Posted on 02/01/2015 7:39:57 PM PST by ReformationFan
But though everything on earth has declared war on the individual, “God calls each of us by name.”
“human resources” used to be people.
I read 1984 when I was 12. I got it’s intended message. I had the general feeling that “Social Studies” was flaky or fuzzy at best. When I read “Free to Choose” by Milton Friedman at age 16 things really crystallized for me. For the first time I found something about human activity that really clicked and seemed reasonable. I also learned that to master some subjects you had to do so in spite of the wishes of my overlords at the State Indoctrination Camps. (Otherwise known as California Public Schools).
Link didn’t work.
I have my own Newspeak-English dictionary:
- objective :
- reliably promoting the interests of Big Journalism. (usage: always applied to journalists who are members in good standing; never applied to anyone but a journalist)
- liberal :
- see "objective," except that the usage is reversed: (usage: never applied to any working journalist)
- progressive :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- moderate:
- see "liberal." (usage: same as for "liberal").
- centrist :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- conservative :
- antonym of “objective"
- right-wing :
- see, "conservative."
- society
- government (a meaning which Thomas Paine rebutted in Common Sense in 1776)
I read 1984 when I was 12. I got it’s intended message.
I read the book at right around the same age, shortly before turning 12. I'd heard a little about the book by that age, enough to have understood that this book is Important. It was in the school library (I'd just started attending a middle school--grades 6 to 8, around ages 11 to 14). I checked out a copy and read it in my spare time (and not for any school assignment or other obligation).
At the very least, I didn't misinterpret the book as the author's daughter did. I also didn't have too much difficulty reading the parts from "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism."
I wouldn't recommend the book to most 12-year-olds, but neither would I withhold it entirely.
Is the 12-year-old in question even literate and intelligent enough to understand the book, interested and intellectually curious enough to complete it without too much duress, or mature enough to be reading about what Winston and Julia are doing?
(Not long before my time, 6th-graders in my part of the district were in elementary schools, not in middle schools. I have a hard time imagining finding 1984 in my elementary school.)
Funny, that's exactly what I got out of it. And, I think Heinlein said the same thing in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," though in a different way: "...all fools who are so impractical as to think they can fight City Hall."
Thankfully, I think our modern world has empowered the individual more than Orwell or even Heinlein could have foreseen. But at the same time, government is now capable of oppressing any given individual in ways Orwell or Heinlein never imagined.
People don't really change; advancing technology allows us to do more good or more evil to one another.
Animal Farm is a more basic expression of the totalitarianism-as-helping-the-people theme.
1984 goes into the dynamics of crushing the human spirit and perverting the service vocations into servants of evil. A 12-year-old is smack in the middle of learning to trust the mechanisms of society to be what they claim to be, and not think her teacher, for example, is keeping a dossier on her and her parents to send them to a concentration camp.
One of the most fundamental tactics of the Left is raping childhood. They are obsessed with shattering children's spirits and crippling them while they are still native and vulnerable, by exposing them to truths beyond their maturity level so they have no context to guide them. That's the strategy behind Common Core, too - deny the stability of straightforward basics and replace them with advanced alternatives and theories without any supporting context or knowledge. This strategy creates existential despair that, because its done so early in life, destroys their ability to climb out of it by emotionally overwhelming them.
It's very carefully thought-out, cold-blooded, methodical evil.
I agree. Even without Common Core, I was exposed to plenty of that existentialistic garbage in my private prep school (Waiting for Godot, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Floating Opera) in early high school. My wife’s Canadian French immersion did not provide Balzac, but rather modern nihilistic post-Sarte existentialist Swill (not even Victor Hugo, which at least is classic French literature).
Common Core formalizes, nationalizes, and streamlines the process.
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