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Comment by rakejake | Hacker News Reader

Burmese Days is my favorite Orwell. It captures the state of the colonies under British rule extremely well - the British new-arrivals who are derisive and at best ignorant of the local customs, the British who've grown up in the colony and are more sympathetic but stuck in a world where they'll never truly belong, the extremely corrupt rich locals, the poor mob who are easily misled, the endemic corruption in everything...

This novel could have been set in post-independence India and a lot of the themes would have rung true.

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> novel could have been set in post-independence India and a lot of the themes

The colonialists did, but the baggage never left. Turns out oppression/corruption/subjugation/feudalism/communalism/obscurantism/cronyism is politically and/or economically profitable. The current ruling class learnt well from their predecessors.

I've read 1984 as a poorly-drawn frame story meant to convey* Orwell's sincere argument, in the form of Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which baldly states that even without colonialism in the picture, you ("the Middle") probably will still have to live with the extremely corrupt rich locals ("the High") and the poor mob who are easily misled ("the Low"), etc. etc.

* or at best to provide a motive filling in the implicit blank left by TaPoOC's truncation: "deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists..."

ПЖ would claim later that the oppression and continuous warfare are merely unfortunate side effects! (Joke?)

The motive consists simply of helping society be more effective!!*

(Riffing on 2-ish Nussbaum-Sen derived questions:

1. How to hand out capabilities to the effective/viral but not necessarily wise.[0]

2. How to immediately extract the foremost interesting issue with any framework... that some undergrad can fix before you even sit down at your studydesk in your chalet tonight.

*at learning/earning as a team. "too much information" is consensually the thing to insure against in the Overton; other things detractors ("prigs"/殺氣者) warn you about are to be reflexively dismissed as acts/will of god(s)

**Otoh info asymmetry foments corruption. "moral hazard" is translatable to irl outcomes.

***not touching the CFG analysis directly atm, indeed, because those tractability monsters pull you under when you forget to focus on interestingness

https://aarushgupta.com/2024/03/30/procrastination

[0] S-N's "thresholds" I read as a placeholder for a thermodynamically grounded app of "festina lente". Colloquially: When your heat baths are way too mismatched, your Carnot efficiency...

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