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Dec. 16, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:05
1808 Book Review - 1984 - The Anatomy of Murder

The unspoken truth behind the most terrifying novel in the world.

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And then you can add them whenever you get translated.
Go for it, Steph. A totalitarian country, to my knowledge, at least not to the level of detail that you'd need to write a book like this.
And when 1984 was published, one of the things that people in the Eastern Bloc said, they said it was just incredible how accurate he got every single last detail about a totalitarian society.
And I've always sort of wondered about that.
You know, how could that conceivably occur?
And so I sort of mulled it over, and I think the answer came to me when I was reading a book recently called Homage to Catalonia.
I don't know if you guys have ever read it.
Yes, that's his account of the Spanish Civil War.
Yes. Now, one of the things that is very true about the Spanish Civil War and his involvement in it is that he is, in fact, a murderer.
One thing that's true about totalitarian dictatorships is that they're murder-based societies.
Everything is a threat of murder.
Hitler was a murderer.
Winston Churchill was a murderer.
George Orwell was a murderer.
It just sort of struck me that how did he describe a society so common?
To everyone and to every single dictatorship that's ever been known of.
What if a dictatorship is simply a mental model of the mind of the murderer?
And that's why it's so powerful and so compelling and so universal.
Now, when you say he's a murderer, I can't remember homage to Catalonia at all, but did he shoot people in the war then?
He threw bombs and blew people up.
Yeah, and he...
Now, he didn't actually see directly, but he threw a bomb and heard the guy just over the hill screaming in agony after the bomb, and he says, oh, poor devil, and so on, and that's about it, right?
But, no, he...
Because, of course, these are not people who aggressed against George Orwell in England.
This is not an act of self-defense.
I mean, he was out there actively hunting fascists and shooting at them and being shot at by them.
And... He is a murderer.
I mean, by any rational standard or UPB standard of morality, he's a murderer.
So how is it he's so able to accurately describe a murder-based society?
I think that the world of 1984 is the world of the bomb in the brain, gone completely different.
To extremes. This is not a portrait of society, but a portrait of the mind of a murderer.
And given what we know about the degree to which one's psyche or the collective psyche influences how people view the government, if you live in a murder-based society, this is the government you get because this is everyone's relationship to themselves.
Constant war.
Well, that's the constant war against the conscience that occurs in the soul of the murderer.
The two minutes hate, that's the violent acting out against others that occurs with the horrendous rending of the conscience that occurs in the mind of the murderer.
The pornographic...
Sorry? Oh no, go on, go on.
Well, I mean, you have the pornographic sexual desires, the furtive The belief that you're getting away with something, right?
So he believes that he's getting away with his affair with Julia, but he's being watched the whole time.
So it's this fantasy that you're actually getting away with something when you never get away with anything, and that is the reality of the conscience.
The need...
O'Brien's torture scene or scenes of Winston Smith are just terrifying and powerful and fundamentally philosophical, right?
So he's holding up four fingers and say, if the party says five, it's five.
And is completely overriding the soul of the man striving for freedom with irrational, bigoted and violently imposed absolutes, which is sort of an ideology, whether it's communism or fascism or Nazism or just the ideology of the virtue of the family or the ideology of nationalism and I think that to me is the way like when you get the conscience it has to be so overridden by this aggressive ego that to me O'Brien is in a sense the part of Orwell that murdered and The remaining shreds of his original self is somewhat like Winston Smith.
And that's why, because the murder occurs before he writes the book, that's why Winston Smith hasn't got a chance.
He says it right at the beginning, I'm already dead.
Right. And a murderer, you know, there is that, this comes from William...
Golding, right? Lord of the Flies, a stick is a spear sharpened at both ends, right?
So there is a generally accepted moral rule that when you kill somebody else, you die yourself.
Well, on point to that theory that you've got, where do you think, which I think that's, I got chills when you were describing that.
Where would you say that Goldstein fits into this?
And also, why would you say that Winston At first, and for the first half of the book, or even the first three-fourths of the book, thought that O'Brien was on his side.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah, I hadn't thought about that.
Yeah, he thinks he has an understanding with O'Brien, right?
Winston Smith himself is not a hero, and is certainly not portrayed as an innocent man.
And just before we get to that, because this is a great point, I don't have a good answer for that as yet, so let me just do the unconscious cookery well.
The one thing that is true is that Winston Smith is interested in the past, right?
