The following social science FICTION report may help you
decide these questions for yourself. To get your immediate
attention, the date of events is set only ten years in the
future, but twenty years from now would allow more time
for current trends to mature into outright horror. Don't
say you weren't warned!
The article was inspired by current political events. The
flow is a free adaptation from the powerful book:
"1984" by George Orwell,
pen name of Eric Blair (1903-1950)
For a time after "1984" was published, "Room 101" was a
common language icon, symbolizing a dreaded evil place
where guilty souls would ultimately face their own worst
nightmares.
Although Machiavelli thought of himself as a
fence-sitting historian, many readers of "The Prince" came
to believe that he personally advocated the tactics he had
observed. From this belief, the term "Machiavellian" came
to symbolize underhanded methods of domination in all
power relationships. The term: "Office Politics" was a
logical derivative of this thinking.
Some more contemporary inquisitions by harassment
destroyed careers and lives. These methods were used by
Senator Joseph McCarthy
(1908-1957) and his predecessor,
Anthony Comstock
(1844-1915), the paranoid, self-appointed, morals
reformer and vice inquisitor, whose laws have caused books
to be
Banned In The United States
.
Earlier INQUISITIONS were directed against suspected religious
heretics and commonly included secret tortures and public
spectacle executions. The practice flourished in Europe
for six hundred years, beginning about 1235 and ending
about 1834.
Even in the American colonies suspected witches
were executed.
(Where they appear in the following article,
personal pronouns should be read as generic.)
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN NEWTAMERICA
A PROGRESS REPORT ON NEWTSPOCK IN 2005
A Politically Correct NewtParty (PCNP) member
lives from birth until death under the pervasive control
of the local NewtWatch Board of Righteous Education. She
never graduates from her eternal happy neophyte persona
into a mature adult female with the free choices
temporarily promised to women in an earlier decadent
period in American history.
Her body and spirit are never her own. She is
never given a choice to be her own fulfilled person. Even
when apparently alone she is never really alone. Without
any warning and without her conscious knowledge, she is
inspected and controlled with painstaking care by day and
by night: wherever she may be at any moment, in public or
in private, awake or asleep, at work or at rest, in bath
or in bed.
Nothing that she does escapes detection. Her
friends, her proclivities, her attitude toward her
friends' husbands and children and her own significant
others, the expression on her face when she is alone, the
words she mutters in her uneasy, troubled sleep, even her
innate bodily movements, are all insidiously scrutinized,
categorized, documented in the Righteous
NewtBook.
Detection is certain, not only for actual
transgressions, but for any normal physical anomaly or
desire or change, no matter how pitiably small, private,
and personal; for any personality trait, any nervous
mannerism that might possibly betray a secret inner
conflict or concern.
But, there is a great contradiction. In
NewtAmerica, there is no law covering undefined NP
maladaptive behavior. Even flagrant assignations with
RightThinking NewtParty superiors are not regulated by
administrative rule or by any formal code of PC ethical
behavior. There is no specific regulation that flatly
forbids her private thoughts and secret conspiracies which
can, when detected, provoke the terrible wrath of the
feared NewtState INQUISITION. There, under interminable
torture, her teeth and hair fall out and her worst fears
are finally realized in Room 101. Under threat of an
agonizing slow death, she will confess to any crime
whatever and will betray her dearest friends and lovers,
begging only that they replace her in the evil punishment
chamber of the unholy damned.
The endless NewtConfession INQUISITIONS are
conducted by NewtParty zealots of the NewtState. They are
not inflicted as punishment for abuses which have actually
been committed by NewtParty members. Instead, they are
only patterns of continued Newtralization of already
Newtered members who might otherwise, at some time in the
future, think natural, but impure thoughts or entertain
natural, but forbidden desires.
A PCNP member is required to have the right
opinions, the right thoughts, the right instincts, the
right humble aspirations. Many of the right beliefs and
right attitudes demanded of her are never plainly stated,
and could not be stated without exposing the inherent
flaws and contradictions in the NewtSpock Contract on
NewtAmerica. If she is naturally orthodox (a RightBeliever
in NewtSpock), she will know, without conscious thought,
what is the right belief or right emotion in all
circumstances. She has been schooled since childhood in
mental gymnastics based on the right NewtSpock words:
AbuseStop, RightWrong, SplitThink. As an indoctrinated
RightThinking adult female, she is now unwilling, and even
unable, to think logically about any subject at
all.
A RightBeliever must have no private emotions and
no respite from frenzied enthusiasm for the PCNP dogma.
