Presenting one of my most dangerous opinions. I hereby yell out loud the words nobody on the Western Internet dares to say: THE WORLD IS NOT ENDING! And we need to stop shoving George Orwell down everybody’s throat.
We are not living in a dystopia. We are not approaching a dystopia. We are not just around the corner from approaching anything like a dystopia. You can tell you’re not living in a dystopia if you’re able to read this, and you’re well-fed, clothed, warm, relatively safe at the moment, and free to reply with whatever babbling pops into your head.
In the herein linked post, I debunk Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (I refuse to express it numerically) and all the other dystopian literature along with it. Let us stop the paranoia and focus on the real world problems right in front of us for a change.
BONUS BUCK: The obligatory link that stayed hidden from my research until after I posted the article: “Why I’ve Had Enough of George Orwell”
UPDATE Ye Gods, they actually hand out copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four in hotel rooms in place of Bibles now. An organized theocracy based on Orwell is going to be really, really weird.
ADDENDUM: It’s an election year coming up in the states, so the dystopian mob frenzy is boiling over on the web more than usual. This post allegedly by Aldous Huxley is making the rounds lately:
In the first place: Huxley NEVER said any such thing. Debunked by these quote detectives at MetaBunk.
Now that we have that out of the way: This bit of text is a perfect example of a logical fallacy. It tells you that you are always living in a dictatorship no matter what. Even if you are perfectly happy with no problems anywhere, by this quote’s circular reasoning, that’s all the more reason why you’re “enslaved.” No one can postulate any state of being outside of open anarchy (which can also be defined as a “prison without walls”) that does not match this quote’s definition of a dictatorship. If you have walls, open shutdown of democracy, and do dream of escaping, that’s a dictatorship too.
Lovely Humpty-Dumpty reasoning, isn’t it?
