Julia was a very fickle person. She was young and impulsive and she did not love Winston, she was just simply intrigued. Sex to them was an act of rebellion and just purely thrilling. They are still legally married because the party does not allow divorce. He throws the photo down the memory hole.
He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear that some accident — a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for instance — would betray him.
Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. A non-trivial example is when your electoral process is corrupted by a foreign power and your government talks about charging the people who tried to investigate this interference with treason.
The playful inventor of the Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz faced a challenge: write a page-turner that restrained itself to a few hundred real, mostly monosyllabic words.
By I-Huei Go. By The New Yorker. The Daily The best of The New Yorker , every day, in your in-box, plus occasional alerts when we publish major stories. Enter your e-mail address. Under Review. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive.
Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice —a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.
For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees.
Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappears—a lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense.
Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breeds—not out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.
This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. Veterans of fruitless wars: Two Marine Corps memoirists share their gratitude and dismay.
Cinema legend James Ivory, 93, talks about letting it all hang out — and more. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing.
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