
The most telling part of “1984″ is the appendix - hermanywong
http://qz.com/95696/you-probably-didnt-read-the-most-telling-part-of-orwells-1984-the-appendix/
======
jmduke
_What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was
that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who
wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to
passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from
us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell
feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a
trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy
porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World
Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert
to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite
for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting
pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In
short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our
desire will ruin us._

~ Neil Postman

~~~
baddox
It's a popular quote, but not one I find very accurate according to my
interpretations of the two books. For example, in 1984 the government did a
lot of censorship, but it's also true that there were very few people who
would want to know the truth. This is why Winston is so alone. Presumably the
censorship efforts would no longer be necessary if the government's goals of
spreading Newspeak and eliminating the few remaining Winstons were
accomplished. 1984 also featured a population "reduced to passivity and
egotism" and truth was also drowned in a sea of irrelevance (namely, the
persistant and perhaps partially fictional global war). A few of the
differences are real, but most of the main points are false dichotomies.

~~~
jccc
But these are closer to end results. The contrasts being drawn between Orwell
and Huxley are about the means toward those results -- fear, force, violence
vs. drowning entertainment, drugs and distraction.

I think the point is that if we can recognize which is which we're better able
to resist going down a dark road.

~~~
baddox
I think that governments in Western society do use a lot of fear, force, and
violence, and I also think that the government in 1984 used entertainment and
distraction (drugs not so much, unless you count the rationing of cigarettes
and victory gin).

~~~
cstross
Note that at the time Orwell was writing, the only epidemiological research
linking lung cancer and heart disease with smoking had been carried out by
doctors working in Nazi Germany -- research which was tainted with guilt by
association. (It took epidemiologist Sir Richard Doll another decade to
independently make a conclusive case that the lung cancer epidemic was the
result of smoking.) Smoking was tending towards a habit shared by 50% of the
male population of the UK Orwell lived in; it was as unexceptional as tea or
coffee.

Alcohol is a depressant and exactly the sort of bad habit a dictatorship with
an unhealthy interest in its' subjects mental states might want to encourage.
Think too much: anaesthetize yourself! It's also _very_ hard to clamp down on
bathtub distilleries.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Reading your comment, I was reminded of the hypothesis that the 17-18th
century cultural shift from alcohol to coffee was a contributing factor in the
Enlightenment.

~~~
cstross
Also note that drinking one of small beer or coffee (substitute tea to taste)
was a great way of ensuring that your fluid intake wasn't contaminated with
viable cholera bacilli. Adding alcohol or boiling water would kill them before
they killed you. Which, before the discovery of the germ theory of disease and
the development of sewage treatment farms, was pretty important.

------
minikites
I don't get the fascination with mapping _1984_ onto current events when
_Brave New World_ always seems to fit so much better:
[http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/07/amusi...](http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/07/amusing-
ourselves-to-death/)

Sure, we're all talking about PRISM now but give it a month or two.

~~~
run4yourlives
I'm pretty sure it is because of two reasons:

1\. More people have read 1984 than have read Brave New World.

2\. Brave New World is so ridiculously accurate that most people are too
afraid to think about what this means.

We _fear_ 1984 while living (for the most part, the only real difference is
that we don't have, or need, a direct controlling force) _Brave New World_.

~~~
afterburner
From what I remember, Brave New World centers largely around the use of drugs
to regulate the populace, so while it might fit the debate with current day
mood stabilizers, it's nowhere near as much about surveillance and a police
state. It's like the opposite, regulation through conditioned happiness rather
than suffocating oppression, with a similar loss of liberty. So the
surveillance part resonates with PRISM.

~~~
stplsd
>Brave New World centers largely around the use of drugs to regulate the
populace

Drugs are NOT central theme in BNW it's just simply a metaphor. Super king
burgers, reality TV, NFL, wrestling, facebook, MTV, in essence all pop culture
is SOMA of nowadays

"Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all
transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again.
Here. Here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed,
America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these
pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on
living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do as we
tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!"

