1984: 75th Anniversary

" ' How is the dictionary getting on?' Said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.'Slowly,' said Syme. "I'm on the abjectives. It's fascinating.'He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak ...'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. ' We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a singe word that will become obsolete before the year 2050 ...'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words' ...'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.' "- George Orwell, '1984'"Logic, therefore, as the science thought, or the science of the process of pure reason, should be capable of being constructed a priori."-Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy("a priori" is defined as deduced from self-evident premises)By revealing the concept of "Newspeak" in his great dystopian novel '1984', George Orwell, while dying of tuberculosis, cryptically attempted to expose to the world one of the great crimes of government against humanity; the systematic suppression/subversion of essential tools of reasoning; both in language and science. Central to this crime is the deliberate suppression of the science of formal logic. (Formal logic, invented by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., is the science of evaluating arguments in order to determine if they are correctly reasoned. ) I will fully explain.You see, the masses haven't been taught formal logic by State controlled public schools or media for many generations. (In his book ' The Underground History of American Education' John Taylor Gatto informs his readers that this deliberate dumbing down of the population through State controlled schools was adopted nationwide just after the completion of the U.S. Civil War.) Don't believe me? Just go out and ask some average U.S. adults how to determine if a deductive argument is both valid and sound; or the difference between a formal and an informal logical fallacy. (Both are very basic and essential knowledge of formal logic.) You'll find that not one in twenty have any idea. This is not an accident.The terrible and murderous lies of our governments rely upon the masses being misinformed, ignorant, and intellectually crippled. And our State controlled schools and media have done this job very well, I'm sorry to say."Ignorance is strength."-George Orwell, 1984The list of criminal conspiracies, committed by the oligarchs who control our governments, are difficult for most people to psychologically accept. They include the subversion of free systems of government, fraud, illegal war, and genocide on an almost unimaginable scale. Here are a few for which the available evidence is simply overwhelming:(1) Arab terrorists did not carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001.(2) Man never walked on the moon.(3) HIV does not, and never did cause AIDS, and our governments have always been aware of this fact.(4) JFK was not murdered by a lone assassin.(5) The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which justified U.S. entry into the Vietnam War was a hoax.(6) The homicidal cyanide gas chambers of the holocaust are a fraud, devised by the Allies to dehumanize the German enemy, and generate support for the people and state of Israel. The Germans never murdered anyone with cyanide gas.There are many, many more bloody lies, as you will see, if only you will accept George Orwell' s invitation to finally become conscious."If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within... But the proles, if only somehow they could become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet--!"-George Orwell, 1984-------------------------------------------------------Here are few quote/definitions regarding formal logic that I hope you will find useful."Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong."-Thomas Jefferson"We ought in fairness to fight our case with no help beyond the bare facts: nothing, therefore, should matter except the proof of those facts."-Aristotle, Rhetoric"The truth or falsity of a statement depends on facts, not on any power on the part of the statement itself of admitting contrary qualities".-Aristotle, Categories"We suppose ourselves to posses unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows, when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and further, that the fact could not be other than it is"-Aristotle, Posterior Analytics"The province of Logic must be restricted to that portion of our knowledge which consists of inferences from truths previously known; whether those antecedent data be general propositions, or particular observations and perceptions. Logic is not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence. In so far as belief professes to be founded on proof, the office of Logic is to supply a test for ascertaining whether or not the belief is well grounded."-John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843)"Fallacious reasoning is just the opposite of what can be called cogent reasoning. We reason cogently when we reason (1) validly; (2) from premises well supported by evidence; and (3) using all relevant evidence we know of. The purpose of avoiding fallacious reasoning is, of course, to increase our chances of reasoning cogently."