The main character of George Orwell’s famous book, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Plume Printing, New York: 2003) begins with Winston purchasing a book. “The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp.” (pg. 6-7) The three famous sayings throughout the book of the “Party” were:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength (pg. 4)
Beginning his diary entry, we read of Winston’s thoughts about writing: “How could you communicate with the future?” (pg. 7) What are we communicating to the future generation - is there such a thing as truth? Winston begins writing his first truthful thought on to paper: “Down with Big Brother”. As he is writing, he realizes in that moment of free thought that he had committed a “Thoughtcrime”. As this moment unfolds, Winston recalls the consequence of people who resisted the “Thought Police” in that they “simply 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.” (pg 18)
I was recently struck by the same question by Pontius Pilate to Jesus during the trumped up trial some 2,000 years ago. “What is Truth?”
In the current stampede to tolerance, I ask myself as a follow up to Pilate’s question: What is Universal/Liberal Tolerance?
I’m told that the movement to a universal tolerance in America is to legislate that I can do and believe anything I want privately as long as publicly I placate all others. Has our current society replaced truth with a liberal tolerance of no one point is correct? Has George Orwell’s 1984 book become a reality? Remember the opening lines of: “This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death”? Is the objective dead and the relative the new god?
Next blog: expounding on tolerance and truth
C'ya
Eagle Driver
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