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RE: George Orwell / Citario del Cardumen, n° 2 / @hlezama
When everybody thought humanity had hit bottom with the Nazi Holocaust, that sort of collective hypnosis that allowed millions of people to be brutally slaughtered while, at the same time, millions of other people got disconnected from such atrocity, we find ourselves facing the fact that the frightening revelations and warnings done by Orwell, almost sardonically, in his visionary novel, 1984, become every day more current and imminent.
The expression fake news became trendy, and it is used with the same shamelessness by presidents Trump, Maduro, Putin, al-Ásad, Rohani, Prime Minister Netanyahu, or King Salman. We are asked to question the information reported to us by our own senses, but it is expected from us to accept as unquestionable intangible concepts such as mother land, patriotism, autonomy, sovereignty, honor, or the almighty God that is always on the ruler’s side. If God is with all of them, then they are all right, right?
Orwell, obviously, invites us to question absolute truths coming from benevolent/paternalist voices, that pretend to know better not only what works in our interest, but also what we perceive through our senses. Even though the senses and what we perceive as objective reality can trick us sometimes, Orwell suggests that it is preferable to give credit to what we can confirm first hand and through reason, than to validate collective “Truths" imposed by an authority to which we owe unrestricted reverence. The Party of 1984 has mutated into different instances and institutions, but it is the same thousand-headed monster.
In an era when information immediacy mixes with a broad global spectrum of events, Orwell’s words gain greater power and currency. Many are the alleged truths created and spread by the social networks; even photographs and videos, former unquestionable evidences, can now be manipulated or altered and put to the service of unscrupulous interests. Now, more than ever, human beings must enforce their capacity for reasoning, their infinite curiosity and their common sense to believe only that that they are fully convinced of by empirical evidence. Who would have thought that “the-more-information,-the more-uncertainty” paradox would become true?
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