He's interested in history. He's interested in life before this.
The truth of the past is...
Yeah, and so that, of course, is...
Whereas, I mean, not only as O'Brien...
He has a knowledge of the past, right?
Because he said that he wrote part of Goldstein's book, right?
So he has a knowledge of the past, but he has no empathy with it and no curiosity about it and simply uses it as a weapon to ensnare and control and manipulate others.
But Winston Smith is interested in the past, but everyone he goes to, there's a scene in the bar with the old man where he asks what life was like.
He just gets these irrelevant and inconsequential details.
And if you read Such Such Were the Joys, which is his account of his childhood, Orwell's account of his childhood, It's nonsense.
It's got nothing to do with anything.
It's like little details about what happened in school, little details about the cruelties.
He did punch a bully full in the face and felt great satisfaction of that.
But no clue as to where this sadism came from in his personality.
No clue as to how he was forged into a guy who wanted to go and shoot people in Spain.
So Orwell himself is far closer to O'Brien than to Winston Smith.
And Winston Smith is probably the part of him that wrote the autobiography, but got no details that were at all relevant.
And I think that's the scene in the bar with the old man.
That it's just, well, you know, there were hats at the wedding, but he can't remember anything.
And also because history was so far back, The chance of getting to know anything diminishes, right?
And this is true of self-knowledge, right?
The longer you put it off, the less likely you are to ever achieve it to a point where, in a sense, all the old people have died and no one can remember the past anymore.
So all of the parts of you that could have informed you about the past are just killed off, so to speak.
So, yeah, I think that's one of the reasons I always found that scene to be very vivid and, if it is, a metaphor for the inner life.
Then this pursuit of the past that gives you only inconsequential details is, I think, powerfully replicated in the book.
I think that's a fascinating theory.
I've not read such such the dates, but I have heard that people have talked about 1984 being, you know, about a lot of the psychological side of 1984 being about his childhood and about his time in that school and, you know, this sort of surveillance from the boarding school teachers and stuff.
But it's not about the first five years of his life.
This is what is essential, right?
This boarding school could not have produced a murderer.
Boarding school in and of itself.
I went to boarding school. I mean, not for as long, and obviously it wasn't quite as brutal when I was there, but it's not enough.
People want to look at the boarding school, but not at his family, right?
Because nobody ever wants to look at the family, right?
Because you can't get the family, right?
So if Orwell chooses not to write about his family, You can't get any information really about the family.
You can get information about the boarding school, right?
This is why everyone's drawn to the boarding school, right?
So you can look up the boarding school records.
You may be able to find things that other people wrote about the boarding school.
You can find manuals of discipline.
You can find, you know, his...
But you can't go back into this, you know, empty, broken, burnt-up documentary of his first five years.
If he's not going to talk about it, it's like it's not there.
But I think he is talking about it the whole time he's writing.
It's similar to me to American Psycho in that sense, right?
That he's trying to say, this was my life.
This is where I live.
This is how I came to be.
Sorry, we're just...
Anyway, this is the sort of theory that I've just been working on about this murder stuff.
So, in which case, O'Brien is his false self, and Winston Smith is his, sort of, his true self, or his conscience.
I think, yeah, I think so.
And, I mean, the most brutal parents, really, are the ones who get the children to collude, right?
And this is to answer to Greg's question.
To answer like it's definitive.
This is sort of my response to Greg's question.
Which is that he believes that O'Brien is on his side.
In other words, he has Stockholm with his parents, right?
Oh, right, right, yeah.
Well, yeah, because there is actually a scene where he, somewhere towards the end of the torture, he actually, and it's really sort of laid out that he has this fantasy of being in some beautiful place with his mother, with O'Brien, And with Julia.
Right. And in the book he very clearly describes O'Brien holding him as if he is a little baby.
Yes. And he soils himself because he is a little baby.
And his teeth fall out, which is what happens to children.
Oh God, yeah.
Wow. Right.
So O'Brien is his father, and it's also his own false self that's taken on those messages from his father.
Well, yeah, for sure.
I mean, there is an independent self that wants to examine history but can't get any details, and that attempts to resist, attempts to form a relationship outside the family.
Right? And families are all about you cannot have a relationship outside the family, unless the family approves of it, in which case it's a relationship that will never threaten the evil.
Of that family.
And so he attempts to have an affair with an outsider, with a skeptic, with somebody who, Julia, who does understand evil, who does understand immorality, and who judges the family.
