I was leafing through a collection of George Orwell’s essays when i stumbled upon this gem from “Looking back on the Spanish War”:

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that “the facts” existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.
[…]
Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.

The first part has remained quite depressingly true. But the second part? The second part i’m not so sure of. Reality has surpassed fiction — we’re living in a kind of 1984 world where people reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. Righteousness has become more important than truthfulness. Orthodoxy holds dominion over ethics, morals, civics, logic, aesthetics, epistemology, and even religion.

For billions of people, truth does absolutely exist, but it’s got nothing to do with the absolute truth that Orwell was talking about. The colour that results from the complete absorption of visible light and the lightest achromatic colour still exist, but the meaning of the words “black” and “white” has changed to construct an alternate reality. You can only be right or wrong in this world, and if being right makes you wrong, then a decree will make it right.

You can liberate people from their oppressors by bombing them while negotiating with said oppressors. You can fight climate change by changing very little in the climate-altering megastructures. You can protect the country you’ve built after the single largest genocide in history by committing the 23rd largest genocide in history. And you can definitely grow the economy by making the poor even poorer, as long as the rich get even richer.

But hey, everything is for the best in this best of possible worlds, right?

Links

Best of all possible worlds. By the way, i love this passage from Wikipedia’s entry on Leibniz’s argument about the best of all possible worlds: “Beings are possible together, in turn, when they do not enter into contradiction with each other. For instance, it is logically possible that a meteor might have fallen from the sky onto Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s head soon after he was born, killing him. But it is not logically possible that what happens in a given world (e.g. that Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia) also does not happen in the same world (i.e. that Jimmy Wales did not found Wikipedia). While both of these events are logically possible in themselves, they are not logically possible together, or compossible — so, they cannot form part of the same possible world.” Poor Jimmy.

“The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’” by David Epstein. Why concentrate when you can monotask?

“What have you tried?” by Ashur Cabrera. I came for the article, i stayed for the purplish background, the Peugeot 404 error page, and the obsessive photo side project. Wait, did i write this article?