But there is a reality. The reality of "I."

The world itself may be an illusion, but my thoughts, my suspicions, my logic - they are my own, and no one can take them from me.

I hate that book. Seriously. The dominant interpretation now is the right-wing Libertarian one, which says that government programs are always evil and the people who propose them are actively trying to oppress the people, for no other reason than their own savage glee (contrast with, for example, Arendt's Banality of Evil). From this perspective, it was a warning against socio-nationalist policies in Western countries after the War.

In actual fact it, like Animal Farm, was written as an allegory of Soviet government and ideology. English saw the Russians as foreign strangers, so merely writing about Russians as such would have confused people, or resulted in criticism that he didn't know what he was talking about. It was meant to be instructive as to why the USSR would not demilitarize, would not democratize, and that everybody in Russia was okay with this. It predicted (accurately) the need for a perpetual Cold War to occupy industry, and the ideological need to resort to torture and cruel imprisonment to suppress dissent. If you switch the numbers around, "1984" becomes "1948" which is the year all this was taking place.

Actually, Medi, the truth is that the objective reality ties into "thou" and not "I". So long as there is only "I", there is only perception. But the possibility of another mind, a Kantian dich an sich or an existential Autrui, creates the possibility of alternate perception. But... I cannot perceive that perception. You can say, "I believe you float" but I can never say for certain that you are not lying. It is because George Winston clings to "I" as objectivity, because he insists that 2+2=4 by himself, that O'Brien is able to break him.

African-Americans have a uniquely strong understanding of this phenomenon.

yes, after awhile he beleives that 2+2=5

why do you say that? because of slavery???

Because they have to front to the white man.

There is an objective reality. We cannot perceive it, but we may conceive of it through our faculties of reason. A third person may see that you are not floating off the floor, and we hit a logical contradiction. One of them must be describing the objective truth, despite many possible perceived personal Kant-style truths.

In 1948, George Orwell predicted that by 1984, we'd all be obliged to have a device in our homes which screened programs telling us what to think.
As it turns out, by 1964, most people had volunteered....

If you think that the role of mass media in American culture now is any different than it was a century and a half ago, you are a very poor student of history.

Did I mention America? Was 1984 set in America? Was George Orwell American? Is it mass media which leads so many Americans to believe that the whole world centers around America?

menace, you mean there are competing partisan factions representing people's actual opinions - in fact, even formed by people themselves when they felt their perspective was not published in the media? sounds good to me.

hey the whole world doesn't center around america. america is just the model that the rest of the world is being transformed on the basis of ;)

how does one reread something again?

The same way someone rereads it the first time. =)

silly me. :-))

fwancophile, what I mean is that there never were. Reading de Tocqueville's Democracy in America persuaded me that pandering demagoguery is not a recent invention. What TV does now, radio and newspapers did before, and pamphlets and oratory even before that. In fact, the tradition of telling people what to think goes back to the late bronze age with the speeches of Cicero, Demosthenes, and and Alcibiades, and would go back even further had records been kept.

I speak of America only because it is the country whose political culture I know best. However, I understand that Cromwell winning the English civil war was partly due to his pamphleteers being better than the Royalists'.

well i hope you are praising this aspect of society :P indeterminacy of language aside, it seemed you were slighting my beloved country :P

menace3society, since you appear strong in history I assume it was sort of paradox to put together bronze age (before 1000 BC?) and Cicero (1st century BC) or Alcibiades (5th century BC).
I appreciated reading the posts above, anyway.

Science requires a skepticism. To question all things presented as fact.

If i read a scientific paper and just assume the things written there are true then I will find it more difficult to understand than if i question and work through to agree with the conclusion of the author(or if i disagree I can write a paper about it)

This is why science is often portrayed as uncertain in the media.
All scientists shhould strive to question the current dogma of their field, and when they fail they may proceed to ask new and interesting questions.

This is why science fails to have political aims, we can't say how things 'should' be. We can only predict outcomes, and test them.

However that science has advanced so far (from papar printing to television to the internet) is a sign that there is an objective reality. This is the most logical reason for people who question everything to come to an agreement.

they agree on the observed evidence. I cite scientific progress as evidence for an objective reality.

Very well said, orathaic.

Abab, I use the term "bronze age" in a historical sense very loosely, generally to refer to the time period before the Roman Empire, since that is, in a sense, the foundational moment of European Iron Age. The pre-Imperial Romans and the Classical and Hellenistic Greeks had a great deal more in common with their forbears from the Bronze Age proper than with the successor civilizations. Thus "Bronze Age" is easier to say than "Archaeo-Classico-Hellenistic Period", hence my usage.

The terms "Bronze Age" and "Iron Age" are properly archaeological terms that describe the types of tools used for everyday tasks, and consequently, the Bronze Age shifted to the Iron Age to different extents and by differing degrees in different places. In some parts of Europe iron almost replaced bronze altogether by AD 400 owing to the superabundance of iron, whereas in China bronze was still used for building tools and weapons into the previous century.


As for the characteristics of mass culture, I have no wish to pass judgement good or bad, but I simply cannot stand the ignorance of people who claim them to be a recent phenomenon.

How fortunate, then, that nobody did.