Fire and Knowledge

Thoughts

It is strange to ponder the different perspectives you obtain about a book once you read others. The first time I read Animal Farm and 1984 was in high school, when I didn’t have a clue about much other than sleeping (and even that was arguable). I did enjoy them, but I did not understand the allegory and imagery the way it should have been.

Something I saw that I would have never seen before reading Hegel or Marx (not that I like either of them) is the blatant alienation of labor in Animal Farm. I would have most likely seen the denouncement of totalitarianism without reading many other books, but alienation of labor I would not have.

Orwell says in Animal Farm: “The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master.” (emphasis mine)

Compare this with Karl Marx:
“The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes a cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces. . . ”(pg.59)

“The worker, therefore feels at ease only outside work, and during work he is outside himself. He is at home when he is not working and when he is working he is not at home. His work, therefore, is not voluntary, but coerced, forced labor. It is not the satisfaction of a need but only a means to satisfy other needs . . . . the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to another. It is the loss of his own self.” (pg. 62)

[Taken from Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” in Selected Writings, Edited by Lawerence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994).]

They are speaking of the same concept. The animals were no longer coerced of their labor–it was free! They were no longer losing their selves… or so they thought. Orwell appears to be critiquing this line of thought, or at least the final conclusion of it. The animals end up being coerced once again and their freedom returns to slavery of a worse kind.

The concept is hinted at in 1984 as well, for the people of Oceania were not conquered and made to work–they stared out willingly, most likely. Promises were made of their better life to come (and were continually told they were in that better life through the telescreens daily) if they would only bond together under the banner of camaraderie and work for themselves and one another uncompelled!

“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” (Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto,” pg. 185)

Memorable Quotes

“The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.” (pg. 98)

“A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” (pg. 101)

“To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.” (pg. 103)

“Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed–would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper–the essential crime that contained all others. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night–the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simple disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.” (pg. 105)

“He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.” (pg. 108)

“Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” (pg. 112)

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two options which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself–that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink. (pg. 120)

“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.” (pg. 124)

“We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone.” (pg. 134)

“. . . there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” (pg. 136)