Bill Hicks

~~~
mpyne
Ah, but what is freedom if I can't watch American Gladiators because I want
to?

Or, in my case, what if I want a grilled cheese sandwich with tater tots
instead of filet mignon and caviar? I _hated_ Sundays on the boat because that
was always "Steak & Lobster" day, and I was the one asshole who didn't like
steak and didn't like lobster.

I agree that people should probably take an interest in civics. I agree that
people should have the information needed to care _deeply_ about civics, if
they wish. I don't agree that people should feel _compelled_ to care civics or
anything else that Bill Hicks or any other self-righteous prententious jerk
tells us to care about, any more than we should be compelled to care about
what the government tells us to care about.

If the freedom to do as we please leads to people actually doing as they
please, and that offends you, then perhaps freedom isn't what you were looking
for in the first place.

~~~
krichman
But isn't that the whole point? That we're so easily distracted by
_objectively useless_ entertainment? I spent hours this week looking at
pictures of cats and viewing videos of cats jumping. It was a poor use of my
time.

~~~
mpyne
I would argue with "objectively useless". We are not just labor for the
entrepreneurs.

------
tstactplsignore
I have always thought that the most enlightening aspect of 1984 is its
commentary on the ephemeral nature of rationality, and it disappoints me how
often overlooked this theme throughout the novel is. There is an
overwhelmingly mainstream misconception that our modern western use of
rationality and empiricism is inherent to human thought- in reality, it isn't
even universally applicable to our own "enlightened society".

One of the climaxes of the novel is when Winston finally believes that 2+2=5,
and he does so because Big Brother says it is so. In general, we tend to
believe that belief is something which must inherently rise out of empiricism;
all of us reading this believe 2+2=4 because we have seen and understood the
mathematical and logical reasoning behind this. However, the spectrum from
daily emotional irrationality to politics to religion tells us that human
beings do _not_ base a large number of their beliefs in empirical reasoning,
but in something unscientific entirely.

Thus, the most important part, in my opinion, of 1984 is not about
authoritarian censorship or surveillance, but rather the creation of a
delusional society. This is also, even in light of the recent scandals, far
more applicable to our society today, when modern conservativism is both
willing to be ignorant of scientific and social evidence, and willing to lie
to the degree that they have believed their own lies.

------
afandian
I'm amazed that Quartz is still in business. Whilst on a desktop it's just
horrible to use, on my Android it flat out doesn't work. The comment thing
covers the whole screen and I can't see any content. How difficult is it to
make a website that works on modern browsers? I wanted to read this, it looks
interesting.

~~~
munger
Wow yeah, firefox here on a desktop - they moved the browser's scroll bar from
the far right to the right of their content (the middle of a 1920px wide
browser). I was clicking where the scroll bar would be to try to scroll - and
what that did was for every click I made (on a blank background), when I
clicked "back" to get back to HN after I read it, it cycled me through as many
different stories as erroneous clicks I made before allowing me to back all
the way to HN. (basically spamming 3 different stories I didn't want to read
instead of "back" button functionality)

Terrible UX.

Edit: additional paranthetical

------
tomasien
1984 and other works of science fiction were always used to represent these
psdeu-truths to me growing up. It would range from why socialism was bad, to
why America was good, to why reading was important, etc. etc. But it's just a
book, it's just a series of thoughts put into a really compelling story, but
that doesn't mean it's true, probable, or even possible.

It's a reference to our collective consciousness and contains some potentially
key insights, but whenever something REMINDS us of 1984 we're all still like
"HOLY SHIT IT'S LIKE 1984 THAT MEANS BIG BROTHER IS TOTALLY GONNA HAPPEN!"

It doesn't mean that at all. This Snowden business is massively disturbing,
but our ability to collectively disseminate and digest information about it is
encouraging, something that wasn't remotely possible in 1984. People make
jokes about their tweets being censored by PRISM, and they're funny because
it's not happening.

Freedom of speech is so important.