I mean, this isn't even subtle, right?
Because, I mean, big brother, right?
It's the family, right?
And so he tries to form a relationship outside the family, and the family then...
It destroys him for that.
And so yeah, this would be to me, maybe he had a nurse or maybe he had somebody who he was attracted to outside of...
Unfortunately, these autobiographies are, you know, prior to the 60s, they're also sexless, which is what makes them so hard to decipher.
But he forms a relationship, Winston Smith, outside, which he's then destroyed for.
And so I would say that, yeah, this is his struggle as a child attempting to escape and evade.
His father finds out about this relationship and then destroys him for it.
I have a vague memory, and it may not be true, but that he was attracted to a girl that his father disapproved of when he was a teenager.
I'd have to double-check that because I don't want to sort of go, you know, ah, I'm certain.
I think that's my vague memory, but...
But yeah, so then his father destroys him, and he loves Big Brother, he loves his father, and because of that love, he has to act out the hatred somewhere, and so that's what is the furnace of the murder impulse, right? Right.
And just to add to that, I remember from this documentary that we were just talking about earlier on, about Orwell's life, that it's not just the Spanish Civil War.
I think he actually went with the Allied troops as they were going through Germany and through into Berlin.
He wanted to be there at the front line going and checking out what was it like right after the combat.
I think he went as a journalist or something, but this is of course at the point where it was just charred massive bodies and it was just a complete nightmare all the way across Europe.
Apparently he was well up for going and checking it out and having a look at that.
And then, of course, he also put himself into a lot of pretty bad situations throughout his life.
But another thing that I don't know, it'd be interesting to see what you think about this and how it fits in.
Apparently, I'm not sure if he actually married her, but he was with a woman for a long time.
I think they adopted a child.
When the Second World War ended, he was off looking around at all of the carnage, and his wife or partner died of some operation that went badly wrong.
And he then had this child who was there the whole time he was writing 1984, but when he was up in Scotland, this kid was apparently sort of sitting around, not really being looked after, but generally being there.
And Orwell, you know, his own family was a total disaster in that sense.
Not his foo, but the family that he sort of created, I think was really...
He just wasn't able to be there for his wife when she was ill.
And then obviously this child afterwards, as far as I understand, wasn't really looked after.
Right, right. And San, I think, became a salesman of agricultural products and lived a pretty lonely and isolated existence.
Right, right. I didn't quite understand what you said.
These autobiographies before the 60s are so sexless.
Do you mean his own autobiography when such-such were the days and stuff?
Is that what you're talking about?
Yeah, I mean, sexuality is a very revelatory aspect of anybody's life.
Who they're attracted to, what they do about it, what their resistances are, what their hang-ups are.
And it's really hard to understand somebody without knowing anything about their sexuality.
And so I would say that it's hard to understand...
George Orwell in 1984 without some knowledge of his sexuality, but of course that's not really something that you wrote about back then.
Now it's a little bit more common to hear about that kind of stuff, but back then it was tougher.
So I think there is a certain amount of obliqueness to understanding Orwell without that aspect of his life.
But I mean, sex is the driving force in 1984.
And so without knowing his own relationship to sex or his own history with sex, or even if it's not like the act in terms of desire or impulses, it's really hard to unravel.
Right, right. I see what you mean.
I mean, to me, it's really hard to make a murderer without sexual abuse.
I mean, to me, that's just a really hard thing to do.
I don't know even how you...
You could do it. And so he was writing at a time where you simply couldn't write about sexual abuse.
You couldn't report about it.
It was obscure, right?
But it is a chilling kind of rape that goes on, at least to me, between O'Brien and Orwell.
And he does obliquely refer to buggery and all of this sort of stuff in his essays on his school life.
So it's hard to know.
What was going on for him in terms of sexuality and what his punishments were for anything which was not considered sort of proper and sexual in the day.
So that's what I mean. It's just it's hard to figure people out without understanding something.
If sexuality is a big hang-up for them and they never talk about it, then you have to deal with a lot of inferences rather than direct info.
Right. I think it's an absolutely fascinating take on the book, and I'm just thinking of the other things in it and how they would fit in with that.
What you said about the relationship outside the family and that being when he wants to get together with Julia, that this is basically breaking out of the cult, and that's the crime, is him having an independent skeptic in his life.
But the thought that occurred to me is that in 1984, children are Terrifying to Winston Smith.
