Are we in for 'INGSOC'?

[muman613]

Shalom,

I am one who really enjoys the category of distopian novels. When I was young we had to read both 1984 and Brave New Worlds. I was just thinking about the term 'INGSOC' and did a wikipedia search. It is scary to read that what Obama has planned for us is outlined in the ideals of INGSOC.

Basically INGSOC is slang for "English Socialism". It is a form of political control of the people through various mind control and torture regimes. Anyone who has read 1984 also knows of the central part played by Big Brother. Aside from the great advances in technology which we have today the parallels of INGSOC to the plan which Obama portrays is frightening.

Let me define INGSOC according to what wikipedia writes:

In the novel, Emmanuel Goldstein's book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, describes the actual ideology of the Party as "oligarchical collectivism", stating that Ingsoc "rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it does so in the name of Socialism", (a practice Orwell dealt with in Animal Farm).

The Party is personified by Big Brother, an omnipresent face constantly depicted on posters and the telescreen; like the Party itself, Big Brother is constantly watching. Ingsoc demands complete submission and tortures to achieve it, (see Room 101). Ingsoc has mastered a complex system of psychological tools and methods not only to make people confess imagined crimes and forget thoughts of rebellion, but also to actually love Ingsoc itself.

Unlike most real totalitarian regimes, Ingsoc has little if any true end or ultimate political goal other than control for its own sake. O'Brien puts it quite glibly:

“    The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.    ”

Ingsoc as a metaphysical philosophy

Aside from being a political philosophy, Ingsoc is a metaphysical philosophy, positing that all knowledge rests in the collective mind of the Party, that reality is what the Party says it is. This is the Party's justification for altering historical texts. It uses doublethink to believe what it would otherwise know as false, and in believing the new past, the new past was, hence he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past.

Thematic references to solipsism, regarding pure Ingsoc, are made throughout the book's third part, implying that, according to Ingsoc, the universe exists entirely in the mind of the person. It is the job of the Ministry of Love (via torture and brainwashing) and, to a lesser extent, that of the Ministry of Truth (via false propaganda) to ensure that each person's mind is shaped to undying loyalty to the Party and its ideology. In these beliefs the person exists only as part of the collective, thus convincing the collective that nothing exists other than the goodness of the Party and the evil of other nations. This is the form of the conscious universe of the person and the collective. Thus the Party remains in total power.

To me it seems that Obama and his party wants to brainwash the world into believing this rewrite of history. If they are unable to control us through control of the media {which the liberals already have such a big share of} they may resort to more physical means. Obamas ministry of free speech is obviously doublespeak. We already have very evident forms of doublespeak where 'good' really means 'bad' and 'bad' means 'good'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year". Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an appendix[1] in which the basic principles of the language are explained. Newspeak is closely based on English but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. This suits the totalitarian regime of the Party, whose aim is to make any alternative thinking – "thoughtcrime", or "crimethink" in the newest edition of Newspeak – or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on. One character says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the new dictionary: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

And Ingsocs political slogan is :

"War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength."

Kind of sums up Americas ideals today...

muman613

[muman613]

More info about the class structure in Orwells 1984:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc

Class structure under Ingsoc

Under Ingsoc, society is composed of three classes:

   1. The Inner Party, who make policy, effect decisions, and run the government, they are simply referred to as The Party. They are akin to the brain of the party.
   2. The Outer Party, who work the state jobs and are society's middle class. "Members are allowed no vices other than cigarettes and Victory Gin." The Outer Party also are the most scrutinised, constantly monitored with two-way telescreens and other surveillance technologies. They are akin to the hands of the party.
   3. The Proles, who are the lower class, the rabble whom the Inner Party keeps happy and sedate with beer, gambling, sport, casual sex, and prolefeed ("rubbishy texts"). The proles are the proletariat, Marx's term for the working class. The Proles are 85% of Oceania's populace.

The classes mix little, although the narrator describes an evening at the cinema, where proles and Party members both attend. The protagonist also is able to patronize a prole pub without attracting much attention — or so he thinks — and to visit the flat of O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party, on a pretext of borrowing a newer edition of the Newspeak dictionary.

