Hillary: Orwell's message in 1984 is 'we need to trust government and the media'

By Robert Laurie —— Bio and Archives September 13, 2017

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"Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism. This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered. The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust towards exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves."

Orwell does not want us to rely on "our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence," only on the last element of Clinton's quote: "ourselves". While Orwell favored the pursuit of knowledge, he also knew humanity's innate susceptibility to political malfeasance. Orwell wrote 1984 in the years just following the Nazi eugenics-based human supremacism, and at the epoch of Stalin's government-based human supremacism. Crucially, he recognized that both foul ideologies had originally won favor by claiming to serve human interests. "The people we need," as Clinton puts it, are also the people who instigated Nazi and Soviet suffering. Orwell's observations led him to become skeptical of all power and "knowledge", however beneficent it might first appear. Via the language of Oceania, "newspeak", Orwell warns us that that knowledge must always be open to re-examination. This is worth considering when Clinton references climate change activists as "experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence." ...Clinton doesn't get this. Instead, she believes that the solution to populism is obedience to a 1984-style "inner party" class of those who know better.