Ben Shapiro’s Book Club | 1984

Hey, and welcome, folks. This is the Ben Shapiro Show. So we have something behind the paywall over at Daily Wire Plus. It is called Ben Shapiro's Book Club. It's precisely what it sounds like. A book club. Well, one of the books that we analyzed over the course of last year was George Orwell's 1984. Here's what it sounded like.

Hey, everybody, and welcome. I'm very pumped because this month we read 1984 by George Orwell. You can see how I keep tabs. Literally, I put tabs in the book. We're going to go through this book. We're going to answer some of your questions. First, I'm going to give sort of a brief intro to the book. I think honestly there's no better way to introduce this book.

and just to read the first couple of lines, because it just is fantastic. I mean, George Orwell is an extraordinary writer. He writes with actual clarity. One of the things I really appreciate about Orwell is that he's not hiding the ball at all. He's not attempting to be obscure. He's not attempting to play around with language. He's just going to give it to you straight. It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13. So right away you know you're in a different world in which everything is going to be

changed, the facts are going to be subsumed to something different. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind slipped quickly through the glass doors of victory mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. And so you're immediately immersed in Winston Smith's gritty world. This is not going to be a positive future. This is not going to be a place with gleaming towers and wonderful flying cars or anything. This is going to be a very dark and gritty place.

And the first thing that we notice is Big Brother is watching you, this giant poster of Big Brother who clearly is described in which Stalin is described. He's a mustached figure with these piercing eyes, and he's constantly watching. And this is the constant theme of Big Brother. If you actually look at all of the covers for 1984 over the course of its publication history, nearly all of them look like this one. Nearly all of them have a human eye on them because the basic idea, of course, is that a state that is omnipotent and omnipresent

can twist you into something that is not you, and that is the real danger, a state that is so in control of everything surrounding you that you don't even have the ability to think anymore. You don't have the ability to be anymore. And then, of course, there are the three big slogans that are introduced on page 16 in this particular edition. This, I believe, is the Signet Classics edition.

The three slogans of the party, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. And moment, I'm going to go through what each of those means. First, I kind of wanted to use, go through a little bit of the iconography that has been associated with 1984 that's become so much a part of how we think about 1984. Of course, you all remember this commercial, right? This is the very, very famous commercial.

from Apple. It's one of the first Apple commercials, the idea being that IBM, which was then the big company, is big brother, and then you have the lady who shows up out of nowhere, and she throws this hammer. Remember that? She throws the hammer at the screen. Well, this commercial, maybe the most famous commercial in the history of television, was actually filmed at the same time as the film 1984 with John Hurt, which is a pretty good film adaptation. Again, the imagery here is so telling this is the compendium of some of the covers.

of 1984. Again, the constant icon is the human eye and the eye of the state that is always watching you at all times. Big brother is indeed always watching in the iconography of this. So I want to start by going through a little bit about George Orwell and his history because you sort of have to understand his history to understand what this book is and what it isn't. It's been read as sort of a pure right-wing tone, which is very weird because George Orwell considered himself a socialist.

So to understand why George Orwell, a socialist, would write Animal Farm, which is a very anti-communist book, and 1984, which is a very anti-communist book. You have to understand that there is another side of communism that was promoted by Leon Trotsky. The basic idea here is that communism had never really been tried. You've heard this one before. Socialism has never really been tried. And the big problem is that Stalin took communism and socialism off the path of righteousness, and if only it had been properly applied, then everything would have been okay.

Obviously that is untrue. We'll get to why that's untrue in just one moment. But Trotsky was indeed a great critic of Stalin to the point where he ended up with an ice pick in his eye in Mexico. And Orwell was a deep critic of Stalin. One of the reasons he was such a deep critic of Stalin is because he actually went and picked up and fought in the Spanish Civil War. So folks tend to forget the Spanish Civil War because it preceded World War II, which of course was a much larger, grander, more vicious war. The Spanish Civil War was pretty vicious. It pitted.

a guy named Generalissimo Francisco Franco against the communists who were backed by Stalin. So you had basically Hitler versus Stalin in Spain in the mid thirties. And Orwell, who again, considered himself a socialist, actually went and fought on the side of the Reds in Spain. He wrote a book about it called, Amunds to Catalonia. And one of the things he discovered, it's actually a phenomenal book, Amunds to Catalonia. And if you've never picked up a copy and you like 1984 and you like Animal Farm, you should really pick up Amunds to Catalonia because it's pretty spectacular.

He has another book called Road to Wigan Pier, which is about poverty in Britain, also spectacular, Orwell's a terrific, terrific writer. Amish to Catalonia is really not about socialism versus fascism, per se. It is much more about the fact that Stalinism had crept into the communist ranks to the point where it was almost difficult to tell the difference between the side that you were fighting for and the side that you were fighting against. There's a very famous portion of Amish to Catalonia, where, and this happened, where Orwell

started being targeted by the Stalinists inside the communist movement in Spain. He actually went to a hotel to meet his wife in Barcelona and he spotted her across the room and she came up to him and she hugged him and then she told him to run because of the Stalinists were going to liquidate him. So a lot of what Orwell is writing about is the Stalin regime.

And while he sort of lumps all totalitarianism together, right, he says it doesn't matter whether we're talking about Oceania or East Asia or Eurasia, none of that really matters. What he means by that is that once you have a totalitarian regime, whether it considers itself Nazi or whether it considers itself communist,

You're now in the same boat. Now, there are some fundamental distinctions between these ideologies that I think that Orwell elides, but his ability to critique totalitarianism is unparalleled, which is why 1984 stands the test of time. And there's no question, by the way, that many of the incidents in 1984 are attempts to draw from real life. So, for example, there's this character of Parsons, right, who is this sort of fat, bloated idiot who lives in

in Winston's apartment building, and he's very excited that his kids are informing on all the neighbors. They're constantly informing on all the neighbors. Well, this was a thing in the Soviet Union under Stalin. There's a very, very famous situation where a kid named Pavel Marsov was a 13-year-old boy.

and Pavel Mirazov supposedly informed on his own father to the GPU, which was the predecessor to the KGB. And his father received a 10-year prison sentence, and then supposedly Mirazov's family beat him to death. And so he actually became a Soviet hero. There were songs written about him. There were statues built to this 13-year-old kid who informed on his own father. That, obviously, is paralleled in 1984.

In Oceania, your mind is not your own. You have these massive surveillance state apparatuses that have been built. And that, again, is paralleled by what the Soviet Union did. And the goal of the surveillance in the Soviet Union was not just to keep track of people, because they didn't actually have the ability to process all the material they were taking in.

