The Exigent Duality
The Name of the Beast - 05:51 CST, 6/01/18 (Sniper)
I recently finished George Orwell's "1984", and it's simultaneously amusing and disquieting how closely the modern-day Left have taken the work not as a warning, but as an instruction manual. Bold emphasis is mine:

"'You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else...'

'Sometimes, Winston [two and two are four]. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once...'

'If I wished, I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens."


Contemporary Leftists subscribe to the metaphysical concept of "solipsism". That's why Facebook has a "fill-in-the-blank" textbox for "sex". Or, if you prefer, here is another example-- the below quote is from the 3:34 mark, bold emphasis once again is mine:

"'Is it possible that she actually may be black? Some of us our born cis-gendered, some of us are born trans-gendered, but I wonder, can it be that one can be cis-black or trans-black? That there is actually a different category of blackness that is about the achievement of blackness, despite ones parentage. Is that possible?"


This is the same as Orwell's "soap bubble". Or, "if a tree falls in the forest and no one observes it, did it fall?" If Rachel Dolezal says she is black, and I believe her, then she's black, independent of genetics! Genetics are, after all, a part of the fake, external, objective world.

The problem here is that solopsism is easily debunked. The above reasoning presumes the existence of two parties: Rachel Dolezal, and the quoted television anchor. The simple acknowledgement of that fact assumes that there is some shared-- or "objective"-- place in which the two actors are set, and via which their two separate existences can be contrasted.

Of course, to Leftists they simultaneously do subscribe to an objective reality, when it suits them. For example, the "Earth" is "warming" due to the release of "hydrocarbons" into "the atmosphere", creating a "greenhouse effect" like what inflicted "Venus". Note all of the references to an knowable, observable reality.

So how can Leftists subscribe to both solipsism, and the theory of anthropogenic global warming at the same time? Orwell rescues us again, as he describes the notion of what he calls "doublethink" thusly. Bold emphasis is mine again:

"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies-- all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."


The key to instilling this system of thinking is to start people on it from a young age. This is why Leftists are generally so disparraging of home schooling, and are almost universally opposed to the notion of "school choice". Bold emphasis is mine:

"The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction."


The selective subscription to solipsism, combined with the moral self-righteousness enabled by "doublethink", enacted the apparatus which is the stage for Orwell's classic novel. Where he was so observant and prescriptive in those areas, I worry that large portions of the novel's final apparatus may likewise come to pass. This is why I named "Cultural Marxism", which is a sort of "name the best" descriptor of this post's discourse, as the third greatest threat in the world today.