1984 in 2017?

Reading 1984 in 2017, really?  I can’t think of a more trite idea.

Granted, doublespeak and groupthink are pretty big these days.  Doublespeak has been big in politics at least as long as I have been eligible to vote.  It is common in business and management.  It is everywhere really, and we have to learn to see past it and get on with our lives in an intelligent way.  To think that anything unique with doublespeak is going on right now is to show an ignorance to what has been going on for a long time already. 

Groupthink has a strong history in the US in recent decades too: the run-up to the Iraq War; the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis; the US involvement in the Arab Spring.  Neo-liberal or Neo-conservative, it doesn’t matter; these camps are filled with groupthink that doesn’t want to recognize the real and sometimes drastic differences in ideals, values, cultures and people around the world.  Politicians are blinded by ideology and business as usual from the everyday reality, concerns and experience of everyday people, and then they are surprised when backlash occurs.  Their solutions seem to be to double down on their ideology and current path.  I think that qualifies as groupthink. 

Reading 1984 now is like waking up the day after the election and watching the debates as if they are the most important thing on YouTube. 

What do I think is worth reading now?  I think Camus’ The Plague is a very timely book.  Most people take it as a work talking about the struggle against Fascism, but Camus was far more deep and philosophical than that.  The plague that people struggle against in the book is not a human nor a government.  It is something bigger than that: a force of ‘nature,’ a part of reality that is bigger than humanity. 

What we are struggling against right now is not other humans.  We are struggling against ideas and realities (different interpretations of the world we live in) that are bigger than any person or group of people.  When we blame those things on people or groups (and demonize or make heroes of them), we are taking the stupid way out.  Stupid because it really doesn't get us out; it just draws us deeper in.  We divide ourselves, alienate ourselves from the experience and concerns of others, and all of this leads us to be more deeply entrenched and blinded by the assumptions of our interpretation of the world.  This is a recipe for disaster for a democracy, and I think it is the situation in many failed states. 

Big Brother is not our enemy.  Our enemy is a world that we are ignoring more and more as we retreat further and further into ideology and the virtual.  We make this worse by using others as a scapegoat, blaming them instead of seeing that we are all at fault. 

So please, spare me anymore talk of 1984. It is a great book, and if you haven't read it, you should.  But stop the hysteria because it is no more timely now than it was ten years ago.  (I also think Brave New World is a better dystonia novel, philosophy wise. Yet, it is no more timely now than it was 10 years ago.)