The idea was that everybody knew that they were being watched at all times, that inherently changes everybody's behavior. When you feel like you are on guard all the time, you start to shy away from exercising your freedom. This obviously has some weaker echoes in the modern social media era, where you feel like if you say anything, then people are going to come after you and destroy you, right? We can feel sort of the faint echoes of Orwell all throughout our society. Whether we're talking about the surveillance state, or whether we are talking about social media mobbing, or whether we're talking about people informing on each other for mob rule,

Right? So, you know, the way that, that, that historian Robert Conquest talked about the salinaries had to die to lose your loved ones is bad enough to be forced to denounce your father or husband in the hope of saving the rest of the family and in general to be compelled in public to express joy at the whole bloodbath. Maybe thought worse still, truth almost perished.

This was the surveillance state. That's big brother is watching. Then you get to the actual slogans. War is peace. So the basic idea here is that when you have a suppressed population, you must go to war. You must, because you have to direct that ire somewhere else. And you see this in totalitarian states all over the globe. North Korea is constantly being aggressive with South Korea, not because they actually hope to win a war with South Korea, but because

Kim Jong-un has to constantly show his population that the bad guys live on the south side of the border. The same thing with China, vis-a-vis, for example, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Same thing, for example, with Iran, which is constantly driving its citizens' ire at Israel or in the Palestinian Authority. And whenever you have country, Russia is a good example of this, right? You need territorial ambition in order to make excuses to your citizens for why you are a terrible government and why they have a terrible living standard.

And so, Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984 is the stand-in. Now, he's actually a stand-in for Trotsky in 1984, and pretty clearly a stand-in for Trotsky, because Trotsky was used as sort of the all-purpose whipping boy for the Soviet Union during the Stalin regime. Everybody who was an enemy of Stalin was treated as, quote unquote, a Trotskyite, and then targeted. But the idea, of course, is the perpetual war allows you to push all of the ire of your population abroad and go after all those other people. Now, here's where you get into

Orwell's failure to understand actually socialism and communism because he actually didn't understand socialism and communism at an economic level. There's a huge portion of the book. It's actually the dullest portion of the book where he gets a hold of Goldstein's pamphlet and he reads the pamphlet and the pamphlet is just straight Trotsky. It is pretty much an open paraphrase of the revolution betrayed by Trotsky.

And, and that the revolution betrayed basically says communism is good, Stalin is bad. And you hear the same thing here, right? The idea in, in the Goldstein pamphlet is that the reason that the state has to constantly go to war is because if it were not for the state going to war, they couldn't get rid of all of their excess wealth and getting rid of the excess wealth sinking it to the bottom of the sea as Orwell puts it, keeps the people in misery and keeping the people in misery is the goal because if they're in misery, then it prevents them from being able to rise up. Now, that's not

True. Okay. Communism keeps people in misery because it inherently destroys all the wealth. Soviet Union did not need to go to war with surrounding countries in order to destroy its surplus wealth. It had no surplus wealth. It was an impoverished country masquerading as a first world nation. And then you get to the second slogan, freedom is slavery.

So, again, the idea here is that to be free is to actually be a slave. To be fully free means that you are a slave to your own impulses and only when you are liberated from individualism and you are subsumed under the rubric of the state, can you experience true freedom. Now, in order to do that, you have to give up your own mind. And this brings us to ignorance's strength, which is the third slogan and the most important slogan of the state, ignorance's strength. That when you give up your own mind to the state,

then you find strength because now you are united with everybody else. You've been merged into the great collective. And the key to this, and this is I think Orwell's best point in the whole book, I think his best point is this, the key to this is the pushing of subjectivism, the pushing of the idea that you can create reality within your own mind. And this is what is constantly being pushed by O'Brien. O'Brien, of course, is the emissary of the state who is trying to brainwash Winston.

And Smith talks about this, right? He says, what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise in the two plus two equals four, but that they might be right. For after all, how do we know that two plus two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable, what then?

So the idea is that you destroy all objective truth. And once you destroy all objective truth, all that is left is the subjective. And then when you apply pressure to the subjective mind, what you do is you destroy freedom.

Because again, you can think yourself into anything as the premise here. Now, there is an external world, right? There are facts. There are realities out there. This is why it is very important for us to cling to the facts of life. We do not cling to the facts of life. And if we believe that all reality is made up inside of our tiny p-brains, then it's very easy for people to exert control, to use the power of the culture, to use the power of the government, to compel you to think things. Because after all, reality is created in your brain. It is not an external thing out there for you to discover.

This is Orwell's great point. The most dangerous philosophical thing you can get into is radical subjectivism, and that is where we are as a society. And it keeps hammering that home, right? He hammers that home over and over and over in 1984.

Right. A court is described in the book as quote, every record has been destroyed or falsified. Every book has been rewritten. Every picture has been repainted. Every statue in street and building has been renamed. Every day has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day, minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right. So.

What is the hope here? It's pretty hopeless books, pretty grim book, right? By the end, Winston, who has fought back against the state, essentially by taking the lover. And again, I think that that is a misstatement of how you fight back against totalitarianism. It really is not about emotional subjectivism. It's about

vital institutions that you build on top of your emotional feeling for other people. So institutions like marriage, institutions like church, you need those to fight the state. Otherwise, they can be wiped away. Winston falls in love with Julia. They have a relationship. The state destroys it anyway.

So he says that he has hope in the pearls. And Trotsky says this too. He has hope for the lower classes because the lower classes still grip tight to their personal relationships. It really isn't about that. It's about the fact that elites in society have a nasty tendency to tear down the institutions that are necessary in order to allow life to continue normally. And the pearls grip those institutions tightly.

It turns out that William Buckley once suggested that he'd rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty at Harvard. The reason for that is because the faculty at Harvard think themselves into the belief that they can get rid of all the institutions. Whereas normal people, they live within those institutions. They live marriage. They live family. They live school. They live church. They live local community. Those are the things that are absolutely necessary, right? That really is the hope.

There's one other point that I think Orwell is wrong about. There's a lot he's right about. There's one other point that I think Orwell is wrong about in the book. And that is this. He suggests, through O'Brien, who is the emissary of the state, that the reason that this is being done is for pure power. It's almost a nihilistic desire for power. It is not about some sort of higher cause. I don't think that's right. I don't think that communist actually believe in just pure power rule. I think it's actually, forgive the phrase, a slur against Stalin. I don't think that Stalin was just about promoting his own power. He actually was a utopian.

as the philosopher Karl Popper suggested, utopianism is the danger. It is not just that you have nefarious movie villains who twirl their mustache and talk about, we're so powerful, we're gonna use our power to abuse everyone else. There are some people like that, for sure.

