Posted on 01/19/2021 6:44:18 AM PST by CharlesOConnell
I’m a public school English teacher (yes, yes, forgive me...I know, I’m to blame, I get it) and I can attest to the fact that no one reads anymore. A favorite bit of humor I’ve developed over the years is to tell my friends, “I’m the only one in the class that’s done the reading.”
How the devil must exult over this. He used to have to challenge those on the cusp of salvation with, “Surely God has not said...” (see Genesis ch. 3, or ask Eve). Today, his challenge question might be, “Why read that, wait for the movie to come out.”
“In order for your post to be truly meaningful to me, I’d ask you rewrite it in much greater detail. Explain to me things you think I should already know.”
Okay, sexual reproductive tech in Brave New World hasn’t worked out as Huxley saw it, but it’s actually worse, now after 60 years of American Abortion (1963, the Thalidomide Romper Room School Lady), we’re getting our comeuppance for treating human souls as just “ghosts in the machine”, using human beings for medical, commercial and cosmetic consumer marketing research, thinking that we’re Masters of the Universe, that we made ourselves, in that Wuhan “Han Immune” Weaponized Virus is mutating against the common pattern of five phases of lethal influenzas, the new mutations will get more, not less lethal as the infection rates slowly continue to climb: it will look like the Black Death of 1350 with vast swaths of the earth depopulated, including the Han Chinese areas that were supposed to be largely immune. There are plenty of sci-fi stories that treat that.
The interaction of Brave New World and 1984 is that people of the Gamma and Beta classes, who are supposed to have some education, instead merely have social conditioning, they went through the crushing of the imagination that was the explicit goal of Prussian education, ever since Joahnn Fichte wrote Addresses to the German Nation in 1808 to the Prussian King because Napoleon had said “every corporal with a Field Marshall’s baton in his rucksack”, meaning, French soldiers were supposed to seize the initiative and disobey orders. That’s why the Prussians origianlly lost in the 1806 Battle of Jena, but they wised up, they got a whole nation of obedient soldiers who wouldn’t question orders (they also got Krupp breech loading canons that could whip the French front loaders, Krupp and Thyssen & Farben ran WW2 as a profit making operation, ever ride a Thyssen-Krupp elevator or take Bayer aspirin?).
The socialization of American education over the past 150 years was not a kind of historical accident, it was planned from the outset, John Taylor Gatto knew it. It’s a wide field; the information’s all out there. If you need it all explained to you, you aren’t really interested.
1984 had an official villain, focusing the people’s powerlessness and rage, their being able to achieve mass catharsis in The One Minute Hate.
In 1984 his name was Goldberg.
In 2021 his name is Trump.
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