-Howard Kahane, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric, 1976, second edition"The fallacy of suppressed evidence is committed when an arguer ignores evidence that would tend to undermine the premises of an otherwise good argument, causing it to be unsound or uncogent. Suppressed evidence is a fallacy of presumption and is closely related to begging the question. As such, it's occurrence does not affect the relationship between premises and conclusion but rather the alleged truth of premises. The fallacy consists in passing off what are at best half-truths as if they were whole truths, thus making what is actually a defective argument appear to be good. The fallacy is especially common among arguers who have a vested interest in the situation ttho which the argument pertains."-Patrick Hurley, A Concise Introduction to Logic (1985)"Aristotle devides all conclusions into logical and dialectical, in the manner described, and then into eristical. (3) Eristic is the method by which the form of the conclusion is correct, but the premises, the material from which it is drawn, are not true, but only appear to be true. Finally (4) sophistic is the method in which the form of the conclusion is false, although it seems correct. These three last properly belong to the art of Controversial Dialectic, as they have no objective truth in view, but only the appearance of it, and pay no regard to truth itself; that is to say, they aim at victory."-Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy"The hypothesis most likely to prove right must do the following: 1. Include all known facts; 2. Not over-emphasize any part of the evidence at the expense of the rest; 3. Observe the laws of probability as established by previous investigation; 4. Avoid logical contradictions; 5. Stay as simple as possible without ignoring any part of the evidence. Hypotheses which violate any one of these requirements are Forced Hypotheses."-James Johnson, Logic and Rhetoric (1968)"This is the argumentum ad verecundiam. It consists in making an appeal to authority rather than reason, and in using such an authority as may suit the degree of knowledge possessed by your opponent.Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment, says Seneca; and it is therefore an easy matter if you have an authority on your side which your opponent respects. The more limited his capacity and knowledge, the greater is the number of authorities who weigh with him. But if his capacity and knowledge are of a high order, there are very few; indeed, hardly any at all. He may, perhaps, admit the authority of professional men versed in science or an art or a handicraft of which he knows little or nothing; but even so he will regard it with suspicion. Contrarily, ordinary folk have a deep respect for professional men of every kind. They are unaware that a man who makes a profession of a thing loves it not for the thing itself, but for the money he makes by it; or that it is rare for a man who teaches to know his subject thoroughly; for if he studies it as he ought, he has in most cases no time left in which to teach it...There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted. Example effects their thought just as it affects their action. They are like sheep following the bell-wether just as he leads them. They will sooner die than think. It is very curious that the universality of an opinion should have so much weight with people, as their own experience might tell them that it's acceptance is an entirely thoughtless and merely imitative process. But it tells them nothing of the kind, because they possess no self-knowledge whatever...When we come to look into the matter, so-called universal opinion is the opinion of two or three persons; and we should be persuaded of this if we could see the way in which it really arises.We should find that it is two or three persons who, in the first instance, accepted it, or advanced and maintained it; and of whom people were so good as to believe that they had thoroughly tested it. Then a few other persons, persuaded beforehand that the first were men of the requisite capacity, also accepted the opinion. These, again, were trusted by many others, whose laziness suggested to them that it was better to believe at once, than to go through the troublesome task of testing the matter for themselves. Thus the number of these lazy and credulous adherents grew from day to day; for the opinion had no sooner obtained a fair measure of support than its further supporters attributed this to the fact that the opinion could only have obtained it by the cogency of its arguments. The remainder were then compelled to grant what was universally granted, so as not to pass for unruly persons who resisted opinions which everyone accepted, or pert fellows who thought themselves cleverer than any one else.When opinion reaches this stage, adhesion becomes a duty; and henceforward the few who are capable of forming a judgment hold their peace. Those who venture to speak are such as are entirely incapable of forming any opinion or any judgment of their own, being merely the echo of others' opinions; and, nevertheless, they defend them with all the greater zeal and intolerance. For what they hate in people who think differently is not so much the different opinions which they profess, as the presumption of wanting to form their own judgment; a presumption of which they themselves are never guilty, as they are very well aware. In short, there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?Since this is what happens, where is the value of the opinion even of a hundred millions? It is no more established than an historical fact reported by a hundred chroniclers who can be proved to have plagiarised it from one another; the opinion in the end being traceable to a single individual."-Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy (1831)