Beria, who is one of the heads of the KGB for a while, the head of the GRU, he was like that. But most people who do the most damage in life are people who are actual ideological utopian to believe that they can cure the problems of humanity if you give them enough power. And that we see every single day in American politics and unfortunately all over the world. Okay, let's go to some of your questions because I want to hear what you've been thinking. You've been reading this book along with me. So let me bring up some of those questions.

Right, quick. Here we go. Sarah says Orwell has often seen prophetic in his depictions of a tyrannical state and what is currently happening in the world. I was wondering what your thoughts were of the forced sexlessness of the party versus the hyper-sexualization of our current culture. How does this difference impact what we take away from the novel? This is a great question. So obviously in the novel Orwell suggests that the state is trying to do away with romance. So it's true that our culture is trying to do away with romance but in the opposite way.

So in this book, it's really about the passion that Winston has for Julia. And the way Orwell writes it, it's just the lost. Essentially, the lost is what is supposed to fight the state. But the reality is that it is there falling in love that really should fight the state. And the sort of war against romance comes from both ends. And this is where Orwell is right.

It's where he's wrong on modern politics a little bit, but it's where he is right. And it's more, I would say the sexual morality that is reflected in Brave New World is more accurate to today's climate than the sexual morality that is reflective in 1984. 1984 really does do a good job of expressing what happens under a full totalitarian regime.

Brave New World does a great job of explaining what happens under a full Libertine regime, which is kind of what we have right now, which is people are giving up their freedoms and in exchange to get hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. At some point we'll do Brave New World in the book club, I am sure. In any case, the thing that the two have in common is the destruction of romance, because romance is the building block. The romance between man and woman, societally speaking, is the building block of long-lasting and powerful institutions like family, and that's what the state has to wipe away.

because if people actually fell in love and got married and then had kids, it would destroy the impetus for the state having control over every area of your life.

Meredith says chapter one, it was always the women and above all the young ones who are the most bigoted adherents of the party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nozers out of orthodoxy. This line really struck me as related to Karen's. Here's how you read or interpret this and if you could expand on your viewpoint, it's a great question. So this is largely, this has been true, and this is reflected in other literature surrounding revolutions that many of the most passionate revolutionaries are women and they tend to be childless women.

That is sort of the idea of the state, that when the state deprives women of their fundamental role as women, which is bearing and rearing children. And by the way, that's not a slur against women. Again, it's a superpower. Women have a magical superpower. They can create other human beings from their body. And then they can take care of those human beings and raise the next generation. It's literally the most important thing anyone does on earth. And how motherhood became a dirty word or a slur against women is beyond insane. But

When you deprive women of that superpower and when you teach women that really they should give up the thing that is most precious in life, they have to find something to fill that with. And so when the state deprives the women in 1984 of their ability to have children essentially and to raise families, of course, they're going to become the most passionate adherents of the party. They've traded away the thing that's most valuable to them.

Breanne says, Hello Ben, I first read 1984 in high school in the 90s. After my initial reading, and upon reading it again this past month, I still firmly believe Julia is an undercover party member used to bring down others. Wondering if I'm in the minority with this thinking, please let me know what you think about this idea. So, I think it's a great theory. So, when I was reading the book again, right, last time I read this was like you probably 20 years ago, and when I was rereading the book, and when he meets Julia again,

I honestly didn't remember the book all that well. I sort of remembered the point of the book and some of the more philosophical sections, but not Julia's character. The first thing that occurred to me is she's obviously got to be a spy for the state, right? I mean, there's no question. And who just walks up to somebody and slips them the note that says, I love you and then meets them randomly for sex? Like, that's just not something that typically happens a lot.

And so you would think that, yeah, she was an agent of the state. You think that's the direction in which it's going to go. I think that it's sort of a red herring that Orwell is using there. Orwell doesn't hide the ball in this book. O'Brien is the person who's the red herring. O'Brien is the actual member of the state.

organization. You think that it's going to go the other way. You think O'Brien is going to be the person who actually is trying to help and he's trying to help Lindston get out of the state and the Julia ends up screwing it all up. Instead, it's the opposite. And the reason it has to be the opposite is, again, Orwell's whole theory is that personal romance, personal relationships, which he attributes largely to the motion of the pearls. I mean, he openly talks about that in the book, that that is what overcomes the state. So he couldn't make Julia the villain. There was no way to do it.

PJ says, hey Ben, given that George Orwell was an avowed socialist, had we squared the obviously anti-totalitarians lands of 1984 with his views, do you think he was one of the it just hasn't been done right crowd? Yeah, I mean to a certain extent, yes. I think he was a little too skeptical to embrace full scale communism and to believe that it could be properly tried because

Orwell is too hard-headed for that. It's what made him an outcast from the left as well as from the right. However, he never learned enough about economics, I think, to full-scale reject the fundamental premises that underlie the totalitarian state. If you believe in individual rights, and the individual rights include the right to own and dispense with property, if you believe in those things, it's very difficult to found a totalitarian state on those ideals. Very rough. Or, well, I don't think fully understood socialism is my answer to that, actually.

Lisa says, hey Ben, so glad you're doing this. 1984 is one of my favorite works. Are you familiar with the David Bowie album, Diamond Dogs? Bowie was obviously extremely moved by this book as well. He wrote several songs about this classic book. The most moving song to me is We Are The Dead, which captures perfectly the relationship between Winston and Julia. It gives me chills every time

I hear that this book should be required, reading for every American, and so frightening how accurately it portrays what's going on right now. Again, I think what is so amazing about the book is that it's obviously about a particular type of regime. That regime is not what exists in the United States, but you can see the echoes. And this is the problem. If you can see the echoes, then you can see what's going to happen down the road. If you can sense the creeping totalitarianism in a society that basically delegates all powered one branch of government to control every area of your life up to and including personal relationships and how you raise your children, that's a scary thing.

