In English, that name of the center sounds to me like it might be a great thing. Can anyone familiar comment on the nature of this center, or on general public sentiments around the topic (such as any sense of need for vigilance, and against what)?
There's not too much public sentiment around the Center itself. The question of whether to publish the archives or not was a controversial one as the article points out.
For obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot on this topic, and it's... just flat-out complicated.
For any culture -- be it a business or a country -- there is both (a) a maximum rate of sustainable change; (b) a minimum rate of necessary change; and (c) the need to walk back from poor decisions.
Too much change, and the culture breaks down. Too little change, and the culture can't handle growth.
Walking back from poor decisions is super-hard. The harder it is to get a law passed, the more incentive there is to try and justify it for eternity, rather than being able to say things like "Our law proposed to decrease the murder rate faster than it was already. That didn't happen, so we're rolling things back to where they were and trying something different."
Not sure what the answers are here, though.
If all the participants feel like they took part of the educated decision regardless of outcome - they might be more tolerant towards walking it back. One could argue that would be part of the culture.
I've found a number of correspondences between Oceania and Plato's Republic, but am unsure if there was any direct correspondence intended, or if Orwell's tragic satire of society at his boarding school[1] only indirectly implies them, due to ancient greek influence on edwardian mores.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such,_Such_Were_the_Joys
Being a second rate boarding school, they never read greek or latin works whole (and thus presumably were spared the most cynical, least copybook, bits about power, e.g. δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν?) but were merely "taught to the test."
Figure 1 on pdf page 10 [1].
[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
> "To be sure, people at the ninetieth income percentile are neither very rich nor very elite; in 2012 dollars, Gilens’ “affluent” respondents received only about $146,000 in annual household income."