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Stalin's Russia is no longer the touchstone it once was, in other words. I don't think that you can't apply the critique in 1984 to current events. There is just a generation gap.

GWB is a kind of touchstone for the modern generation, helpless while events swirl around him, grasping for a measure of control at all costs. And what costs they were: torture, surveillance, war, a Manichaean division of the world into heroes and villains.

Instead of intentions of powerful men, you have the psychoses of bureaucracies created by individuals for all the right reasons, full of unintended effects, ultimately achieving the opposite of their stated goals.

In 1984, there is a malevolence at the back of Big Brother. In 2013, there need not be anything but a decentralized system, harnessing the latest technologies, manipulated by the knowledgeable, but ultimately storyless, aimless, and inhuman.

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I view it as sort of a zombified religion. There's everything there. Institutionalized morality. The concepts of "sin" as an absolute evil even when at best only self-harm is involved. The idea of individual needs and freedoms being subservient to the needs and even desires of the collective. The idea that everyone should live and be bound by the same moral and ethical code.

And, of course, the ideas that true independence, heterodoxy, and privacy are threats to the established social order (they often are) and should be reined in as tight as possible.

A lot of these ideas are still rattling around in the socio-cultural baggage of the west, even after their mooring to organized religion has drifted away and become less relevant. Yet all of these things are problematic for the same reasons they've always been, but without the wires tying it directly to a bunch of stories about an omnipotent sky-being suddenly people have lost the ability to understand or gauge their level of threat to essential personal liberty.

>In 1984, there is a malevolence at the back of Big Brother.

1984 made it painfully clear that the actual existence of big brother was superfluous.

It wasn't his malevolence that made the system run as it did - it was the nature of the system itself.

I found the excerpts from the fictional The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism some of the most interesting parts of 1984 as although straight infodumps about, as you put it, the nature of the system.

I guess I meant the inner circle, who were complicit and aware of it, and dissociating the fact. That came from the myth of Lenin that a small, pure cadre could run the whole show. Oceania follows this design.

Today we need no such evil and aware of it crew to see the same systematic abuses, merely the banal evils of everyday.

oddly, Atlas Shrugged is along a similar vein but many here seem to dance around it, as if it were taboo. An overpowering bureaucracy is bad regardless if it manipulates an individual or a group of them.

There are similarities between 1984 and Atlas Shrugged, but some big differences too. I like them both but Ayn Rand's work seems more fantastical. Orwell's seems closer to reality in some fundamental way.

Her heros are more unreal, like demigods. Having those perfect heros makes the parody less poignant. I do think hers is a valuable parody as well. The cowardly, opportunistic looters are probably more realistic than Orwell's unbeatable bad guys. The heads-I-win-tails-you-lose dynamic she describes is very good. She messes up (IMO) is in dividing the people into innate types. Also in her description of where this will all eventually lead. When the hero's escape to build their own society the other heros it looks like an extension of the heros' (shared) personality. The looter society left behind (now without heros to support it) devolves and regresses, cannibalizing then living in the ruins of the once great civilization. That doesn't feel all that convincing in the book^.

Even though Rand describes the process and Orwell describes the result, his (mostly inferred) process seems more realistic. His dystopian society resembled actual history more than either of her societies, and feels more like a stable state. I think it all comes back to more realistic portrayal of humans. Orwell seemed to undertand how humans work. The characters are products of their circumstances within their society. It feels realistic. More similar to the people you know. They can be moulded. They can be broken. The John Galts in Atlas Shrugged are real. In Orwell's world they exist as stories, like they do in ours.

^There are lots of example in the world and all through history of similar looking scenes. EG, medieval societies in the ruines of Roman cities washing in rivers that once fed aqueducts. These have inspired variations of The Great Fall stories for thousands of years(Planet of The Apes!).

>GWB

Help with this acronym?

George W Bush

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