Edit: not saying a 1984esque future is impossible, just that the book being
written doesn't make it any more or less possible.

~~~
jonnathanson
_" Edit: not saying a 1984esque future is impossible, just that the book being
written doesn't make it any more or less possible."_

The book is hyperbolically over-referenced in pop culture, in internet
arguments, in OpEd pages, and so forth. I'll grant you that. Chances are,
PRISM is not the beginning of a steady march toward a fascist police state.
Far from it.

But that's not the point of this article. The author isn't claiming "a
1984esque future" is in the cards. Rather, she's drawing comparisons between a
particular aspect of Orwell's concept -- that of linguistic manipulation for
political ends -- and the tactics being used in actual politics today. The
playbooks are similar.

The fact is, we've sacrificed quite a few of our freedoms in recent decades in
service of a vaguely defined "War on Terror," and it's highly disconcerting.
It doesn't mean we're ready to put Big Brother in office, and drastic
hyperbole to that effect is indeed silly. But it _does_ testify to the power
of language to bend a population toward an agenda.

~~~
dkl
_Chances are, PRISM is not the beginning of a steady march toward a fascist
police state._

But it is certainly a precondition. Just like "free speech zones" after the
Iraq war and during the run up to the 2004 presidential election.

Let's not kid ourselves: we won't awaken in a fascist state. It will be like
the frog boiled alive, the ratchet will be turned ever so slowly, but the
march is definitely in the direction of fascism. How long will it take? Will
it ever happen? We can't say now, but the last 12 years have had an alarming
number of movements in the wrong direction.

~~~
jivatmanx
We need only consider the difference in freedom between now and before 9/11\.
How many more attacks or Bushes before 1984? It's a finite Number, and on my
opinion low.

------
danso
That's funny...the part about language and how it can be used to limit thought
was the most memorable part of 1984 to me today (well, besides the rats at the
end)...but I hadn't interpreted to be written from the perspective of someone
in a post-Big Brother world.

~~~
acqq
Because it's not. The interpretations of Ms. Frost are wrong. The narrator
talks to the reader reading it in 1949, using the language from 1949 but
talking about the future as if he had a vision of it. That's it. He never
claims that Oldspeak won or anything. He had a vision of future in some
particular moment, 1984 and explains the plans of the ruling party regarding
the Newspeak as of 1984.

~~~
discostrings
I thought that before re-reading the appendix. But take a look at this line:
"It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak...by
about the year 2050."

Why not just "It was expected that Newspeak would finally supersede
Oldspeak..."? The author seems to go out of his way with the tense he uses to
convey the future interpretation.

One could argue against the article writer's conclusion, but after re-reading
the appendix, I think there's some compelling evidence for it.

EDIT: At least for the bit about it being written from an Ingsoc-free future.

~~~
acqq
Couldn't it just be playing with the fact that text describing Newspeak is
written in Oldspeak? Pointing to the paradox that the very book would be
impossible in Newspeak? More like "we're lucky we're not them" than "and the
wolf was shot and they lived happily ever after"? I posit Orwell wanted to
keep the book gloomy enough. It was not to be a fairy tale but the warning.

Is there any explicit statement of Oldspeak actually winning in the
alternative universe we're reading about? Or the reasons for winning as
declared by Ms. Frost ("it's da language")?

~~~
discostrings
Sure--the perspective of the appendix seems open to interpretation, which is
great. The very fact he chose such a strange tense, though, leads me to
believe he wanted you to at least wonder about such a thing.

I only looked to see whether there was a basis for the claim that it was
written from a future in which Ingsoc didn't prevail. There's definitely a
basis for that claim in the text. Whether there's a basis for her other
claims, I'm not sure--I'd have to read again.

------
jcl
I must admit, I always interpreted the appendix to be a note from Orwell to
the reader, not a document from a later date within the novel's world.

------
baddox
I'm surprised at the claim that many readers skip the appendix. Is that really
the case? I read 1984 in 7th grade, and the appendix was one of my favorite
(or at least most memorable) parts. It's like the maps in some publications of
medieval fantasy novels—I would be very surprised if a significant number of
readers skipped it.

------
asimeqi
Fun fact. Bjarne Stroustrup indicates the appendix of "1984" as a source for
an interpretation of the name C++.
[http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#name](http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#name)

~~~
mpyne
Just came across it in the Fourth Edition of the C++ Programming Language book
that was just released, in fact.

