Re: The average Joe doesn't have time, he's too busy cleaning out rain gutters, taking kids to school, earning a living, to notice his earning power and personal rights are being destroyed by a cabal in Washington.
When they find out the truth, the public will be as pissed at the Bush cabal as the Italians were when they found out the extent that Mousellini had been lying to them.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Technocracy and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Technocracy member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.
A Technocracy member lives from birth to death under the eye of the StraighThought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be suspected without warning and without knowing that he is being suspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously pondered.
Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean blacklisting are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, layoffs, harassments, smear tactics, and mobbing are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps deviate at some time in the future.
A Technocracy member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Laissezfaire. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Doubletalk a goodthinker), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Doubletalk words crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever.
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Excerpted from:
Subject 33609 |
