Last winter I crashed my "Shattern" sedan after spinning out on I-80 at 70 mph on some ice. I was unhurt, but the car was totaled. My new vehicle is a 2004 Aztek with all wheel drive and on-star. Living in Wyoming I can justify the SUV and I really do enjoy it, especially with the camping option.
One of the drawbacks to having such a new vehicle is that I don't have a cassette player. They're being phased out, and many vehicles don't have them available even as an option with factory-installed stereos. So I have a few obsolete books on tape left on my shelf and now buy books on CD. There aren't as many options, especially for unabridged books. I was shopping recently at a Borders in Ft. Collins, and picked some up. One I set down was Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver...it was 24 hours of listening on 20 CDs...and only "exerpts from" rather than "unabridged." Yikes!
There are a lot of classics on CD, unabridged, and I certainly haven't read all of them. One of the classics I picked up was George Orwell's 1984. It has so permeated our culture that I already knew "Big Brother is Watching You" and "War is Peace." I knew about "doublethink," and more. What I didn't appreciate so much was the so-called big lie, and how if you control the past you can control the future, and if you control the present, you control the past. The party in 1984 controls the past through a constant, never-ending "rectification" of all documentary evidence about the past. They believe in, and practice, a form of collective solipsism. They reject science, empiricism, and an external objectivity. They embrace the reality of thoughts, perceptions, and, more importantly, collective perception. They create their own reality, and the reality of their world. They believe it is key to maintaining power, and power for them is its own goal.
I don't generally intend to be political on this blog. I want this to be primarily my forum for science, science fiction, and related topics. I'll just quote from an article a few months ago in which Ron Suskind interviews a White House aide:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'" -- Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt", New York Times Magazine
Posted by Mike at December 31, 2004 01:09 PM