The Book Club: 1984 by George Orwell with Dave Rubin

[Music] welcome back to the book club i'm michael knowles the book this month very timely 1984 by george orwell but first in our fast-paced world it is tough to make reading a priority we all know that well at least it used to be but at thinker.org they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-size form you can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes from old classics like dale carnegie's how to win friends and influence people to recent bestsellers like jordan peterson's 12 rules for life if you want to challenge your perceptions if you want to expand your horizons most importantly if you want to sound smart at parties go to thinker.org that is t-h-i-n-k-r.org e no time for that to start a free trial and put your mind in motion here to help me understand the world we're living in i'm sorry i mean 1984 by george orwell the great dave rubin dave thank you for being here nols it's good to be with you i mean that is not a joke where you just started there this is the world we are living in i want you to i was thinking of calling you winston and you can call me winston throughout this we should just call each other winston we are living because we're all winston now yes winston the protagonist of 1984 tell me if this sounds to you like a paragraph of a novel or like a news story about our world right now wait before you even read the quote you could literally pick any quote yes from the book and it is applicable now so whatever you're going to say i am going to agree but i will jump off i've noticed this one actually some people have been picking up on this 1984 is having a sort of renaissance it is days every record has been destroyed or falsified every book has been rewritten every picture has been repainted every statue and street and building has been renamed every date has been altered and that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute history has stopped nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right sounds like life on twitter yes right i mean an endless present and that was part of what the system was trying to do the ministry of truth and winston worked there and he was one of the people that was basically using language yeah to confuse people he was intentional i mean that was the whole purpose of all of this was to get people to question everything what does two plus two equal again i mean this was the ultimate purpose i want to get to this language yeah because i think this is the rookie uh just a quick summary for those of you who haven't read it yet and if anyone hasn't read it i guess you're getting the real life experience of it but it's still worth reading to help you understand especially your world right now it's about winston as you say winston is this guy he's living in a totalitarian state called oceania it's all run by one party he's in the outer party he's still in the party but he's in the outer party there's the inner party that really runs things he works at the ministry of truth what does the ministry of truth do spreads lies spreads lies rewrites the past branding it's all about branding it's all about branding they have this area where they torture political dissidence what's it called the ministry of love and their the the totalitarian government is referred to as big brother big brother is always watching you through screens through tv cameras always monitoring you winston has this sort of illegal love affair with this girl julia and they're just trying to escape this modern totalitarian madness finally they're caught out doesn't end well it does not end well for him and then as you just alluded to at the very end they're torturing him and torturing him and trying to break his spirit and trying to break his mind how do they do it he fears rats and they put basically a contraption on him with rats and they're trying to in effect get him to sort of out himself and her and the people that are that are rebelling in essence and he basically points to her and and causes them to put the rat trap on her and so that's sort of what we're dealing with right now well and there's also this this point once he says go get her go get her there's this intellectual admission where they say what is two plus two yeah and what does stripless do is four yeah no no five you have to say you have to believe that two plus two equals five look everything it's so bizarre to see this um right now because or to read this so i originally read the book i think i was in 11th grade it was long this is like 92 or something like that 93 it's a long time ago and then i reread it over the last couple months and you know on twitter it's like everything that we're seeing nothing means anything anymore the way words are constantly used or everything that we hear without making this too political to the day right now you know it is hard not to but so much of what we hear about from the left is exactly what 1984 is about so words are violence now but violence is not violence these are things that they create to actually make us question everything and then once you question everything well then gender is up for question and all of the things that should be settled are no longer settled and then what i completely forgot about that i found was interesting is that one of the things that they're also trying to sort of untie that the ministry of truth is trying to untie is the idea of time and it does feel like right now that time feels a little weird it's partly because of lockdown partly because you know we're trapped at home we're all on social media but doesn't time feel sort of sort of strange right now like anything could happen at any given minute right and i think that all leads to a sort of well sick society where two plus two eventually will be five if they just tell you there are so many of these contradictions or absurdities that come up i mean the three slogans of the party that you've always got to repeat they've got it on the back of the book right here war is peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength this could be the chance of protesters that we see marching all around the west quite literally i mean one of the things that i talk about all the time now is that it's the anti-racists who are the racists right if you if all the people that are running around now proclaiming that the rest of us are racists they're the ones that are pushing racism into society everywhere they're the