Noah says I was extremely depressed by the ending, especially considering what's going on presently. What hope do you think is out there for us to have a different outcome? Well, I think that the United States, thank God, is structured in such a way that makes it very difficult for full-scale totalitarianism to break out in the United States. The checks and balances created by the founders are very durable. The federalist system is very durable. With that said,

One of the great dangers that I see is not necessarily the power of a top-down federal government controlling your life, but the power of a culture that mirrors a lot of the priorities that Orwell talks about in 1984, cramming that down on your kids via the internet, via social media. I'm worried about the cultural lessons of 1984 being applied mob rule up rather than top down. That is the thing that frightens me most, which is why it's so important. It's so all-fired important.

to make sure that you are raising your kids with values away from the influence of national media who have every intention of corrupting your children. They really do. Jesus says, why do you think that even though there are so many parallels between what's in the book and what we're seeing in the society now, people are still in denial about how we're falling for the same traps as the book? Because nobody wants to believe that they're falling for a trap.

There's a great Twilight Zone episode, I forget the name of it, in which there is a, it's called The Howling Man, that's the name of the episode, great episode if you can find it. And that episode is, the basic premise is a man walks into an old monastery.

And he stumbles across a jail cell in the monastery. And inside the jail cell is a man who's howling. Hence the name of the episode, The Howling Man. And he goes and he talks to this guy. Everybody's telling him, don't talk to him. Don't talk to him. He goes and he talks to the guy. And the guy behind bars tells them, these are all delusional priests. And these delusional priests keep saying that I'm the devil. They keep saying that I'm Satan. And they kept me here for years. And then the priest tell him he is the devil, right? We've kept it after World War I.

We captured the devil, we put him here, it ended all war, and we're keeping him here. And the devil convinces this guy, of course, to let him out, he lets him out, World War II begins. Okay, and the basic lesson is, as the devil says, the greatest, essentially, the same thing they use in the usual suspects is to rip off. They say that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is telling you that he doesn't exist. The same thing is true of totalitarianism, the same thing is true of utopians. The greatest trick they ever pulled is telling you they are not totalitarian utopians, don't believe them.

Brittany says, hey, I'm a 40-year-old mom of four living in Sacramento. This is the first time I read 1984, although I've heard a lot about it. Now, I recognize many of the quotes I've heard people use over the years, especially the last couple of years as originating from this book. How old were you when you first read the book? How did it impact you at the time? So I was probably 13 when I first read this book.

I was, you know, a big reader very, very early. And I remember just being shook by it. I remember more than anything else, the feel of oppressiveness in the book is what struck me. And that's sort of how you remember books, is sort of how you felt while you were reading it, less than what's actually in the book. And what you feel when you read this book is just the walls closing in, and that is constantly

pushed, right? There's no air. There's no, there's no ability to breathe. And that's what Orbal does so beautifully is he really captures that feeling of you have nowhere to turn. You are surrounded on all sides. You cannot escape this.

Stephanie says, I read that conservatives often misuse the term Orwellian because Orwell was a Democratic socialist. In 1984, the fictional book written by Goldstein precisely points out why socialism would fail and why a hierarchy of power will always prevail over equity. How could Orwell be so insightful regarding the threat of tyranny yet so naive as to believe in any form of socialism? So you have to understand that Orwell's early career was spent covering abject poverty in Britain. And also, you have to understand that Britain has a very different system than the United States. The United States is a nearly classless society.

This is something that Alexis de Tocqueville points out in Democracy in America. He talks about the fact that you have these very rigid, class-based systems in places like Britain or in France, in which you're born into a class. You'll probably die in that class. There's not a lot of class mobility. The United States never had that. So if you grew up in a society where the poor stayed poor, and no matter what decisions they made, they were always considered a sort of an underclass,

Then you could see why somebody would say, this system needs to be done away with free market economics doesn't work. We need a complete rejiggering of the system. If you read Road to Wig and Pier, this is what you see from Orwell is that Orwell is an unbelievably clear thinker when it comes to diagnosing the problems of culture. In Road to Wig and Pier, for example, he talks about the laziness that is bred by the welfare state, but at the same time, he sees a rigid class-based system that people can't break out of. And this is why, by the way, socialism has never picked up popularity in the United States because we don't have that same rigid class-based system.

Scott says, in 1984, the movie, it opens with, who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past. The state then proceeds to bend the past to its narrative, as if it were silly putty. This is starkly different to the reverence it receives in Fiddler on the Roof, where they keep their balance with tradition, tradition, and tradition. The state, which seeks to be God, ruthlessly controls its citizens, and suffocates any independence towards diversity and thought. These leaders are human, and necessarily lacking in power, knowledge, and morality. The true God is not His perfecting every way, did not think to limit people in such a manner. He gave very few restrictions.

Winston is told, it is not enough to obey him. You must love him. What does it mean to love that you're a destroyer? Well, this is the basic thing. So Winston has to love Big Brother because that means that his mind has been overcome. If you can learn to love that which has destroyed your independence, that's the only way you can survive. Once your independence has been destroyed, you have two choices. You can either rage against the dying of the light and collapse completely into yourself, or you can join them up.

you can begin to think the way that the state wants you to think. You can start thinking that people you don't like are double plus on good and that two plus two equals five. And by the way, this is the easy path that is the easy path. And this you see, I mean, how weak are we? Honestly, as a society, how weak are we? We're so weak that it used to take full-scale totalitarian regimes with people being shot to death in the Lubianca in order to convince people to believe things that were untrue. Now, to get people to believe that a man is a woman and a woman is a man just requires a bunch of idiots on Twitter yelling at you if you don't put your preferred pronouns in your bio.

Marianne says, amazing parallels between Ingsock and science deniers, natural immunity to COVID and trans athletes, using the pandemic to wield tyrannical government power and rewrite history, 16, 19 CRT, very timely book tries. Yeah. Again, you see a lot of these elements in the culture promoted by the left. When we talk about wiping away history, rewriting history, memory holding things, like the attempt to wipe away history, that is key to these folks. If you destroy history, then there's nothing to cling to. You can always remake the present, always.

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Jen says, hey Ben, over the holidays I read 1984, I was quite intrigued with the world of the book. I found myself comparing it to our world of today rather than reading a criticism of the Soviet Union. The degree of censorship and control I found could be easily expanded into our society as we know it. We have technology which can track our every movement, our every word. Is it so far fetched to believe the censorship of 1984 could happen? No, it's so much easier now. The digital world's made it so much easier. So in this book,

He has to have like an actual memory hole where he takes physical things and he has to throw them in the hole. You know how easy it is to hide physical objects, right? This is why he's able to find curiosity shops with relics of the past.