They're spies and thugs and, you know, they're basically a source of danger for him.
What do you think is going on with the representation of children?
Well, that's a presage of the end of the book, right?
Because in the end of the book, the father wins, right?
The family wins. And so this is the parent's perception of children, right?
They're dangerous, right?
And so that would be my guess.
Because, yeah, I mean, the children are all creepy and dangerous in this world.
And that, of course, is one of the things that goes on in abusive families, is that they have to control the children because the children are perceived to be an enormous threat.
And a huge amount of effort is expended into controlling the children.
And I also thought that what was very powerful, the speech I remember very vividly from the very first time I read the book when I was 15 or 16, that Brian talks about the people in the past made these huge mistakes.
Because first they would just kill people without getting confessions, in which case they became martyrs, right?
The opposition to those in power.
The second thing they did during the Inquisition and afterwards was that they would force confessions out of people and then kill them.
But people wouldn't remember the confessions because the confessions were so obviously forced and they still became martyrs.
But the genius of this Ingsoc, of the big brother of society, is that they continue to torture until there is a complete internalization of the abusive structure.
A complete internalization of the abusive, the ultimate Stockholm Syndrome, where there's no part of the person who's left Who doesn't love the abuser.
And that is just, I mean, that's just completely savage.
And a complete evacuation of another human being.
He can't have come by that just by theory.
I mean, that has to be something he experienced, was the complete invasion and evacuation of an innocent soul by a completely and utterly malevolent abuser.
I think that is what is so peculiarly terrifying about the book, is the degree to which he can be let go and still completely enslaved, and not even with any knowledge of his enslavement.
And that, of course, to me, is the metaphor of the incredibly abusive family saying to the adult kids, yeah, you can go out into the world.
That's fine. You have now internalized us to the point where you can wander around all you want.
You can go to Thailand. You can go to the moon.
It doesn't matter. We still own you.
Because there's no you left.
There's only us. That, to me, was really chilling.
And that's, I think, the incredible genius of the book, is the degree to which he talks about the internalization of the abuser and the absolute Stockholm Syndrome.
And that that is the prison.
It has nothing to do with being in a prison.
isn't that you can walk around free and be completely enslaved if you've internalized your abusers.
Yeah, That is very chilling.
And that makes a huge amount of sense in reference to the family.
Yeah, and that was very new in literature as far as I understood it.
In literature before, you had people who...
You know, may have been killed by tyrants, but they died in that sort of heroic, you know, Mel Gibson-style way and all that sort of thing.
But there was nobody who was turned free who was completely broken by the abusers.
But that is the reality of what happens, right?
And we all know. We go to talk to people about morally questionable family actions, to say the least.
Everybody clams up, right?
Everybody freaks out. Everybody.
Either goes silent, goes away, or goes on the attack.
He is a step closer to describing the reality of the totalitarian world that we all live in.
That was a huge step forward, but I just don't think that people have...
It's so obvious that it's a parent-child relationship, as I said.
He's a big brother, right?
He's specifically referencing the family, and I haven't seen any references to it, but...
I do think that you have to be murdered in your soul before you can kill another human being.
You have to be just so dead inside that killing another human being is not only something that is irrelevant to you, but it's actually...
I mean, it's the only thing that makes you feel even a little bit alive is to recreate the murder.
And so the fact that he was out there killing people in the world...
And that this to me is the portrait of the mind of the murderer.
I think it's underguessed at because I think it takes a fair amount of pretty rigorous self-study and self-analysis and a pretty staunch heart to look at something that dark and yet that universal and see it for what it is.
So, in the same way that O'Brien's use of Goldstein's book was a kind of unempathetic manipulation of the actual truth of the history, Orwell's book is the exact same thing for him.
And the only way that Orwell could have written this book and could have portrayed a man like O'Brien is if he had At least in some sense, become that kind of man himself.
Yeah, he couldn't have written it when he was younger because he hadn't killed people yet.
He hadn't lost everything that he could have possibly had as a human being.
What are his earlier books like, Steph?
Well, they're lighter.
They're certainly, I mean, this is just a ferociously grim and despairing book.
And his younger books, they have flashes of humor.
They have flashes of empathy.
They're pretty cold and analytical and detached, particularly down out in Paris and London.
And they're kind of acerbic, but certainly, I don't think...
I mean, if you look at the before and after his murders, it's...