I love George Orwell books and 1984 is no exception. Shipping, as always was quick and had no issues. Love the price almost as much as I love the story. Great read for times like these!

Came quickly but paper quality poor

initially, I thought the book would be a tough read. However, I now realize it was laying crucial groundwork for the ideas that followed. Many chapters mirrored current events in the US, highlighting history's cyclical nature and how similar paths often lead to the same outcomes. The book was intense and stirred up a lot of emotions and reflections.

Comparisons between Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR and Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD are so common in literary circles that they have become somewhat of a joke. Especially when you consider that neither of these books was the first in the genre; while Huxley predated Orwell by seventeen years, somehow Zamyatin's WE, written a decade before BNW, often gets left out of the discussion (in fact it has been some time since I read WE, and I read two different translations, so I would need to tackle it again to review it properly). And there are other novels in this genre that are worthy of consideration, such as Levin's THIS PERFECT DAY and Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451. But at the end of the day, when it comes to the ultimate dystopia, it is Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR that emerges as the absolute expression of the genre in all its nightmarish vividness.London, 1984 (Or is it? Nothing is certain in this book). We are introduced to Winston Smith, a clerical worker for the ruling body, an entity known only as "the Party" and represented by posters of a Stalin-like figure known only as "Big Brother" and the slogan "Big Brother Is Watching You." Which is literally true: everyone's apartment is equipped with a two-way television ("telescreen") that sees and hears absolutely everything, from eating to sleep to sex, and which can be turned down but not off.Winston's job sums up the Party pretty well: it is his task to process changes to newspapers, history books, magazines, any form of literature so that the present will match up with the past. In short, it is his function to completely obliterate history on a daily basis. The world is divided into three primary "provinces:" Oceania (in which London is located and which oddly appears to include the United States), Eurasia, and Eastasia. There is always a war going on between Oceania and one of the other two, but it is subject to change on a dime, and when it does, Winston and his team must scramble to change all records to make them state that Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with whichever one happens to be the enemy at the moment.It is instructive that Winston performs his duties at a place called the Ministry of Truth, which is in fact dedicated to falsification of everything from history books to television shows. There are two other Ministries: The Ministry of Peace, which is concerned with war, and the Ministry of Love, which is concerned with horrors that I will not reveal here.Speaking of love, this is where comparisons with Huxley actually have some merit. Both novels have removed all meaning from the sex act. But Huxley does it by making promiscuity the order of the day and making any feelings deeper than the basic tactile sexual sensations deviant, unnatural, and anti-social. Orwell does it by making sex a crime except for the necessity of procreation and in his world pleasure for the woman is the unnatural thing. Winston has a wife (who left him some time earlier), but the descriptions of their couplings are bone-chilling: a dedicated Party member, his wife hated sex but insisted that they do it once a week to make a baby, calling it (God help us all) "Our duty to the Party." Winston's relief at her departure is almost palpable even though we only hear about it as a past event.Slogans abound in Orwell's world. The three primary ones are WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, all of which eerily recall the words that greeted the prisoners arriving at Auschwitz: ARBECHT MACHT FREI (literally "Work Makes One Free" but more accurately "Freedom Through Work").Orwell does not limit his inspirations to Nazi Germany, though: I have already mentioned the resemblance between the mythical "Big Brother" and Josef Stalin; his characters address each other as "comrade" and there is mention made on more than one occasion of work camps that sound more like Siberia than WWII Germany.Orwell was an unremitting pessimist. The plot of his novel is so simple it is almost predictable: Winston is an unhappy member of the Party, and unhappy people sooner or later do something rebellious. Winston rebels, with a young woman named Julia, and there follows a brief period where things appear to be hopeful, but eventually the hammer falls, and the ending is almost preordained.Which brings us to the one other valid comparison to Huxley; in BNW, London is a city so sterile you could probably eat off the floors. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, on the other hand, is so grimy that you almost want to wash your hands after reading it. The only other novel I can think of that presents the reader with such an unrelentingly gritty vision of the future is Harry Harrison's MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM!, the inspiration for the film SOYLENT GREEN.There are a lot of futuristic dystopias out there, and they tend to share various features: the genre is a narrow one, rather like horror and science fiction, and some crossover is inevitable. But NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR stands out, somehow, above all the others; it has a grim resonance that is not only rather depressing but one gets the feeling that his vision is not in the least bit impossible and that we would do well to take care that we do not end up in Oceania.