It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer.
So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.
1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. He developed viral antibodies for totalitarianism and then injected them into our culture. It worked so well that people say "Orwellian" to mean "totalitarian-esque" in the same way they say "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue".
Making ideas as simple as possible, but not simpler requires some amount of creative genius. Nuance is not viral.
EDIT, a thought experiment: Your job is to write a short book that if it could somehow be read by the population of North Korea would cause the Kim Jong-Il regime to collapse. Could such a book be written? I think 1984 would do it.
1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history.
Dressing down your prose a little, you're saying "1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people".
And that is, in a nutshell, why I don't like it much. Orwell does not treat his reader as a peer. There's no respect there, just manipulation, because the author doesn't trust the reader with nuance.
EDIT (in response to yours): Luckily for me, I am nobody's minister of propaganda. I would (were I a much better writer than I am) tell it like it is, nuances and all, and let them do with that what they will.
"1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people"
1984 successfully vaccinated a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization.
Like Jonas Salk and polio.
Although.. I saw Victoria Jackson on a Fox News clip once ranting about how Barack Obama is a socialist and she mentioned how she had read 1984 multiple times and therefore understood how the socialists work and how they are coming to get her. I wonder what will happen in her brain when someone explains to her that George Orwell was a socialist.
In other words it looks like some people are so dim that the vaccine can't work on their minds.
Tangent: I also wonder what would happen to Sarah Palin's brain if someone explained to her what a kibbutz is.
"1984 successfully vaccinated a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization."
You're still just coming up with synonyms for "got them to do what I want."
I'll thought experiment you back. If 1984 were largely ignored, would you still think it worth reading? You claim that this book influenced the behavior of a world ripe for totalitarian domination. That's a big claim in and of itself, but let's let it stand for the sake of the point I really want to make.
Basically, you care about 1984 from the perspective of its effect on a bunch of people you don't respect (you think their "minds" are weak enough to need "vaccination" against a "disease"). Even you are treating it basically as a remedial text for political idiots. You don't even mention anything you got out of reading 1984.
So, if it weren't effective at convincing people you don't respect of your viewpoint, would you care at all? Would this book be worth reading if you were the only person ever to read it?
That last is my measure of quality, and 1984 falls short - sure, it's an important cultural phenomenon, but I could have reaped the benefits of the cultural phenomenon without ever reading the book.
No no no no. It didn't occur to me that my words might be interpreted this way:
people you don't respect -- you think their "minds" are weak enough to need "vaccination" against a "disease" -- remedial text for political idiots
I respect (former) East Germans. I don't think they're idiots or have weak minds, or need remedial texts or any kind of higher education or higher intelligence. I don't think they're any different from West Germans. Same with North Koreans and South Koreans. There's no such thing as a mind which is naturally insusceptible to bad ideology. We all need inoculation.
Basically, you care about 1984 from the perspective of its effect
Yes. Orwell fought with a gun in Spain as a member of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. He was fighting with a pen when he wrote 1984. He was more successful with the pen.
would you still think it worth reading?
Dunno. I never claimed it worth reading. But it's short, to the point, and concisely illustrates some important ideas. It might be worth reading just to add "memory hole" to your vocabulary. On other hand maybe Milan Kundera is a more entertaining choice. I love this Kundera quote: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
Whether any given book is worth reading seems very personal to me. I don't have much of an opinion about it. I, personally, didn't love the book. But I did love the movie.
I think there's quite a distinction to be made between the people who did their best to survive under the East German system and the people who actively participated in establishing and maintaining that system.
Consider 1984 as being targeted at those who would otherwise be influenced by equally-simplistic totalitarian ideologies, and who might otherwise be led to collaborate with the equivalent the Stasi in the belief that they were doing good.
There was - and is - an unfortunately large population of such people, and I can't find much fault in Orwell's intention to shrink its ranks.
You could summarize that whole discussion with one word warning. 1984 is a warning as to what can happen. And a succesful one, as a lot of people are afraid of the extreme dystopia it shows. The analogies tot diseases and vaccination are interesting, but appear to just confuse people.
So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.
-- Mike Godwin: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html
1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. He developed viral antibodies for totalitarianism and then injected them into our culture. It worked so well that people say "Orwellian" to mean "totalitarian-esque" in the same way they say "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue".
Making ideas as simple as possible, but not simpler requires some amount of creative genius. Nuance is not viral.
EDIT, a thought experiment: Your job is to write a short book that if it could somehow be read by the population of North Korea would cause the Kim Jong-Il regime to collapse. Could such a book be written? I think 1984 would do it.