------
bediger4000
You're wrong, Snobby Quartz Writer Snob. That appendix is my favorite part of
the book, and it's responsible to a large degree for my sensitivity to
corporation's attempts to change language (Me: I like a cheese burger and a
small fry. McD's counterguy: cheeseburger and regular fries. How irritating.)

But worse than the English-teacher-vogueing, is that the snobbery gets in the
way of a really good point.

~~~
hudibras
The title is total linkbait, but very well done. I'd be willing to bet that
90% of _1984_ readers go on to read the appendix, so Quartz's title
immediately draws in everybody who did.

------
dhughes
Has anyone ever noticed Scientology tends to use a type of Newspeak?

A lot of acronyms and initialisms and other obscure, the article states the
appendix of 1984 “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought.” It will render dissent “literally impossible, because there will be
no words in which to express it.”

I wonder if old L Ron was a fan of 1984?

~~~
goostavos
Do you have any examples of newspeak in their literature?

I had a cousin "fall prey" to the organization. I don't know what went on
internally, but he was forced into, what I colloquially call a re-education
camp (I'm not sure what they called it), for two weeks. They took his phone
away and had him break all contact with the outside world, even with his
girlfriend at the time. 2 Weeks later, he pops up and says he's moving to
California to be a part of the church.

It was pretty creepy to be honest.

Point being, I find the mechanics of the church to be interesting.

------
noyesno
See also: "Politics and the English Language", Orwell, 1946.
[https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm](https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm)

------
wtf_shawn
When I was in high school my teacher made us read this portion of the novel. I
appreciated it after and took away many of the same points you made here. At
this time there was no issues with NSA to relate to though so thank you for
this comparison.

~~~
dllthomas
_" At this time there was no issues with NSA to relate to though so thank you
for this comparison."_

When were you in high school?

~~~
mindcrime
Heh, good question. The NSA, and it's predecessors (SIS, etc.) have been
snooping since the days of the telegraph!

------
return0
I just hope everyone learns their lesson, starts being careful about the
digital trace they leave behind, and that years ahead the current Big Brother
has been reduced to civil servants still miserably analyzing the bulk of data
from the 2002-2013 era.

------
ctdonath
Finally! Someone other than myself recognizes there _is_ an appendix to _1984_
, and that it (the appendix) _is_ an instruction manual.

~~~
derleth
No, it's about what Orwell saw around him in the UK in the late 1940s, working
in a government propaganda office.

------
straight_talk
I guess the HN admins have read that chapter very carefully. Anybody who dares
to express an opinion against the elite here is immediately hell banned.

------
derleth
> “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.” It will
> render dissent “literally impossible, because there will be no words in
> which to express it.”

If this worked, we would have neither the word 'antibiotic' nor the drugs we
classify under that name, because we didn't have the word until after we
invented the substances.

The Sapir-Worf Hypothesis is interesting but Newspeak takes it too far and
turns it into self-parody; the fact languages can develop new words, and new
meanings for old words, gives the lie to the whole idea of taking it that far.

~~~
devindotcom
This seems to me a rather pedantic objection to a moral structure for a
theoretical language... it's worth noting that both "anti" and "bio" existed
as parts of language before antibiotics. The word antibiotic has a general
meaning because it is made from known parts, and was used as the best fit for
something which was discovered.

Also worth noting is that scientific research is heavily controlled in the
world of 1984 for the reason that it brings novelty, advancement, and change
of thought patterns.

~~~
derleth
It's not pedantic if it goes to the very heart of the concept.

> Also worth noting is that scientific research is heavily controlled in the
> world of 1984 for the reason that it brings novelty, advancement, and change
> of thought patterns.

It was heavily controlled in the USSR, too, but that didn't prevent the Gulag
Archipelago novels from being written, for example.