Right after the murders, you get Animal Farm in 1984, right?
Right, and where do you...
Animal Farm came before 84, yeah?
Yeah. Right, right.
I'm trying to place where Goldstein would fit in that kind of theory, and the best I can come up with is maybe, like, the false platitudes that the false self can come up with that sound kind of enlightened but aren't.
But that's all I... I mean, what do you think?
Well, my personal thought on Goldstein, I've just sort of been mulling it off while we're talking.
I think that my personal thought on Goldstein is that what's so terrifying about Goldstein is that O'Brien wrote the book or helped write it or whatever, right?
That to me is one of the most terrifying statements in the book, which means that it is a complete description of the degree to which evil exists.
He understands good and understands evil and uses it to further the causes of evil.
Because the only hope that you can have for an evil man is for him to say, I'm bad and I should change.
But what's so chilling about 1984 is that he knows he's bad.
O'Brien knows that he's evil.
He knows exactly what goodness is.
He knows exactly how society is structured.
So there's no possible appeal to anything in him called a conscience because he already has a near perfect understanding of good and evil.
And so, like O'Brien was instructing Winston Smith on virtue and the nature of evil.
And Winston Smith thought that he was being instructed by somebody else against...
To have knowledge exposed about a system that did not itself know that it was evil, but thought it was doing good.
Because the tyrannical systems of the world, they all claim to be doing good work.
Helping the proletariat, attacking exploitation, reigning in the capitalists, right?
Or even in our own society, right?
Educating the kids and helping the old and the sick and the poor and blah blah blah.
They all claim virtue, right? And our constant hope as philosophers Is that we expose the immorality and people recoil from it.
But that's not what happens and this book is very clear about that.
What happens is we expose the morality and people avoid it.
And what he says is he's going even further and he says that morality is invented by evil people as a way to snare anybody who's interested in being good.
Right, right.
That the Book of Virtue is written by evil men to catch men who are interested in being good.
And they know perfectly what it's all about.
It's just a tool for power.
But you can't then say to O'Brien, but this society is evil.
Because he's going to say, well, I wrote the book calling it evil.
You're not telling me anything I don't know, so there's nothing to appeal to.
That's the Nietzsche. Yeah, and I mean, this is a theory that I've talked about for years, right?
Which is that morality is invented by evil people to control and guilt good people.
And that's why the cynics say morality is a sucker's game, because historically, until UPB, it was.
But UPB turns the tables, right?
Which is why it's unacceptable to so many people.
Well, because it's a methodology and not a list of...
Not a list of conclusions as every other morality really is.
It's just a list of conclusions.
Yeah, I mean, because UPB takes the child being bullied and turns it into a reversal, right?
So UPB says, okay, so if this, like if I was morally accountable when I was seven, then you were morally accountable for how you treated me when I was seven, but with far less excuse.
So UPB is the child taking the adult's moral prescription and universalizing them back to the adult.
And that makes adults very angry because that's not what it's for.
It's to dominate kids.
It's to dominate people you have power over.
It's not to subject yourself to those rules.
They're used to dominate other people.
But UPB says, well, you have to be subject to the rules too.
And that really pisses people off.
because that's like grabbing the gun from the muggers hand, right?
That's not the plan, right?
Anyway, I just wanted to – it's a theory I've sort of been mulling over over the past month or two, and so I'm glad when this came up – I wanted to run it past you guys.
I don't want to blow away everyone else's discussion of it.
I just thought it was an idea that was worth sharing and get your feedback on.
That's awesome. It's really, really got my brain working on many levels, thinking back.
Because I've only just read this book, so it's all quite fresh in my mind as well.
And I think it makes total sense.
In fact, there is a section in the end when Just talking about O'Brien and virtue and the evil people understanding it, he actually says that directly, that he says he's really impressed with how O'Brien understands when he says that the one thing he hasn't done is to betray Julia, that O'Brien understands what he means, and O'Brien doesn't say, oh, what do you mean?
You already told us everything in interrogation, but O'Brien understands that the sort of The emotional message that he's saying about his not betraying Julia because he still loves her and so forth.
So he's saying, you know, this guy understands everything about virtue and betrayal or not betrayal and so forth, and yet still is going through all of the actions that he is in doing the torture and everything.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Right, and it just struck me as well that, I mean, what breaks him is something from his childhood, right?
What breaks Winston Smith is the rats, and the rats come from his childhood.
Right. And in his childhood, his father is dead, right?
