The Passion of Winston Smith
Why would the American left abandon self-evident truth for self-evident falsehood?
Tucker Carlson is devoting his entire show tonight on the “war on science”, focusing on how our scientific community is divorcing itself from facts and data and attaching itself to fads, social pressure, and ideology.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot – because you need to understand a problem factually before you can even begin to solve it – and when I think about how creative people are in constructing elaborate ruses to support what they want to believe (actually they aren’t “supporting” anything, they are pasting over their wrongness with a tissue paper thin layer of veneer), it occurs to me that these people must have some degree of intellect and creativity to create those ruses.
I do not want to be right about this because, if I am, it leads to a damning endpoint. People who build their camouflaged duck blinds to hide from reality are smart enough to know they are wrong and simply choose to deny what their own intellect is telling them. That proposition leads to one irrevocable conclusion, those people are evil.
That is a hard thing to say about our fellow Americans. At least it is for a thinking person who wants to believe the best about people but even the reaction to people like me and others who refuse to start with ideology and work backwards to define reality confirms it. This willingness to justify anything and everything, even the most irrational, more or less proves the evil thesis because those folks have absolutely no compunction about calling us evil.
There is no denying the ideology they are protecting is collectivist in nature. It runs the gamut from socialism to communism, but that seems a distinction without a difference.
I have always classified science by dividing the population of science into two categories: reactive sciences seek to explain events and proactive science, taking what is learned from the reactive sciences and building something new. An oversimplification to be sure, but for the general purposes of discussion, these seem adequate.
It is not just “science” under fire, it is the very basis for science, the same basis upon which our republic was founded – the truth of natural law. Everything about science is an attempt to theorize about and explain the characteristics of nature.
I recall what F.A. Hayek wrote about the real victim of collective systems:
“A further point should be made here: Collectivism means the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information.
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.”
Thinking people can see Hayek’s prescription at work in the defenses of the COVID-19 failures and those “scientists” and “doctors” who promulgated and promoted the lies of the past year and a half. When you carefully consider why careers, incomes and reputations were destroyed by the media, by academicians, by Democrat officials and operatives, and their allies in the various tribes of the Woke, Hayek’s truth is unquestionably confirmed.
Why would people do this? Why would they abandon self-evident truth for self-evident falsehood? For what purpose would they promote untruth over truth, claiming that 2+2=5 and torturing anyone who refused to BELIEVE?
It seems clear, for whatever the reason or motivation, they were defending something they wanted and desired to be true and did so at the cost of the lives (and livelihoods) of others.
It was not good enough to simply mouth the words, you must BELIEVE that 2+2=5.
In Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien tortures Winston to convince him to believe that truth is subjective: it is whatever the Party tells him it is. At first Winston says what O’Brien wants him to say, but O’Brien tells him saying the words are not enough, the torture will continue until Winston BELIEVES it.
In the beginning, it is sheer brutal physical torture, incessant blows all over, that reduces Winston to a cowering animal that will confess to anything and everything, implicating everybody if only the pain would stop.
But in the end, it was not that physical torture that made Winston believe in the ideology. It was the breaking of his spirit, values and principles that drove him to the point of acceptance. He was made to betray and sacrifice Julia, whom he loved, for his own sake. By breaking Winston’s core values, no refuge remained for him other than the acceptance of the party's ideology in place of his own.
If you have deduced, as I have, that the left is not stupid and it is not about them believing in unreality, it is about them holding out long enough to break our spirit, crush our values and smash our principles in the same manner O’Brien broke Winston.
And in that, we find both the reason and the motivation - and the concomitant evil - of the contemporary American left.
Over the past 18 months or so, Americans have lived through “1984”, “Animal Farm”, “The Road to Serfdom” and “Atlas Shrugged”.
It is not like we were not warned.