Modern Times, Pt. II

I've offended some people lately because of my inflexible and intolerant attitude toward an administration that hasn't taken office yet. And since some have found my tone "ignorant and insulting," I'll say no more about Obama and the war for the next six months or so, but rest assured I'll be back early in June to remind my critics that I told them so.

There are times I'm tempted to just forget politics altogether, but I can't seem to shake the obsession. Maybe if I was as pessimistic as George Orwell I'd stop arguing politics, since we only continue to debate and argue if we think we have a chance of convincing someone to change his or her mind.

The thing is, I know the things Orwell knew, and there's no way to dodge them. I know those things because he told them to me, which was the purpose of "1984," to communicate reality. It was the most prophetic book of the century recently passed, because Orwell understood the pathology of modern industrial societies. He sliced through the propaganda of fascism, and Stalinist communism, and liberalism and saw what they all had in common -- the role of perpetual warfare, its economic and psychological necessity in the modern state, and the ability of modern citizens of all political persuasions to both enthusiastically endorse the war and at the same time deny that they are doing so.

Orwell, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx -- here were three of the deepest thinkers of modern times. Each of them had flaws and weaknesses, being human, but together taken together they reveal the essence of the human dilemma as it unfolds under the radically changed conditions of modern times, as different from pre-modern times as pre-modern times were from the age of the hunter-gatherers. What these three thinkers had in common is the capicity to reveal truths about ourselves that are disturbing and disquieting, but which we ignore at our utmost peril.

I'd be much better off if I was apolitical. My life would be tranquil, but I don't know what I'd write about.