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Be Wary Of The Orwellian 'Enlightened Class'

• https://www.technocracy.news

It's not what you believe. It's how you believe it!

George Orwell's novel 1984 has been selling in large numbers to people scared of a lurch toward authoritarianism in the USA. I recently noted that both that book and Animal Farm were written not as a warning against a particular political ideology but against the implementation of any ideology, however progressive, by people who think themselves too smart to have to test their politics against the emotions, sentiments, and experiences of those they would affect.

In his essay, My Country Right or Left, Orwell referred to such people as "so 'enlightened' that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions."

He understood that the morality of a political ideology in practice cannot be determined from its theoretical exposition – but only from the actual experiences of those who would be affected by its real-world application.

To make the point to the people he felt most needed to hear it, Orwell, a self-identified socialist, called out the arrogance of his friends on the Left who experienced themselves as so "enlightened," to use his word, that they did not need to consider the sentiments – let alone ideas – of those who were to them clearly politically ignorant.

Orwell had a name for this kind of self-righteous certainty – and it wasn't fascism, capitalism, or communism.  It was "orthodoxy," which he explains in 1984, "means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." It is a state exhibited by people who already know they have the right answers – at least in the areas that matter.


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