GEORGE ORWELL AT 111

June 25th is the birthday of a very interesting man.  It is the 111th birthday of Englishman George Orwell, the man who gave us a birds eye view of what will become of us if we continue to sit complacently by and accept despotism.

In America we are already well on our way toward the dystopian future that Orwell predicted.  In fact we are well past what even Orwell thought was monstrous.

What makes us so subservient to our own displacement and enslavement?  What makes us so willing to sit by and watch our degradation?  I have come to believe that it is our own personal concupiscence that distracts us, makes us in fact enjoy our "freedoms" (aka licence). Casting around for the culprits responsible I often find them by looking in the mirror.  Do we not spend more time watching the idiot box rather than spending it in the Confessional box?  Others distract themselves with the latest useless electronics gadgets, an eerie realization of the first few scenes in John Wyndham's science-fiction masterpiece, The Day of the Triffids.  Those who are unfamiliar with that work should read it - if nothing else just the first few chapters.  And while Wyndham's fantasy goes into a different direction than the direction aimed at by our present generation the end result is pretty much the same: enslavement and death.

Those of us who have family members hooked on, say, video games have an especially hard row to hoe.  Like drunkards, video gamers do not want to kick this useless and degrading habit.

Some distract themselves with pornography, another of those addictions which can enslave and also prove useful to the enslavers.  This vice has made many accept contraception (and its Catholic version), which led, of course, to the eventual acceptance of abortion and now to the acceptance of unnatural vice.  This flooding of the world with this stuff was not something that came about by chance; it was deliberately promoted.

But we sit by as Belloc says and "watch the barbarians".

Orwell saw it all, but in a somewhat different way.  I once discussed him with the late Malcom Muggeridge, who knew him well.  I forget the precise details of Muggeridge's evaluation of the man but I remember him saying that in a strange way Orwell foresaw the complete annihilation of rational thought.

The complete annihilation of rational thought...if that doesn't explain perfectly where we are just now I don't know what would.