And the great tragedy, of course, is he can't find anybody to explain those relics to him. But the relics exist. There are always these scraps of the past. When everything is digital, you can rewrite history like this. It is that easy. I mean, to take just a sort of perfect example. So you remember that the star of Juno was a woman named Ellen Page. Ellen Page was a straight woman and then a bisexual woman and then a gay woman and then a transgender man. That is the evolution of Ellen Page.

Now Ellen Page calls herself Elliot Page. Okay, the day that Ellen Page said, my name is Elliot Page and I am a man, that day, everything on the internet changed, every single thing. Her IMDB was changed from Ellen Page to Elliot Page. Elliot Page was now characterized as the star of Juno and the star of the Christopher Nolan movie, Inception.

Everything changed immediately, like within 30 seconds, because in the digital world, you can memory whole information with a push of a button. That's what's super scary. You can just get rid of this stuff. That's why folks get hard copies of books, really. I'm dead serious about this. Get hard copies of books before they censor them. We're going to read a lot of censored books this year.

You know, we're lucky that those are still in circulation within 15 years if the left had its way, within 15 years, within a year if the left had its way, a lot of these books would immediately be censored and out of circulation. Jen continues also, Orwell makes a point of discussing sexuality and the death of having real intimacy with another person. The depth of intimate with which intimacy brings into a relationship cannot be overstated. But today we see the left destroying what it means to have a fulfilling relationship with another person, which includes the death of physical intimacy. I believe this book applies just as much of not more to today than it did back when it was published. I mean, I agree.

I mean, it was obviously much more immediate and you could see the metaphor much more easily because there were states on Earth that dominated half the globe that were mirroring what Orwell was talking about. But again, the hints are the really scary thing. That's what's scary. Ellen says, I have only one comment on the book because I feel everything else will be covered. I know Winston Smith had one corner of his flat where he could hide from the telescreen and the continuous watching eye a big brother. That is left as a ray of hope you can escape the ever-present observation.

Right. I mean, he has this one corner. And so long as he stays in that corner, by the way, he's okay. The problem is he finds another corner and that corner is unguarded. And because that corner, you know, because they have the surveillance apparatus behind the picture in the room that he shares with Julia,

He's screwed. The minute that your mind is laid bare to everyone, that is the minute that you are toast. Lisa says, why do you believe Winston believes the ultimate salvation rebellion from Big Brother and the party will come from the Proles rather than from the outer party members like himself, Parsons, Simes, Julia, et cetera. So what he says that the party members have been indoctrinated into the cult of never having relationships with other people, right? He does say this. Late in the book, he's talking with Julia, I can try and find the exact section.

But he specifically is talking about why he believes that the pearls are the great hope. And the rationale that he gives is exactly this. He says that the pearls are the only ones who have real relationships. It's on page 164 of the Signet Classics edition of the book.

He says, the terrible thing that the party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing made literally no difference. What happened when you vanished and neither, whatever happened you vanished and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again.

They were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet, to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed all important because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties, which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships and a completely helpless gesture and embrace a tear. A word spoken to a dying man could have value in itself. The pearls that suddenly occurred to him had remained in this condition.

They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea. They were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life, he did not despise the pearls or think of them merely as an inert force, which would once a spring to life and regenerate the world. The pearls had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions, but she himself had to relearn by conscious effort. And in thinking that she remembered without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage sock. The pearls are human beings, he said aloud, we are not human.

That I think is the answer to the question, right? Is that the pros are still tied to other people. Now, what I think Orwell and the Glax is that you require institutions to tie you to other people. And those institutions are things like family. It can't just be two people reaching out to each other in the dark. They have to be able to build families. And they have to be able to build institutions. They have to exist in churches. The idea that sort of the pros don't have belief systems is wrong. They do. It's just those belief systems are completely contrary to many of the utopian beliefs of the wild left.

Kate says, when I finished the book, the main thought I had was that God gives us opposition in all things for a reason. Humans need to know sorrow so we can know joy and vice versa. The party like Satan does not want opposition. The only way to have a life without opposition is to create a society fueled by hate and anger. The party is constantly giving them something to hate and forces them to indulge in the hate every day, the two minutes of hate.

The party also purposely takes all joy out of society by eliminating natural affections with spouse and child. By corrupting these two sacred things, the person no longer is able to experience the basic joys in life and thus really has nothing to live for. So the person lives only for the party and can only feel the hate. I also wanted to tell you, I felt compelled to read this book over Christmas. Was excited to hear this was your first book choice. Thank you so much for all that you do. That's it. That's a very solid take. I think that's correct. Avery says,

In my view, Orwell glances over the power that religion has on the will and psyche of a populace and was perfectly purposefully discredited as a factor at all. As if it's a foregone conclusion that a higher power was a ridiculous notion altogether. To add to your summary, if an Orwellian-type future is to be avoided, it will certainly be in part attributed in no small contribution from people of faith. P.S., the book was so depressing, I had to immediately read some Wendell Berry afterwards to get the taste out of my mouth. It is a very depressing book, but that's why it's great. Yes, this is right.

I think that he does make reference to God. It's one of the best parts of the book, honestly. There are only a couple of references to God in the entire book. The section where he explains why Syme has been jailed, or ample forth rather. So there's a poet ample forth, right? And the poet ample forth has been jailed. He's been loyal to the regime. And this section is so good. It's just, it's terrific.

So he asks him, what are you doing in here? He says, to tell you the truth, there's only one offense. Is there not? And you have you committed it? Apparently I have. He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for a moment as though trying to remember something.

These things happen. He began vaguely. I've been able to recall one instance, a possible instance. It was an indiscretion undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word God to remain at the end of the line. I could not help it. He added almost indignantly raising his face to look at Winston. It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was rods. You realize there are only 12 rhymes to rod in the entire language. For days I had racked my brain. There was no other rhyme.

The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed out of it for a moment. He looks almost pleased. A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out some useless facts shown through the dirt and scrubby hair. Has it ever occurred to you, he said, that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes? No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston nor in the circumstances did strike him as very important or interesting, but it is interesting. Okay, the whole point here is that language defines how we live.

And a single mention of the word God is dangerous to the regime. A single mention of the word God is dangerous to the regime. Mark says, hey, Ben, I last read 1984 when I was in high school in the 70s. I found it to be science fictions, which I did not really relate. Reading it for the book club was much more frightening as I saw so many parallels to American society today. It left me in a pretty dark mood. Yeah. I mean, it is supposed to do that. That was the goal.

