Perhaps you haven’t read George Orwell’s novel 1984 recently. I have and find its message horrible and deeply disturbing. It is more affecting now than it was when I read it first as a youngster. Today we seem closer to the world of 1984 than we did, say, thirty years ago. I think Orwell deliberately set the time in the near rather than far future because the stealthy hold of his negative utopia was already tightening its grip on us, and he sought to warn us of the imminent danger; if not when the book was published then when we would still be able to see it with the clarity of hindsight a few decades later, when it was still not too late.

An example from the B-vocabulary of Newspeak is more than alarming now: ‘Prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses.’ In this context, the American Fox News¹ organisation combine prolefeed with doublethink of which their leading example of the latter is Fair and Balanced reporting of the news.

Doublethink is already endemic to our society. As timepasses, our language is steadly being eroded and debased further. Why should this be important? Words are the software of the mind. Without words that have clear meaning it is impossible to accomplish clear, critical thinking. Today it is extraordinarily difficult to engage people in discussion because they don’t know, can’t understand, or won’t understand. Do not underestimate the power of prolefeed and blind-faith. And the root cause of all our problems is lust for Power. Power and its accumulation is the means and the end.

If you haven’t done so recently, I recommend that you read George Orwell’s novel 1984.