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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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askchapo
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Used to be obsessed with 1984. Let it define my personality. Thought i was the big brain for having read it.
Did I ever tell you about how when I was 8 I thought Animal Farm was a great metaphor for capitalism?
Like, I knew it was about the Soviet Union because it was a subtle as a horse fart, but kid me was like "Wow, so much of this can also be applied to our current lives under capitalism."
What a fucking nerd I was.
I was the same for both animal farm and 1984 i just applied it to the Tory government and work life instead. The anti communism was lost on me completely cos well I didn't exist in it or near it so made more sense to apply it to a capitalist government instead.
i thought animal farm was horseshit but it was fun to read
dirt_owl more like smart_owl
It's not even that 1984 was a terrible book. It is rather poorly written by an author who was kinda a shit writer, but the dude did capture a certain important and lasting zeitgeist. He did identify an undercurrent of fear, a very valid fear, that permeated culture. The problem was that he misidentified the direction where the fear was coming from, the systems it was actually bubbling up from were the capitalist systems. But commies were both easy and profitable to make the enemies. The source was the society he actually knew better and mostly lived in, but he had witnessed other systems and wanted to project all the negativity onto the socialist systems that, again, benefited him to badmouth. His book could have been still a poorly written but interestingly prescient warning of capitalism, what it was what it was becoming (and what it is), and some of the extremes trends towards... That's what could have been if he had correctly attributed the dystopian elements as being rooted in capitalism instead of communism. Also, even thought he may not have been a great writer in general, he was good with using phrases that fit well in the milieu at the time and continue to. Like "thought police" and "Doublethink" and "Newspeak" and "memory hole." "Big Brother is watching." "We've always been at war with East Oceania." Bunch of others. There is a reason that shit stuck around, reason that goes beyond just the fact that the capitalists blew it up and made it popular, this otherwise mediocre book they held up for its usefulness in propaganda as some great bulwark against the terrors of communism. Really a tragedy that Orwell was a fucking rat-narc liberal coward.
I did that too.
Could be worse, the only person I've known that got really into that book ended up as a literal nazi within a couple of years
Nice pfp
: this is where I'd put a hollow knight emote if I could find one :