Sophia says, hey, man, my name is Sophia. I'm 14 in eighth grade. I absolutely love this book. I actually wrote a book report on it for my English class. One of the things I noticed in the book is that during Winston's time in the ministry of love, he seems to develop Stockholm syndrome after the time he spent being tortured by O'Brien. It's not really a question, but something I thought was interesting and wanted to know if you noticed it too. Absolutely. He is converted by O'Brien.

And O'Brien breaks him down. Now, there's been some criticism of the book on how O'Brien breaks him down. The criticism is that when they actually bring him into room 101, and they sick the rats on him, essentially. And he breaks, and he says, do it to Julia. He says, do it to Julia. That this is not enough of a culmination. That O'Brien has broken him down piece by piece by piece by piece. And to get him to turn on Julia using simple, pure physical fear is a misread. That you would actually need him to embrace

Julia as a heretic to the state that he would have to be convinced that he was wrong to have ever engaged in a relationship with Julia and you couldn't use pure physical fear in order to accomplish this. It's a criticism that I think is well taken me to super creepy scene, obviously. It's very visual. But the truth is that what the state would do in the Soviet Union is they would take that which you held most year. It wouldn't just be through pure fear. It would take that which you held most year and they would threaten you with it.

They would force you to believe that this person was bad or this person was terrible, because there was something else that you believed in that was deeply threatened, and physical fear wouldn't be enough to do it. So long as physical fear is the only thing a totalitarian regime has, there are people who will resist, and I think that was the failure of the Soviet Union in the end.

Tennessee preacher says, hey Ben, I have a good amount of questions to ask currently is politics just fake war agreed to by parties to keep them relevant necessary in control and in power? I don't think so. I think that there are some pretty significant differences of opinion. I think at times it can be that. I think sometimes it's just a bunch of posturing, but I think there's some pretty serious issues at play right now. John says rereading 1984 and the two minutes of hate seem like social media.

Could the hatred expressed on social media be distracting people's energy instead of being able to see what the real problems are? Absolutely. Absolutely. So I've said about social media that social media is two minutes of hate and in much the same way. It's a mob that is organized but has no actual target.

I mean, unlike mobs of the past, where he had to, there was something that would happen, and then people for either a good reason or a bad reason would get together and form a mob. Now, we just have a roving mob on the internet waiting for a point of controversy, and then they just snap into action. It's like a badly firing immune system.

And the two minutes of hate is pretty much every day on Twitter. Twitter is two minutes of hate. Beverly says, hey, man, did you find the book a little boring? Love your show, drink daily from the leftist tears mug. No, I think this book is actually one of the least boring classics. I've tried to select books that I think are not boring. That is one of the rules that I have for the book club. So that is going to foreclose some of the

classics that I think are over long. So to take an example, I really have no intention of reading Andrew Cleven's favorite book, George Eliot's Middlemarsh. I try to make it through that myself, and it is interminable. And I'm not afraid to say that. There are certain books where you read 400 pages of it, and you're like, yeah, I can put this down now. And that was one of them for me. Everybody has theirs.

Joseph says, Hey Ben, one thing that circled my mind almost as much as the political theory implications of the book was human psychology. The kind of cultish collectivism that the public has toward the party cannot simply be tossed up to stupid people. There's something much more powerful going on. The topic of psychology is most prevalent in the ministry of love in Ramona one at the end of the book showing how a person can betray himself as close as family members, everything and everyone in between when given enough stress and pain. What are your general thoughts and ideas surrounding the psychology of 1984? So I think that the psychology of 1984 is correct, but

There's a fascinating contrast and we will get to this when we read Brave New World, which I intend on doing sometime this year, probably. The sort of psychology of 1984 is that pain and fear is what drives people into homogeneity. That if you want everybody to obey you, you have to use pain and cudgilling and fear. I think there's some truth to that, you said, on social media. If we inflict enough social pain on you, you will do exactly what we want. You will mirror our priorities and you will start cow telling and malice struggle sessioning with the woke mob. I think that's true.

The Brave New World theory is a little bit different. The Brave New World theory is that we can just innovate you, that we can make it so that you just don't care about major issues. We can inflict just enough pain, but also give you the upside of endless hedonism and you just won't care about things anymore. And as the internet meme puts it, why not both? Because both now apply, right? We're bribing people with endless hedonism and also we are applying just enough pain, just enough pain to actively get people to change their opinions.

Patrick's has, overall, I enjoyed the book. It still has my mind working on Overdrive to think if there would have been any way to even get O'Brien off foot, knowing very well you can't argue with an insane person or one who makes the rules of the game you do not know. I think the answer is no. I think that it is impossible for O'Brien to be misfooted because, again, he has created his own reality. Now, he's sucking you into it. It's the same thing as arguing with folks on the left about issues where they refuse to define their terms. If you saw Matt Walsh's fun

appearance on Dr. Phil, but he literally asked for a definition of a term, a term, a basic term like woman, and was told that it cannot be defined. Okay, that is Orwellian, the refusal to use actual human language in ways that people understand, and instead to arbitrarily defined words, who has to exert control over other human beings, that is Orwellian.

Pat says, hey Ben, a variation on the common does Winston die at the end. Can it be argued? He dies both spiritually and physically at the end simultaneously. In other words, Big Brother can sign him to a life of torment. The moment he finally gave in was the last moment of his life on earth, kind of like Big Brother really does control you from birth to death. So I don't think that he dies physically at the end of the book. I think it doesn't matter. I think the idea is that once he has embraced the state, once he has embraced things, they say the same way that he saw the three old party members basically condemn themselves and then embracing. So it doesn't matter at that point when they execute him. He's already dead.

Susan says there are at least two references to the Catholic Church and numerous mentions of churches throughout 1984. The enemy of the party is called Goldstein, presumably intentionally a Jewish surname. So that's because of Trotsky, because Trotsky was Jewish. Is Orwell pointing out that religion and belief in God contradicts any secular orthodoxy of the party? And it is not unlike the woke orthodoxy of today. Is religious freedom necessary for a free society, even a constitutional republic built upon Judeo-Christian values? Thus, the absence of religion is not freedom according to Orwell. Did he hold any religious beliefs? So Orwell was not a religious man so far as I am aware.

But he does understand the social value of religion pretty clearly. Trent says, hey Ben, just started reading 1984 for the first time. Do you know if well-known terms like Big Brother were originally coined by Orwell as he wrote the novel? Or is that already a well-known term back in 1949 when the book was published? It would be interesting to know which of the terms you know so well today are original to Orwell and his writings. The answer is virtually all of those are original to Orwell.