In keeping with themes of secrecy, deception, and contradiction present in other aspects of this work, Ingsoc, through its propaganda, claims to be egalitarian. The Proles, and some members of the Outer Party, often are hideously exploited while the Party élite live comfortably, and goods are as scarce and costly as Ingsoc propaganda depicts them to have been under capitalism.

Of course the ones treated the harshest are the 'middle class' Outer Party members..

muman613

[muman613]

One more thought...

Doublethink!

This is truly scary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink

Orwell explains that the Party could not protect its iron power without degrading its people with constant propaganda. Yet, knowledge of this brutal deception, even within the Inner Party itself, could lead to disgusted collapse of the State from within. For this reason, the government uses a complex system of reality control. Though Nineteen Eighty-Four is most famous for the Party's pervasive surveillance of everyday life, reality control means that the population of Oceania — all of it, including the ruling élite — could be controlled and manipulated merely through the alteration of everyday thought and language. Newspeak is the method for controlling thought through language; doublethink is the method of directly controlling thought.

Newspeak incorporated doublethink, as it contains many words that create assumed associations, between contradictory meanings, especially true of fundamentally important words, such as good and evil; right and wrong; truth and falsehood; justice and injustice.

Doublethink is a form of trained, willful intellectual blindness to contradictions in a belief system. Doublethink differs from ordinary hypocrisy in that the "doublethinking" person deliberately had to forget the contradiction between his two opposing beliefs — and then deliberately forget that he had forgotten the contradiction. He then had to forget the forgetting of the forgetting, and so on; this intentional forgetting, once begun, continues indefinitely. In the novel's notes, Orwell describes it as "controlled insanity".

In the case of workers at the Records Department in the Ministry of Truth, doublethink means being able to falsify public records, and then believe in the new history that they, themselves, had just written. As revealed in Goldstein's Book, the Ministry's name is itself an example of doublethink: the Ministry of Truth is really concerned with lies.

Moreover, doublethink's self-deception allows the Party to maintain huge goals and realistic expectations: If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes. Thus, each Party member could be a credulous pawn, but would never lack relevant information. The Party is both fanatical and well-informed, thus unlikely either to "ossify" or "grow soft" and collapse. Doublethink would avoid a "killing the messenger" attitude that could disturb the Command structure. Thus, doublethink is the key tool of self-discipline for the Party, complementing the state-imposed discipline of propaganda, and the police state. Together, these tools hid the government's evil not just from the people, but from the government itself, but without the confusion and misinformation associated with primitive totalitarian regimes.

Doublethink is critical in allowing the Party to know what its true goals are without recoiling from them, avoiding the conflation of a regime's egalitarian propaganda with its true purpose.

Wow, sounds like Obama to me...

muman613

PS: I saw some doublethink today on SFGate.com when some gays accused me of being racist because I suggested that they investigate Obamas drug use and called him a crack-head. They were asking me how many hits of LSD I took because I had revealed that I was a Grateful Deadhead some years ago. There was nothing racist about saying Obama was a crack-head, he even admits he took drugs in his books.

PPS: I just had a weird 'flashback'... The high school teacher who made us read 1984 and Brave New Worlds was an African American woman who was an excellent English teacher. I do want to make clear that I am not racist and judge people based on their accomplishments and their true intentions.


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[zachor_ve_kavod]

The vision for the future in 1984 was that of a boot stomping on a human face forever.  Is that what you think we are in for?  I predict more of a Brave New World type of scenario, where nothing is really important and what is important is trivia.  If we feel the least bit out of sorts we can instantly pick ourselves up with a gram of 'soma'.  The worst thing about this type of hell, is that it will be completely self-imposed.

[jaime]

It is a form of political control of the people through various mind control and torture regimes


 


this is exactly what's going on.  the massive crowds: i heard some talk show guys say the word "chilling."

the way he hollers.  makes my skin crawl.

i cannot look or listen to him.

Oprah, that cow, is like this.  her audience members are like zombies.  they have gone into tremendous debt, ruined family finances and their childrens' educational funds trying to emulate her and her "favorite things."  she's lost over one million viewers and who knows how much in her magazine subscriptions over this whole Obama thing. 

they need the adulation of massive crowds.  something mentally wrong, power mongors.