She is stimulated to exist in constant hatred of foreign
religions and infidels and domestic weaklings, with
constant prostrate immolation before the NewtParty
SacredRoyalThrone. By the HillaryFlowersHate and other
repetitive chant denigrations she is deliberately taught
to project her acquired inner hatred outward in order to
dissipate depression and discontent tensions produced by
her bare, unnatural life. Any logical inquiries or
speculations which might possibly inspire a skeptical or
even rebellious attitude are squelched by the acquired
inner mental discipline long before reaching her conscious
awareness.
The first and simplest stage in the discipline,
which is taught mainly to very young girls, is called
AbuseStop in NewtSpock. The mental AbuseStop paradigm
automatically stops short at the threshold of any
dangerous thought or desire. Active fantasy rejects analog
thinking, with consequent refusal to perceive all logical
errors. The PCNP novitiate is punished when she rebels,
but then rewarded when she fails to grasp the simplest
arguments where they disagree with the Contract on
NewtAmerica. Ultimately, she is instinctively bored or
repelled by any train of elementary logic which is capable
of leading in a heretical direction.
AbuseStop is intended to create a coarse armor of
intellectual dullness that automatically rejects ideas of
free thought. But simple acquired stupidity is not
sufficient. Full orthodox PCNP acceptance demands a
contortionist's control over one's own mental processes so
as to reject immediately any tendency toward honest
analytical thinking. NewtAmerica society demands the
belief that the Speaker of the Hearth and Faith is
omnipotent and that the PCNP is infallible. But the
Speaker is not really omnipotent and the PCNP is not
infallible. Therefore, there must be an untiring,
continuous effort to revise the historical facts.
The key word here is RightWrong. Like so many
NewtSpock words, this word has two mutually contradictory
meanings. Applied to a political opponent, it means brazen
claims that right statements are wrong, in contradiction
of the obvious right facts. Applied to a PCNP member, it
means a loyal willingness to say that wrong conclusions
are right when PCNP discipline demands this obfuscation.
But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that wrong is
right, and more, to KNOW that wrong is right, and to
forget that one has ever believed anything
different.
This unswerving loyalty demands an ongoing
aggressive and continuous alteration of the past. This
seemingly impossible task is made possible by the
NewtSpock term SplitThink, a system of thought which
rightfully includes all the other control techniques.
There are two reasons why the past must be
altered...
The primary reason for the readjustment of the
past is to prevent any discontinuity among the speeches,
statistics, and records of every kind. They must be
brought up to date constantly in order to show that the
infallible predictions of the PCNP have been right in all
cases. No choice of doctrine or political alignment can
ever be admitted. For to change leadership direction or
policy is a confession of inherent fallibility. If, for
example, Syria or Iraq or Iran or Serbia or North Korea is
the enemy today, then that country must always have been
the enemy. Any or all could attack at any time, and our
invincible military must be prepared to fight and win on
multiple fronts in multiple far-flung locations at the
same time. If actual accounts indicate otherwise, then the
facts must be altered to accommodate PCNP ideas of right
thinking.
The secondary reason is an important backstop to
the primary one. It is understood that the PCNP member,
like any ordinary subservient peasant, tolerates
present-day conditions partly because she has no choice
and no visible standards of comparison. It is "the only
game in town". Therefore, she must be cut off from the
past, just as she must be cut off from women in foreign
countries, because it is necessary for her to believe that
she is better off than her ancestors and foreigners and
that the average NewtLevel of material comfort is
constantly rising. Again, any factual discrepancies must
be righted as required to reflect the requirements of PCNP
history.
In this way history is rewritten in an ongoing,
continuous righting process. This day-to-day falsification
of the past, carried out by the NewtState Ministry, is as
necessary to the NewtState stability as the work of
domestic repression and internal espionage carried out by
the NewtHealth Ministry.
The right malleability of the past is the central
tenet of the Contract on NewtAmerica. Past events survive
only in written records and human memories. Otherwise,
they have no objective existence. The past is whatever
records and plastic memories agree upon at the moment in
time. And since the PCNP is in full control of all
records, and in equally full control of the minds of its
members, it follows that the past is whatever the PCNP
chooses to make it. Even the past has no choice!
It also follows that although the past is
alterable, it never has been altered in any specific
instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever right
form is needed at the moment, this NewtVersion IS the
past, and no different past ever existed. This flexible
paradigm holds even when, as often happens, the same event
has to be altered out of recognition several times in the
course of a year. At all times the PCNP is in possession
of absolute truth, and clearly the fixed reality never
could have been different from what it is now.
Right control of the past depends completely on
memory training. To make sure that all written records
agree with orthodox PCNP teaching is merely a mechanical
act. But it is also necessary to REMEMBER that events
happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to
rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written
records, then it is necessary to FORGET that one has done
so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other
mental process. It is learned by the majority of PCNP
women, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as
orthodox. In Twentieth Century English it would have been
called reality warping. In NewtSpock it is called
SplitThink, although SplitThink includes much
more.