So there's a whole section at the end of this particular edition. It's a piece of writing from Orwell talking about the history of newspeak and where these terms come from and all the rest and how they narrow down language so that there are only a few words in it.

how language has basically been broken down into as few words as humanly possible that convey as many meanings as humanly possible because the last thing you want is people to be specific and exact and meticulous in that language because then we might actually understand one another beyond the very basics of human existence. Okay, so let's take a look at some of the study questions that I put together for the book club.

What makes Winston unique and how he thinks about big brother? So this is a question that occurred to me while I was reading the book. Why is Winston different than everybody else? It seems like most people who are with the party are just content to go along with the party. And it's not just a matter of pure intelligence. There are some very intelligent people like O'Brien, for example, who goes along with the power party. Now, Orwell's

explanation for this. I don't think it's completely satisfying, right? He, he suggests that, that O'Brien goes along with the party because he just wants power. It's all about that. I don't think that's right. I think the idea for high IQ people is they go along with totalitarian systems because they believe they can mold other human beings. And people who are not as smart go along with totalitarian systems because they believe that there is power in numbers.

And they believe the lies that are told to them by government actors that they can have all their problems solved, so long as enough power is handed over to a centralized government. Does any of this ring familiar? Any of this at all? But what makes Winston unique and how he thinks about Big Brother? Winston has a unique capacity for guilt. This comes out in the book.

This might take anyway. Winston has a unique capacity for guilt. So, for example, there's a whole section where he tells Julia about his childhood and what happened to his mother. And he has nightmares about his mother frequently. And he has this guilt about his mom. Now, he didn't cause his mom to be arrested by the state. He didn't cause any of that, really. He was a brat.

And he was stealing candy because his sister was starving. He was stealing the food from his sister and all of that. But he has all of these guilt issues. Winston has a developed moral sense that has been stifled by the state. And that's what leaves him so far open, right? Because before he even meets Julia, he's writing down with big brother naturally, like instinctively in his journal. He feels disgusted with himself. When he talks about having visited a prostitute, he's disgusted with himself.

He says that it would make no difference because he has committed thought crime and eventually he will be arrested. But again, here's a description. He says he discovered that while he sat helplessly musing, he'd also been writing his though by automatic action, page 18 of this edition. It was no longer the same cramped awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals, down with Big Brother, down with Big Brother, down with Big Brother, down with Big Brother over and over again, filling half a page.

For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria, he began writing, in a hurried, untidy scroll, they'll shoot me, I don't care, they'll shoot me in the back of the neck, I don't care down with Big Brother, they always shoot you in the back of the neck, I don't care down with Big Brother. Right, so he obviously, he starts the book in a state of unrest that other people just don't. Okay, here's another question, here's another one of these questions. Are Winston and Julia truly in love? So, I don't know the answer to this question.

And when I read their relationship, it doesn't seem like a particularly deep relationship because Julia is not a deep character.

And Julia rebels against the state simply almost because she seems like almost an infomaniac the way the world describes her, frankly. Julia is stepping half the party, apparently. But she is rebelling against the party because she is a passionate person and the party is repressing those passions. And Winston is rebelling against the party because he is seeking true human connection with everybody around him, right? Everybody from O'Brien, to Syme, to Parsa, like he's constantly trying to reach out to humans and he's failing to do so.

and like old drunks at bars. So is that a true loving relationship? I have a hard time believing that it is. And maybe that's why the relationship fails. Maybe that's why the relationship fails. Because in the end, Winston's, maybe that's the hope.

Really. And Winston's relationship with Julia is not strong enough to survive because it is rooted in a misapplication of love. And Julia and Winston almost have nothing in common. He's constantly trying to talk to her about ideas. He's trying to read to her the Goldstein pamphlet, for example, and she's falling asleep. She's like, this is boring. I don't care about this. He's constantly talking to her about the problems within the state, and she just doesn't want to hear about it. She just wants to do what she wants to do. And this is the difference between the formation of a real relationship and one that is just based on common opposition to a thing.

A real relationship is formed on common values. I'm not sure that Winston and Julia have anything in common other than they, they don't like big brother. But that's not enough to build a real, like how would they raise a child? Can you imagine them actually having a relationship with a raise a kid? Anyone here? It'd be very difficult to imagine that and maybe that's why it fails. Why doesn't the odd man in the bar remember the past? So you remember the old man in the bar remember the past. You remember there's this old guy in a bar and he, he is confronted by Winston. Winston wants to know about the past and the old guy really doesn't remember much.

And I think what we can chalk that up to is the fact that the truth is there really is not such a thing as individual memory, really. There's sort of collective memory. What I mean by that is how often do you think about things that have happened over the course of your life and you remember it like perfectly clearly? Very few instances in life where you remember it perfectly clearly, particularly actually I think more so in an age where there's so much available visually.

I'll be honest with you, I don't remember off the top of my head even what my almost eight-year-old looked like as a baby. Like I said, what does she look like as a baby? It's hard to remember that because she's changed so much every day. You're my current baby, right? The one who's almost two. If you ask me what she looked like when she was six months old, I would have to look at a picture again. I would.

because I'm reliant on pictures. And maybe that's because we've trained our brains this way. We spend so much time taking pictures and looking at pictures that we're now reliant on them in an unhealthy way. But the truth is that most memory kind of works like this. Memory is extraordinarily malleable.

Memory changes. This is one of the reasons why witness testimony is generally not as reliable as circumstantial evidence in criminal trials. In criminal trials, if you're a lawyer, you're much better off relying on DNA evidence, for example, than a witness identification. Witnesses change their testimony all the time. You can convince people of an awful lot of things. You can tell people things have happened in their life and they will believe you. This is a thing that they will reflect.

So why does the old man not remember the past? Because when you're surrounded by an entire society dedicated to wiping away the past, you lose it as well. The past just doesn't exist for you. You see this happen in real time all the time, right? I mean, it is amazing. It happens politically on a regular basis where a thing that was considered absolutely uncontroversial 20 years ago.

and you remember it, is now considered so wildly controversial you cannot even utter it. If you say, for example, you think that same-sex marriage is immoral, try that in polite company these days. That was the majority position in the United States for literally the entire history of the United States until about 2011, 2012.

Yeah, but nobody remembers a time when they were anti-gay marriage. This sort of thing happens all the time. I'm just picking an example because that's an obvious one, but this is a thing that happens all the time in American life, the collective change of memory. It's a dangerous thing. Memory has to be preserved. That's why we, by the way, we ought to respect our elders, because our elders do have a memory of a time that was different than this one. Why does Winston think O'Brien is actually part of the resistance?

