Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Paradox. (Geddit? ... Pair o' Docs? ...I'm really trying.)

"WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."

Leaving aside for the moment the frustrating lack of punctuation in that thought, and also pleading forgiveness for the obnoxious and apparently irrevocable underline effect, I will now point out the paradoxical nature of Big Brother's three favorite slogans. It's pretty obvious.

War is the opposite of peace. They are antonymns. However, the Party would like everyone to believe that they live in a peaceful society, even though they don't, so they brainwash everyone to believe this stuff.

Likewise, freedom is the opposite of slavery. That sentence (fragment? run-on?) makes no sense, but people believe it because they no longer have evidence to the contrary.

The final "Ignorance is strength" idea is slightly less ridiculous, but only because ignorance is not the opposite of strength. Ignorance is a subset of weakness, though, and weakness is the opposite of strength. Everybody's drinking gin and beer all the time instead of water, though, and they're all (except Winston and a few others maaaybe) too gullible to understand that of course war isn't peace, and freedom isn't slavery, and ignorance isn't strength.


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