ones that are saying black people should have special dorms and that white people shouldn't you know be uh be allowed to have certain jobs or that they shouldn't be considered equally those are racist notions so we live in a time where everything has been flipped and for the few of us that uh have a little bit of the spark of winston it's like how do you make sure you're not one of the people who at the end is going 2 plus 2 equals 5. i'm not sure i'll tell you one other thing i'm actually watching the handmaiden's tale right now did you watch it i did i've seen some of it so so i'm watching it right now the parallels to 1984 are absolutely incredible because this is exactly uh what the main character june is going through and it's so funny because the show came out a couple years ago and everyone kept saying this is what's happening in trump's america except i'm watching it now in the midst of you know what's happening with black lives matter and everything else and it's like no it's all the left it's this america this is america it's not trump that's doing this it's the other guys that are doing this so i think more than anything else there's a beautiful thing when you read a work of fiction when you can go holy cow this was not only it must have been true or true enough to have made sense when it was written what year was the book written like book was i guess written in 1948 published i think in 1949. okay so 49 i mean think about that 70 plus years ago um but yet feels like literally everything we're going through right now yeah that's an incredible uh compliment to a writer and to a to a work and he articulates this concept i mean i think the great one you use is that the people who say they're anti-racist are the ones who are acting in a racist way and the way george orwell describes it is he calls it doublethink so doublethink is this idea that you hold two contradictory ideas at exactly the same time so you can never admit that the ideas don't make any sense but you so for instance we have to get rid of america's terrible past which had segregation and the way we're going to do that is institute segregation through segregation look think about it this way what's like the hottest book on the left right now it's white fragility yes what's the subtitle of white fragility i don't know what it is exactly but in essence it's something like how white people can blah blah that's racist yeah that in and of itself is racist forget white fragility well but then if you say how white people the implication is all white people are this whatever this is that is racist so you they hold these two ideas that are completely at odds with each other and they hold it because that allows you to believe anything basically at any given time this is the key you know so many words just have entered our language because of this book the words like doublethink or newspeak or a big big brother is one and newspeak is the one i want to focus on because newspeak is political correctness and the theory of newspeak is that the party big brother is going to get rid of all the old language that people have used for centuries and centuries and replace it with this new ideological party approved clean language which sounds robotic it sounds so crazy instead of saying something is bad you'll say it's ungood or double plus ungood right right but so what does that sound like right now it sounds like he him they her all of these things so again it's like wow how did he do this in 1948 i'm not exactly sure i think there's some relation to you know it's after world war ii and there there's obviously some parallels to the way the nazis use language and things like that um but it's still it's still pretty remarkable and i guess the premise as you touched on yeah is that if i change my words if i change the language i will change reality this ties into the insistence of the government you have to believe that two plus two equals five because if we all really believe that then that will be true and it seems to be the same thing when you call a he when you call him her you have really substantively changed who he is yeah well this what's interesting about this is i think when most people maybe not my conservative friends but when most people think of like the totalitarian authoritarian state coming they always think it's going to be a far-right state like the idea in 1984 is that the ministry of truth like the whole apparatus is somehow thought of as far right i think is the idea um if you like something like v for vendetta it's the idea is that it's this far right political machine that's silencing people and everything else and yet look what's happening in reality now in reality now it's this far left thing that's seemingly bubbling up from the bottom yeah and that's an interesting flip on this so it's it's one of those things where it's like there's so much truth and yet there's still these like offshoots where you can kind of go oh it's not exactly right but it's like it's pretty much there well even slightly beyond 1984 but still on the themes and still on george orwell george orwell wrote a very famous essay called politics in the english language and in it he says that the word fascism no longer has any meaning all fascism means is something i don't like and when you look around today that that word probably more than any other word has been abused beyond having any meaning yeah well i think one of the interesting things is the way that we all we're all guilty of it at times the way we all can use these words to mean more than they're supposed to mean or we widen them but look this is something we've talked about forever you call everybody a nazi congratulations now nobody's in nazi you call everybody a fascist and then when the real fascists come nobody is gonna be is gonna be listening or paying attention you know it's the boy who cried wolf in essence so i think there's there's just sort of this endless there's this endless destruction of everything that's true i guess that's really what the book is about in many ways more than anything else yes that there there is truth there actually is truth and there actually is history and there actually is time and and a uh chronology that shows us what is real but if you can destroy that yeah if you can destroy that fabric you can get people to say two plus two is five and it'll make sense so i'm obviously frustrated as i read this because i look around i say oh my gosh it's really happening