Because it's just his mom and his sister, right?
What do you think the meaning of that is, then?
Well, his father is dead.
His father is O'Brien, right?
Already dead. Right, right.
Absent, missing, dead, right?
Because it's a war and the father is missing.
And interestingly enough, Winston Smith is in a world of war where obviously the most brutal and unimaginable crimes are occurring.
His father has been murdered and there's just hellish, he's watching people getting blown up and so on, right?
But what is the only moral crime that Winston Smith can extract from his whole history?
Taking the chocolate from his sister, yeah.
Taking the chocolate from his sister, right?
That is his complete disorientation from a moral standpoint.
He's in a world of war, of evil, of murder, of genocide, of the slaughter of, we assume, millions, because he wrote this after World War II, so he knew that 40 million people had been murdered.
And the only moral crime that he can come up with It's a petty survival mini-theft of chocolate in desperate circumstances.
That's the only moral criticism that he can come up with.
Not of his elders, not of war, not of the murders that he's seeing all around him.
But that's what I mean when I say that it's nothing but petty inconsequential details.
And no child in the world, without having that pounded into his head, would ever go through war and think that the only problem with that whole environment was him taking a piece of chocolate.
Right? That's the moral view that comes from, I assume, the dead father.
It's also interesting how that could easily be a lifeboat scenario used in a classroom, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're starving.
Yeah. And of course, it's not really the rats that he's afraid of, right?
It's not the rats that he's afraid of.
It's the person who's putting the rats on him, right?
It's O'Brien. He thinks it's the rats, but it's really O'Brien in the same way that in his childhood it's his dad, right?
And this disconnect is so...
I don't believe, if I remember rightly, neither his...
I can't remember if they died in the war, but there's certainly no mention of his mother and his sister as an adult, right?
For Winston Smith.
All they are is in these little flashbacks, but they're no continuation to the present, right?
Which means that his family, in a sense, have been somatized.
They have grown into the world, right?
And he may have seen his mother try to resist his father's evil in the way that Julia does, or try to carve out a little niche for herself and get completely smashed, right?
In which case, that would be some of the furnace wherein the character of Julia might have been created.
Yeah, I think that people just, I mean, because it's so hard.
I mean, the amount of work you have to do to get a clear view of that kind of stuff is so prodigious that it's not to me too surprising that people haven't seen it.
And I think there's enough there to see.
And of course, I mean, how many thousands of articles and essays and books have been written about 1984?
But I don't think it's easy for people to see that for what it is.
And the same was true of American Psycho and other kinds of books.
Steph, just looking, with regard to his father, So Orwell was born in India, and his father worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service.
This is obviously during the British Empire time.
And it says, his mother grew up near Burma, blah, blah, blah.
Eric had two sisters.
When Eric was a year old, his mother took him to England.
They settled there.
He did not see his father again until 1912.
When he was how old? 1904 until 1912.
He was born 1902, right?
Let me see, when was he born?
19... I think he was 02.
03. So he was either a year or two years old, depends sort of when, right?
Yeah, he would have been like 11 or something when he saw his father again.
Right. Right.
In which case, to me, it would make more sense as to why his experience of his father was so unconscious, right?
I can tell you I've had a huge effect on Isabella, and she's not even two yet.
Right. And if his father is involved, I mean, that was probably some pretty brutal stuff all around, right?
Well, also, you know, civil servant in the opium department in the British Empire in India, I mean, that's obviously...
That's not your empathy job, really, is it?
No, no, that's definitely not your empathy job.
And I'm sorry, I do have to kind of boogie, because we've got to go and do some Christmas shopping, and I'm sorry to bungee in and bungee out, but I just definitely wanted to share the idea, and I'd like to sort of work on it a little bit more, or maybe we could get together and chat about it a bit more, because I think it would be worth writing up a bit.
Now that would be awesome.
Do you think that you could leave the...
I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's just running on my home machine, but I'm certainly happy to leave it running.
Cool. Thanks, everyone, guys.
I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Steph.
Cheers. See you. Bye-bye.
Hello. Hello again.
Hello. Hi, Greg.
Oh, dear. We lost Greg again.
Wow, that was a really interesting idea.
That's really got me thinking.
Yeah, the parallel between the Goldstein book and 1984 itself is pretty interesting.
