The year 1984 was three and a half decades in the future When
George Orwell published his famous dystopian novel. When 1984 arrived, I was a brand
new father and recently unemployed—an early victim of Ronald Regan’s
“trickle-down” economics. George Orwell and Ronald Regan both understood that
the critical feature of social engineering was language. The story is everything.
Orwell’s “Newspeak” was a way of reframing the storyline to
fit reality. If the story tells you that
peace is a valued “good” but you have a culture that requires perpetual war in
order to function, the simplest thing to do is redefine your terms: war is
really peace, and since peace is good, all is right with the world despite
perpetual war—simple transitive logic.
The idea of trickle-down economics works similarly by
redefining exploitation: corporate-capitalist culture requires the maintenance
of a sharp disparity in wealth in which the poor are given just enough to keep
them productive—and the more productive they are, the more money they make for
the wealthy, who are then motivated to continue to keep the poor productive by
sharing a microscopic portion of their wealth.
The denizens of 21st century global civilization are far too
intelligent to fall prey to Newspeak, of course. We know the difference between
black and white. We understand that war is war and peace is peace, and most of
us (with the notable exception of a few toothless tea-bagging morons from Alabama)
know when we are being jerked around by corporate-political double-speak.
We would never fall prey to the thinly veiled propaganda of corporate
marketing, for example. We are far too sophisticated to think that true
happiness is somehow tied to smartphone functionality or that the hive-mind banter
on twitter is about building community.
We realize that bowing to economic coercion is not really the
path to personal freedom. We understand that ubiquitous surveillance is not really
for our own safety and convenience.
We know that siphoning the bitumen dregs out of tar sand is not
really the key to energy independence and we would never think to call fracking
an environmentally-friendly alternative: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/08/shale-gas-fracking-good-for-environment
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