George Orwell: Politics and the English Language (1946)

Christopher Hitchens has a few hour long talks recorded on youtube about his book 'Why Orwell matters' and explains what gave him that kind of insight. 1984 was widely distributed in the Soviet underground and those who read it could not figure out how Orwell understood perfectly what life under Stalin was like without having experienced it himself.

Somebody today with that kind of directness and clarity would be John Ralston Saul, who advocates writing in clear language. Voltaire's Bastards was written in the 90s and is very much still relevant today.

Timely post, considering the insanity I was just handed by my campus Social Justice society on my way inside the student union building. It's full of newspeak, and openly calls for the suppression and censorship of speech, literature and music on campus and contains unclear/vague threats of punishment to anybody "who benefits from promoting patriarchal attitudes and relations of power that were inflicted here by colonists."

> I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of insight.

Orwell said it himself, in Why I Write: he believed he has a "power of facing unpleasant facts".

By all accounts that sometimes made him difficult company. This focus on negativity probably contributed to his bouts of melancholy.

But this power, I believe, came from always putting people first. Unlike most intellectuals he never fell in love with his own intellect, or with the admiration of "honorable" people. Maybe he romanticized the common people a little too much, especially early in his career, but for him it was never an abstraction. I am not sure if there can be any explanation for this. That's just the way he was. He never stayed inside the lines drawn for him, not the traditional ones of class, nor the ones that one might draw around "radical" intellectuals.

So as a policeman in Burma, he got to know the locals and began to understand the horrors of imperialism. Later in life, he traveled to Catalonia to participate in the anarchist revolution as a common soldier, and saw what was beautiful, and ugly, about that. And Orwell saw firsthand how Stalin was engaged in pragmatic and brutal geopolitics, and was not the center of some worldwide proletarian movement.

Anyway, as you can see I'm kind of a fan.

I sometimes try to talk with my mother about truth, reality, correct beliefs and so on. Her problem is, she is relativist. To her, the idea that there's only one reality, and that contradictory beliefs are incompatible is not only false, but repugnant.

One of the major causes happens to be vocabulary. In French, the closest synonymous for belief, "croyance", carries a heavy religious connotation. We have other words, such as "knowledge", "opinion"… but they have other problems. We just don't have a short colloquial word to convey the idea of a probability distribution, and no more.

"No problem, I'll just define the word for her." But I'm not allowed to. I'm supposed to be accessible, which means no long sentences, and no jargon. My trying to be precise comes of as pedantic, pretentious, and needlessly complicated.

And so we're stuck. She doesn't understand what I mean, and I can't explain it to her. Even worse, she actually believes she does understand. Because my words have meanings to her. Just not the meanings I wanted to convey.

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Regarding solo pieces, quartets, and quintets, you should note that guitar has frets. Playing in tune is much easier compared to say, the cello. While becoming a good guitarist requires just as much effort than becoming a good cellist, merely playing something that sounds cool requires much, much less effort.