Yeah, that was the point you were making, that 1984 is his own Goldstein book.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And if what Steph is saying about O'Brien being the dominant aspect of his own personality, I mean, it's a perfect parallel there, right?
And it would make sense why he could write a character like O'Brien if Steph's theory is correct.
Well, the interesting thing I was thinking is actually, because I mean, I have actually read Thomas de Catalonia, but so long ago, and it was a book I read in school, so I wasn't really taking it in.
But... I do remember very vividly reading his essay called Shooting an Elephant.
I don't know if you know that, but it's about his early years.
He went to Burma as part, again, part of the British Empire, right?
He went off as, I think, a policeman or like a local guard guy of some type.
And he wrote about an experience where he shot an elephant that was apparently running wild or something.
And it is written with some empathy towards the elephant.
But the point being, though, that before he was off killing...
People in war, in the Spanish Civil War.
He was working as a policeman in Burma, and I'm sure that there was some dodgy stuff involved in that, you know?
I mean, you don't go and enforce the British Empire without violence.
So, I'm sure that there was some sort of early experiences leading towards that part of his personality that did end up, you know, going and killing in Spain.
Well, this question of his empathy is an interesting one, too, because if you look, like Animal Farm, there are a number of empathetic characters in it.
However, the more human-like the pigs became, the less empathetic they became.
I don't know if you've ever read that book.
Right, yes. Again, as a child, but you mean as they take on power...
Yeah, the more human the pig's characteristics are, the less human they really are.
Right, right. Which I think is kind of interesting.
Sort of in the context of Orwell's own view of humanity, right?
And perhaps his own view of himself.
Did anybody else have any thoughts or experiences about their reading this book that they wanted to share?
One thing I'm not sure I quite understood in Steph's theory, though, was...
I mean, unless...
Because the portrayal of Winston Smith was not an unempathetic portrayal.
So how is he capable of writing that character as well as writing the O'Brien character?
Well, I think it was his conscience, wasn't it?
Yeah, but according to Steph's theory, he doesn't have one anymore, right?
So, how can he believably portray that in the book?
Well, I'm not sure what Steph's thought on that was, but what I took from the idea that he was putting forward there was not so much that he doesn't have a conscience anymore, but that he has an O'Brien...
Running the show, you know?
And there may well still be a conscience inside there, but it's getting crushed by this part of his personality or part of his person that's capable of just willfully denying any reality that doesn't fit his own way of doing things and destroying anything that...
That gets in the way of his own worldview.
That makes sense. So he's just got two guys inside his head.
One is the O'Brien guy and the other is the Winston Smith.
But I guess the point being, once you've given the O'Brien part of your character You know, the fuel of having actually gone and killed people, then there's no going back because you've basically got a dictatorship, you know? And that explains also why Winston loses at the end.
Right, right. And in a way, you know, once he wrote this, I mean, he was obviously very ill when he was writing it, but this was the last thing that he wrote, and then he died.
That was it. After that, he...
He died, like, I think months after writing it.
And in some senses, this was probably what he needed to get off his chest, you know?
Yeah, it's possible. Looking at 1984 as a Goldstein-like tome, that kind of makes sense.
And also, again, with a lot of the things that Winston Smith himself was saying at the beginning of the book in the journal that he was writing, it's very sort of confessional.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Of course, the other thing is, you know, just thinking of this family history stuff, who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past.
I mean, that's very much about his memory of his family too, isn't it?
Sure. And the way that he talks about – the way that Winston Smith talks about his own conscious knowledge of the history of the party and that, right?
Like it only exists in his consciousness and nowhere else and does that make it real or is it just a figment, right?
Yeah. If it's erased out of the newspapers, is it erased out of existence?
Vaporized, right? Right, right.
Well, I think we've all been kind of blown away by Steph's theory there.
Yeah, it's pretty chilling.
I don't have an argument against it.
No, I certainly don't either.
Cool. Well, I mean, has anyone got any last thoughts on this book?
All right. Well, in which case, maybe we'll wrap it up there.
And thanks so much for joining in.
I thought that was fascinating.
And the next one is unjobbing, which should be good.
I think that'll be a fun discussion.
Very different type of book about freedom from career, essentially.
So I hope you can all make it and look forward to hearing your thoughts.
There's a very short tome which is available on eBook as well and there's a link on the Facebook page.
Alright everyone, well thanks so much and look forward to next time and have a great Christmas!
Merry Christmas, Jake. You too.
Merry Christmas. Goodnight, all.
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