So this is a good question. You know, I mean, I wrote it. So gay to me, but the reason why it's a good question is because you really don't know why. He just kind of looks at O'Brien and thinks he's intelligent and therefore he must be part of the resistance. And he looks at O'Brien, he feels a sort of kinship for him, almost like he's groping out anonymously to O'Brien. And maybe that's because O'Brien is putting out a particular kind of vibe, right? O'Brien is basically a magnet for resistors who is then going to capture and torture. So maybe it's that.

But I think what that really speaks to is that Winston is highly intelligent. That's evident throughout the book. He thinks that everybody else who's highly intelligent is bound to come around to his point of view. And maybe this is also a fatal flaw for Winston is he really does believe that if people are smart, they have to come to the conclusion that there's a problem with Big Brother.

He doesn't think the problem is with him. And this is what keeps him sane, but it's also what leads to his vulnerability. Because it means that he believes that other people who are intelligent, he is guarding himself, but he's not quite careful enough. It turns out that very intelligent people can believe very evil things. And I think this is one of the flaws for Winston. Why do Winston and Julia go to O'Brien together? This is just an interesting plot question. Why? It doesn't make any sense. Winston has an appointment with O'Brien. Why does he bring Julia?

doesn't make any sense. He really should just go by himself. Like if he has any care for Julia, he should leave her behind. He knows it's a risky move. He's not actually sure that O'Brien is a member of the resistance. So bringing Julia with him is an enormous tactical error. And of course, is the dead giveaway to O'Brien that Julia is going to be the point of leverage over Winston in the first place.

And I think maybe the answer is just that human beings need, again, Winston's entire character is that he's very needy. Winston needs other people. He needs other people because the state has deprived him of all other people. And so he brings Julia along with him because he needs the backup. He feels that he needs the backup. And once he's reliant on other people, he is, uh, he's cruising for, for a

What should we learn from Julia's disinterest in the Goldstein pamphlet? I think the idea behind Julia's disinterest is number one. I'm not sure that Julia and Winston are fundamentally compatible. But beyond that, I think that the idea here is that you don't actually have to be an intellectual to resist the regime. And this is something I think a lot of intelligency on the conservative side of the aisle would be wise to recognize. The people who vote

for the things that you like, don't have to understand the vagaries of American trade policy. They don't have to have read all the old comms of William F. Buckley. They don't have to have believed in the writings of Edmund Burke or John Walker, even know who those people are. What they do have to have is an animus for untruth and they have to have a willingness to fight it. Maybe that's why, you know, Juliet not caring about the Goldstein pamphlet, maybe that's why that matters.

Why is O'Brien so focused on converting Winston rather than disposing of him? So I think the answer here, O'Brien sort of says it himself, is that it is more important, the more you resist, the more important it is for the state to break you. If the state just shoots everybody who resists,

Then what you're really saying is we are too weak to overrun you, to change you. You see this with every revolutionary movement. I think we are observing a bit of a revolutionary cultural moment in the United States from the left, not a bit of one, a pretty major one. And you see the fury with which the intelligent heretics are treated is extraordinary, it's exorbitant.

I mean, the outpouring of wrath, like the smarter you are, the more they hate your guts when it comes to the left. The more they feel like they must, they must break you. It is imperative that they break you. If you have the right credentials, particularly, they must come after you. They must destroy you. And it's the same thing here, because if you can break the strongest person on the other side and convert them to your point of view, what can't you do? It's a sign of the... He must be allowed to live. I actually don't think they kill.

Winston at the end of the novel. I think they let him be like a living example to everybody else. He just wanders around as a good example of a resistor, and they bring him up on stage every so often, and he talks about his sins. There's something totalitarian regimes do all of the time. And why is Winston's betrayal of Julia the end of his resistance? So this is a question that occurs. Why don't they just get back together? I mean, the state really isn't following them. They could understand one another. They could say, listen, I understand. You stick to rats on, they stick to rats on your face. I kind of get it.

Or Julia says, you know, they were torturing me. So, you know, I'm gonna forgive you and you forgive me and we'll get back together. And I think the answer is because what they actually betrayed is their belief that their own feelings and power to resist were unbreakable. Winston's confidence in his own inability to be shattered is what is broken. And once that's broken, it can't be revived. They can't have the passion they once had from one another. And they don't have the basis for a future because they can't have kids.

But if they were able to have kids, then maybe they could get back together. If they could have kids, maybe they say to each other, we have to forgive ourselves because we have to live for the future and we have to create another generation. But inherently, once you get rid of that next generation, once that next generation is no longer in the picture, then it really is about the level of pleasure you take in the other human being. And how could you take serious pleasure in another human being who had betrayed you to the authorities? Very, very difficult, obviously.

All righty, let's go back to a couple of your questions here. Chris said, hey, Ben, what are your thoughts on the character of Winston? Are we supposed to like him? I found myself really not liking him. I don't think you're supposed to like Winston. I think that you are supposed to see yourself in Winston. You're supposed to see your own weakness. Winston's not a likable character. He's somebody who's been perverted. You're supposed to sympathize with him because he is almost a neophyte being ushered around this terrible, terrible world. But I don't think you're supposed to like him particularly.

martin says of course or will systopia is based on a perversion of socialism or if you like a perfect expression of socialism however can to be said the novel is also warning against extremism and totalitarianism under any banner the idea of excommunicating non-believers in punishing them can be applied within extreme form of any political belief well i mean that is or was point he does make this point he does say it doesn't matter what the actual political system of oceania or east asia are none of that matters all the matters that there's a totalitarian their goals matter a lot less than than their methods which is really about the magnet about the the

the expansion of power. Maddie says, was Julia pregnant? It was that her waist had grown thicker and a surprising way had stiffened. If she was, what is the significance? So if she was pregnant, which is a thought that I actually hadn't thought about. So good on you, Maddie, for catching that line.

She was, so I think there are two ways of reading that. One is that she's pregnant. The other is that she is, she's let herself go, right? The vitality has been sucked out of her. But if she were pregnant, then it would suggest that there is a hope and the hope lies in the future generations. It lies in the child that they have created together.

Ava says, hey, man, if you were to write a sequel to 1984, how would you continue after where or what left off? When Winston is released after being brainwashed, the life is drained out of him, all hope is lost. So maybe we combine this question with the last one. Maybe you follow it a generation down the line and Julia's had a baby and now that baby grows up and how does that baby resist big brother? Folks, if you enjoyed that, go check out the rest of the episodes over at Daily Wire Plus right now.