Casually Completing Classics: 1984 Part 15 (2.9.3)

 Orwell's essay is starting to get questionable here:

 The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

I would argue that most middle class people are happy to remain middle class, or maybe slightly move up to a more comfortable middle class, not to become high class. I have no idea where his idea that a common aim for the low class is to abolish a class system at all comes from.

Likewise, his claim that mechanization removes the need for social levels, even if people still have different jobs. Even if we're entirely post scarcity, some jobs, hobbies, etc. will still be more prestigious than others.

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

This part is spot on though. Along with:

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.

Alternative facts!

But remember, 1984 is a book by a socialist about bad socialists, so:

Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. 

Julia dozes through the whole thing and tells Winston he's good at reading, because of course.