SplitThink means the power to hold two
contradictory fantasy beliefs in one's mind simultaneously
while accepting both of them as right. The PCNP
intellectual knows the right direction in which her
memories must be altered; she therefore realizes that she
is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of
SplitThink she also satisfies herself that reality is not
violated.
To carry out the routine with sufficient
precision, the right thought process must be conscious. At
the same time it also has to be unconscious, to allay any
uneasy sense of unreality and consequent guilt.
Right at the core of the Contract on NewtAmerica
is the PCNP essential SplitThink paradigm which requires
conscious deception while retaining the stubborn purpose
that goes with complete honesty:
* to tell deliberate lies while genuinely
believing in them,
* to forget any fact that has become inconvenient,
and then,
* to draw that fact back from file 13 whenever it
is needed just long enough to satisfy that need,
* to deny the existence of objective reality while
continuing to take account of the denied reality.
All of this is quite necessary. Even in speaking
or writing the word SplitThink itself, as just a group of
letters devoid of any inherent meaning, it is necessary to
exercise SplitThink. For by using the word one admits that
one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of
SplitThink one erases this knowledge; and so on and on,
with the lie always one step ahead of the truth.
Ultimately, it is by means of SplitThink that the
PCNP has been able (and will continue to be able) to
control the course of history indefinitely.
All past oligarchies have fallen from power either
through rigid calcification or increasing structural
weakness. Either they became stupid or arrogant, failed to
adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were
overthrown; or they drifted into liberal and cowardly
concessions when they should have used force, and once
again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either
through consciousness or through unconsciousness.
The genius of the PCNP achievement has been the
production of a system of amalgamated thinking in which
both conditions can exist simultaneously. There is no
other intellectual basis upon which the PCNP could
maintain permanent domination of peasants and technicians.
To rule, and to continue ruling, the invisible tyrants
must be able to dislocate reality. The ultimate secret of
dominant kings and sacred overlords is to combine a belief
in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from
mistakes.
The most subtle practitioners of SplitThink are
the favored insiders who invented the technique and know
that it is a vast, pervasive system of mental cheating.
Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are
also those who live most in denial, in fantasy furthest
from the world as it really is. It is apparent that those
with the greatest understanding of the deception process
have the greatest delusion. The more informed and
intelligent, the less sane.
One clear illustration of this is the fact that
war hysteria increases in intensity as one reaps wealth
and power benefits from the war economy.
On the other hand, those whose attitude is most
rational toward the continuous wars are the passive
subject peoples of disputed territories who have no
choice. To these people war is simply an ongoing calamity
which sweeps to and fro over their bodies and homes like a
tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete
indifference to them. They know that a change in rulers
means simply that the NewtMasters will demand the same
subservient personal service genuflections rewarded by the
same callous indifference and cruelty as they have
experienced before.
The slightly more favored technical specialists
are only intermittently conscious of the wars. When it is
necessary they can be prodded into frenzied fear and
hatred, but when left alone they can shut the wars out of
their consciousness for long periods of time.
It is in the upper ranks of the PCNP that the
right war enthusiasm is most likely found. World
domination is believed in most firmly by those who know it
to be impossible. This strange linking-together of
opposites: knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with
fanaticism is one of the chief characteristics of PCNP
society.
The official ideology abounds with absurd
contradictions that defy any common-sense explanation. For
example:
* In the name of Democracy, the PCNP rejects and
vilifies every principle for which the old Democratic
Party stood.
* To stress uniform thinking, it dresses its
student members in unisex denim uniforms worn at one time
only by manual workers. At the same time it preaches a
contempt for the peasant working class that has had no
parallel since the French Revolution.
* It systematically undermines the solidarity of
the family, but calls its Speaker of the Hearth and Faith
by this name in a direct appeal to the sentiments of
family loyalty.
* Even the names of the four Ministries by which
we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their
deliberate reversal of the facts:
- The NewtDefense Ministry concerns itself with
initiating costly and futile aggressive wars.
- The NewtState Ministry specializes in domestic
and foreign lies and intimidation and manipulates the
media for PCNP ends.
- The NewtHealth Ministry neglects the peasants
and tortures would-be artists and intellectuals.
- The NewtFoodWelfare Ministry subjects disabled
workers and their families to deliberate slow
starvation.
These contradictions are not accidental, nor do
they result from some strange hypocrisy outside the bounds
of ordinary experience. Instead, they are the desired
products of deliberate SplitThink. By creating
contradictions and then reconciling them the NewtState can
retain power indefinitely. In no other way could the
ancient urge toward freedom be broken. If human equality
is to be forever denied and dominance maintained; if the
so-called Distinguished Honorables are to keep their
Righteous places forever, even into the next world; the
prevailing NP mental condition must be PC controlled
psychosis.