there's this one bit of the story that a lot of people don't talk about but there there's this recurring old nursery rhyme that winston and julia keep going back to and the line goes oranges and lemons say the bells of state clements you owe me three farthings say the bells of saint martin's and they seem to get this real joy this real pleasure out of going back does just some nursery rhyme certainly doesn't sound like anything that now the party-controlled language talks about anymore so there's this this other part where winston is getting getting down and dirty with julia right she tells him that she's been with lots of men before him and instead of being repulsed by that winston gets excited and he says anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope [Music] in this clinical ideological society how is it that actually a little bit of corruption fills you with hope well because humans are supposed to use their imagination we're supposed to hope we're supposed to dream we're supposed to have passion we're supposed to have sex we're supposed to live right like we're supposed to do all of those make mistakes you're supposed to make mistakes you're supposed to do things so that you can either realize they're good things to do that fulfill you or maybe they don't or they do in the short term and then you have to reevaluate all those things but in a super sterilized world when you can never break that conformity then the tiniest hint oh i'm sleeping with somebody who's really been around the block is suddenly really is suddenly really really exciting and by the way we see many versions of that right now with political correctness which is sort of like if you keep everybody completely politically correct all the time suddenly we'll all start wanting to be not politically correct now i think that's good right now right we need more people to break out of it but you know the idea of political correctness generally comes i think like most things it's the road to hell is pay for good intentions when people say they want to be politically correct they want to make sure that people aren't offended now you do that too long and what are you left with you're left with just nothing you're left with an inability to do anything so when we watch people cancel each other on twitter and we watch mobs and everything go after everybody in a way they're they're trying to pretend they're pious i'm so great and if anyone else steps out of line and says something that that i don't like i don't believe i'll destroy them because i'm so much better because i'm so much better and because human nature can be perfected right i mean of course it could be of course we're on the path there if only we had the right language and the right pressure of time and the erasure of statute a little more power is always good this is why when i think of newspeak when i think of winston talking about the corruption it reminds me that political correctness which is our own version of newspeak it doesn't just divide along ideological lines perfectly or rather should i say partisan lines it's not like it's only democrats and no republicans absolutely actually what a lot of surveys show is that a big dividing line is wealth how much money you make people who would be considered by the likes of our society elites tend to be much more okay with political correctness than people who are at the lower run what's the difference between an old crazy woman and an old eccentric woman it's money right you're if you're an old woman with no money and you're babbling on you're the crazy cat lady and if you're an old woman who's rich oh she's eccentric music what a character yeah that's it i mean that really is it this is one of the famous lines that winston writes in his in his diary he says if there is hope it lies in the proles the proles like the proletarians or the lower class of people they don't really follow all these rules they're kind of ignored by the the party there's another word for that what's that the deplorables the deplorables the irredeemables yeah the irredeemables that that's exactly what it means it means that the if there's any hope it's that the people who the system constantly throws out constantly mocks constantly uh tries to destroy they're the only ones who will be able to say something true yeah uh even right now just listening to to what goes on in the in the political uh ether it's like i hear a lot of people being like you know i'd love to pull a john galt one day you know and just just disappear all together come from iran these days i assume you've done uh atlas shrugged not yet you haven't done it yet but we have to do yeah so but that people will just self-select out and then you know who will be left the only people who will have a flicker of anything interesting to say will be the deplorables right yeah this deplorable issue i think comes up i think there is a sense that the the elites are just not even aware the party is not even aware of of the the seeds of its own destruction but there is a little bit of a performance it kind of feels like now it does but the performance is what worries me even most you might you mentioned twitter yeah on twitter it seems like every day now some random person is plucked out of obscurity we are all whipped up into a frenzy to hate this person there's something in central park i didn't like that she yelled at a guy or whatever and now we this person is the villain of the country and then it that's gone goes down the memory hole remember another term that comes from 1984 we is completely erased and forgotten about there is a category in 1984 called two minutes hate every day all the people in the party are whipped up to hate the villain the rebel the goldstein goldstein is the man they put him on the tv screen you gotta just hate this guy two minutes then it's over then you move on yeah sort of feels like the purge right the movie the purge i mean the idea is you get one day a year to do all the horrible stuff that's what the movie the purge is about and yes this is what we do we find these people who are nobodies that have no effect over your life that you've never heard of they did something you don't like ah destroy them and what's and really it's never about them right it's always about the signal that that sends across the world which is you don't want to be that guy you don't want to be that guy but there's one other thing i want to touch on winston which is as he's working at the