant connectivity. I'm sure many people do their best thinking collectively, but I'm with Orwell, and value long periods of solitude and nurturing my inner life…

Excellent commentary.

This is what Kafka was writing about all along, and specifically in The Trial.

Josef K's (and Kafka's, and ours) enemy is himself.

The mind traps itself. Within its own hologram.

Re: Orwell’s Escape

#40

Post by 082349872349872 »

andy99 wrote: post #32
082349872349872 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animal Farm is as well; what is a farm but a piece of geography containing multiple living beings but organised for the ultimate benefit of only a few of them? Remember: very few dystopias are as much about the other, as they are about the society in which they were written. Animal Farm is the book-length exploration of what in 1984 gets a single sentence: " Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable cha…

I thought power was the point and cruelty what the way of exerting power - at least that's roughly my memory of O'Brien's explanation. That's why I think it aligns so well with any bureaucracy, because they're all self-organizing towards gaining and exerpting more power for it's own sake. (The big difference of course being the conscious awareness of this the party has, whereas in real life it's mostly just emergent…

I'll have to go back and look up O'Brien; you're probably right that he phrases it as power.

However, I say "cruelty" because I was thinking of the Bartle taxonomy[0] for video game players, and the Killer ♣ quadrant. Both Killers and Achievers ♦ aim for power, but only Killers are cruel: Achievers aim for power over scores or things; Killers aim for power over other players. We call that "prey drive" when it occurs in other species; compare the roles the species play in Animal Farm.

Horses are not carnivores and don't have the same prey drive as dogs, but they do have a dominance spectrum. If you put out 8 piles of hay for 10 horses, the 2 weakest won't get to eat. If you put out 10 piles of hay, there will be peace (this is the key insight to feudalism as a socioeconomic structure) if the dominant animal chooses a pile first, and so on in order to the co-dominant, but plenty of violence if it's done the other way around. Now, depending upon the herd, there still may be some violence, because even if there's enough hay for everyone, a dominant horse will, like the Inner Party, chase a weak horse away from their pile just to show they can. If you don't care about herd hierarchy, and just put out 11-12 piles of hay, there will be complete peace, because each time the weak horse gets chased away, there's always an undefended pile it can eat from: the strong get to play strong but the weak still get to eat (this is the key insight to social democracy).

So, yeah, if only it were possible for us all to have lots of power over our environment[1] without seeking power over each other[2], that'd be great.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...

[1] I'd prefer moving a dozen tons of hay around with a frontloader all by myself, instead of bossing around lots of other people to do it a few kg at a time. As far as I can tell —or have merely been convinced?– the majority of humanity would prefer the latter.

[2] "Oh, it's blessed are the MEEK! Oh, I'm glad they're getting something, they have a hell of a time." –Mrs. B N

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