If truth is only in the mind, do thoughts become easily manipulable and malleable? That is the question that came up while watching a video on the thoughts and ideas of George Orwell.
I have been thinking about his work, “1984” recently because of how similar some of the themes are to the writing projects I am working on.
For those of you who don’t know me, I am a computer technician by trade, but I aspire to become a Science Fiction writer and have been working on learning the craft for over 10 years in my free time. I often get myself stuck on projects I can’t finish, but I am getting better at focusing in on modern fictional writing projects that are closer to home. I am still working on a few ideas I have for a Sci-Fi project, but I don’t consider myself to have enough experience to write a novel yet.
Anyway, the topic of objective truth came up for me this week and I thought it would be a good idea to touch on some thoughts I have about our modern world in relationship to this idea.
There must be some objective truth out there. I know that my thoughts a beliefs are not universal truths. But for some reason, I still believe in the idea that there is one objective truth out there in the universe.
Not the objective truth that leads to self-righteous moralism, even though I often fall into this trap. I don’t want to be so angry at the world that I project my self-righteousness onto others. At the same time, I have been especially concerned about the concepts of totalitarianism and how it shows up in the world today (or at least in Western society) and getting worse with each passing year and I wonder how to talk about this topic with others.
While researching for a project, I stumbled upon the Flint Michigan water crisis and started to review the news sources on it because it could act as a backdrop for a story I am working on. I knew it was a bad situation, but I did not know the extent of how bad it was, and still is, from a perspective of political corruption. From first glance, it seems to me, to be an open and shut case of criminal behavior by those who were part of handling that situation. And yet, after being taken to court, with evidence that seemed to be glaring, the case was closed and none of the people involved suffered any real consequences for their actions.
We could say that this is one isolated incident, but if you look around, it’s happening everywhere. Just take a look at the recent Horizon Post Office scandal or the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan for reference.
I’m often baffled by the concept of immortality. I’m not saying that everyone should adhere to the concepts behind moral behavior. What I am noticing is that some behaviors can be detrimental to society. The big scandals mentioned above seem to stem from idea of selfishness in the form of capitalism.
George Orwell believed capitalism incentivizes conditions of suffering leading to concentrations of power and wealth, which in my view, eventually leads to totalitarianism.
I wonder, how many people believe we are moving towards a state of totalitarianism? The bigger question for me is why these behaviors are being accepted as the norm?
It’s like we are so wrapped up in our personal truths that we are failing to see that, if we don’t agree on something, the harder it will be to effect change for the next generation.
We see countless examples of the warning against totalitarianism in art and media, I wonder if it has done anything to change behavior. Why are we still creeping our way toward a world that is going to be inherently harmful to its population?
Do these warnings actually help to change society? George Orwell wrote about these subjects almost a hundred years ago. What has changed since then, other that the internet has made it easier to transmit ideas?
The below quote is relent to my writing as I also want to bring about a more humane world:
“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it” - George Orwell
This is why I want to write Dystopian Science Fiction. I want to keep reminding myself that this is not our natural state of being. There are plenty of us who are good people, but somehow bad situations have run amok and something has to change, and soon, in my humble subjective truth. I hope we can find a way to agree on that someday.