ministry of truth and as he's obscuring reality and changing words and all this stuff he's miserable yeah and i think that that's actually really interesting because i think if we look at the people who are the most politically correct now they are miserable because that is not it's anti-human in many ways to to be so against thought to be so against someone joking even if that joke crosses whatever your subjective line is to be so against that is actually the reverse of what being a human is which is about using your mind so i think it's just sort of interesting that the people that were the ones putting this stuff into the world we're miserable miserable yeah and winston he needs to take shots of this gross gin just to get through the day but then when he's got this love affair this little secret hideout with with julia all of a sudden he doesn't need the gin he doesn't need the substances and by the way you know they've done a couple articles i've seen about facebook censors that all become alcoholics and miserable and suicidal i'm not kidding because they're literally doing the exact same thing winston is doing they're they're looking out on facebook and they're going what can we get rid of what word is okay what word is not okay do i kind of like this guy then i can let that one slide no i don't like this guy so we got to take care of that and they become miserable because of it but the most depressing part of this book i know i thought we'd already got well so it was funny because when i was rereading it i was like there has to be something at the end that will that will kind of no like want us to continue right especially people like us that put our thoughts out there right and it doesn't really give you anything the most depressing part of this book for me is that there's this rebellion that you know this this revolution the two minutes of hate goldstein right goldstein has a secret book and the book is going to tell you all about that party and it's gonna so winston meets these other people in the inner party they give him the secret book he reads the secret book and it turns out it's a setup or or if it's not a setup it's still a setup because he's given the the book by a member of the inner party that eve in this system it even has its own opposition within it there is no escape right even that opposition might be a false hope or a safety valve on the utter repression what are we supposed to do with that well i think this is what people would say is sort of like our political system now is like this sort of fake duopoly yes right it's like this fake we've got you know the democrats or the liberals and the republicans the conservatives whatever and it's like it seemingly is that those are the only choices and yes as long as the system only allows those choices well then those are the only choices but are those really the only choices you got to believe this or you got to believe this i mean no one really lives their life like that but unfortunately the whole system and in this case everything that that he was led to believe leaves you with that and and that uncomfortability is even worse this is knowing about it right like it's easier to just be a guy on one side or the other side whatever it is and then just run with it but to know it and then be like ah what do i do now because you look and it seems like no matter who wins the election no matter which party wins certain things just keep on happening we lose more and more of our freedoms we rack up more and more of our debt the culture keeps going more and more in one direction it doesn't seem to matter who wins i dare make a pro-trump comment i don't know if i'm allowed we'll certainly be censored by the ministry of truth on the internet somebody's not going to be happy about this but in many ways when i was rereading it i kept thinking man what they needed was a trump yeah you know what i mean because what was trump were what is trump he just sort of broke through all of this if you're if you're talking about how do you break the duopoly how do you break the false choices how do you break political correctness all these things who has been the greatest breaker of those things it's been trump so it's like in a weird way if the book had ended and there suddenly was this person who was just willing to do it for some very bizarre reason and perhaps he was orange and had weird hair like then i guess you see some hope but you don't get the orange i hate to be more pessimistic than you because i i see the same sort of thing you do yeah i think part of the reason why people in both parties don't like donald trump is because he broke the rules he messed up the system a little though i do think it sort of remains to be seen if that will have a lasting effect or if the culture and the the politics keeps careening in the same direction yeah the question i want to leave you on is how do you think he did it what was it that he saw in the 1940s that could predict our present moment yeah so i thought a lot about that because i had a feeling you might come at me with a question like that and as i sort of referenced earlier so okay so he wrote it in the late 40s so you're coming off of world war ii um i so i don't know specifically and i'm sure people have have thought about this a lot and i was really trying to think through i think maybe more than anything else what makes good literature or what makes a good movie or any piece of art that's true is that it is able to capture something that is timeless and and the the struggle constantly you know this is why the struggle right now even though we think of it as democrat versus republican or trump vs biden or whatever it is it's like all it really is always is you versus the system it's the individual versus the system and sometimes the system is better meaning it's more open to freedom and more open to individuals and sometimes it's not and i think that that is what was carried through from 1948-49 into 2020 and it feels right now that the system is very against the individual you know and and i think that that might yeah i don't know do you have a better answer on that i don't know if i have a better answer i i i think your point is right that george orwell is this individualist you know and he's kind of looking out at the system though i again might have a more pessimistic view on your point about literature it would seem to me we can see communism fails because it just totally misunderstands human nature the way communism ends up is so different from the theory of communism they're so disconnected that it can't work and the same thing is true of fascism i think the question we're maybe trying to deal with now is is that true of liberalism too we've got these three great ideologies of modernity fascism communism and liberalism we thought that liberalism was the last one standing at the end of history that's what we were told at least by the the people at the end of the cold war well maybe history takes a little bit longer to resolve and and as you know this is what you're bringing to me at the end you're handing me these liberalism dead at the end of this thing you know this is my life's work i know this is a this is the real thing you thought that this is an incredible sham to get me here you thought 1984 was depressing at the end this is the most depressing but well i'm really i am glad you brought that up though because that that is the part of me that that is fearful of what is happening right now is that that the experiment of liberalism and the experiment of free speech and enlightenment and all those things that it really does feel like it's getting to its end right now that the end of it is that this this more liberal supposedly this ultra lefty progressive thing will come in through the soft spot of liberalism the openness of liberalism and and dismantle every statue destroy every university crush every newspaper i mean everything all the great achievements of liberalism and that's exactly what this book is about yeah so how he saw it i guess yes it is a connection between 10 years before the nazis were literally burning books what are we doing right now we are we're not burning books yet although npr did put out that thing about how you have to decolonize your bookshelf which in essence is a modern book they're not going to write oh burn all your books but they will say get rid of bad books 1984 right this this is it i i wish that we could have a greater killing here but what is the hope what what really is though because as i was reading the end i kept thinking maybe i'm forgetting that there is a glimmer of hope you know what here is my hope i suppose at the end which is a little bit of a plug for this show as well you cannot remain a slave if you are literate and you read you can't do it this is why all the totalitarian regimes in history have tried to burn all of the books have tried to stop people from reading have tried to have anti-literacy laws and what george orwell is describing here the reason it resonates with not just now perhaps at a particularly orwellian moment but it has resonated for so many years is because he is describing something that we know is real something that we experience to varying degrees throughout our entire relationship to politics and as they burn the books as they topple the statues as they erase the history as they memory whole everything that we cherish that we we thought we could rely on there is still a little bit of hope i think for those of us who are willing to crack the spine of a book or two and see the vast difference between reality and all the propaganda that the system is spewing at us ah knowles i want to let you end the show with that because it was a perfect beautiful ending but i have like 10 things i want to say well lay it on me let's do it this is well this idea this idea of the memory hole i wanted to mention it before but don't you feel like that's something we're also going through right now that we forget wait a minute two years ago the biggest thing was michael cohen testimony is going to take down donald trump or russian this or stormy daniels or remember ukraine little before your time why 2k was going to kill all of us that these you know what's going to kill us now 5g is going to kill us and net neutrality was supposed to kill us and we killed um what's his name in iran uh we killed world war 3. and that was going to start world war iii but they all get memory hold yeah they all we suddenly were outraged uh for this period of time and also even something more perverse like they all happen in these very short bursts also and then once that period of time is over you never do it again so remember me too it burned hot for like three weeks and then the second we like close the book on that we move on it's not as if those things still aren't happening or something else but but that and then the other thing was that the phrase orwellian it's not just the other phrases but his name yes actually uh became a phrase that tells you something really good happened that's it tells you he wrote a good book yeah that's andrew's book in the spirit of telling people to go out and read books yes in the spirit of not burning books you should tell them to read your book don't burn this book i'd like to believe i would like to believe that my my book is in many ways the last i mean i don't want to be so hoity-toity but i it's better than yeah they would describe a large woman she was rubenesque um but it is uh in many ways everything that i wrote about in that book is is fighting for the same things that winston ended up sort of giving away at the end um so read 1984 forget don't burn this book it's a good book too but read 1984 it's a good sign yeah it's a pretty good sequel it's a good sequel this one first if i end up in a contraption with rats on me i'm putting you it was those guys i'm gonna be on the inner party i'm gonna be the one who ratted you out you're kidding me dave thank you so much we can talk about this all day yeah but we'll we'll have to move on to do your book next i'm michael knowles this is the book club see you next time this video was made possible by a generous donation from the william s knight foundation thank you so much for watching this episode of the book club on prageru prageru is a 501c3 non-profit organization so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air please consider making a tax deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming thank you very much you

Channel: PragerU

Views: 1,022,948

Keywords: prageru, prager university, reading list, read more, books, book recommendation, reading recommendation, literature, novels, classic lit, summer reading, great works, great books, masterpiece, podcast, autobiography, fiction, storytelling, authors, writers, stories, bookclub, podcasts, greatbooks

Id: SbTQJGxk95o

Length: 31min 27sec (1887 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020