What 1984 Taught Me About Myself

  My resolution this year is to read a book every week. So far, I am doing pretty good. Why, though, I decided to kick off my fifty-two books for this year with a string of dystopias, I am still not sure. Anyways, I started with a classic and read George Orwell's 1984 (I do realize I mentioned this not many posts ago). As I said before, I did not like it.
  None-the-less, I learned something from 1984. What is more is that I learned something about myself: and that is the fact that I need a moral center. A wall to run against so I can know what is wrong and what is right. I want there is be truth, reality. Facts that I cannot reason away even if I do not like them.
  1984 is a book about a world constructed without truth. There are no real facts, no absolutes. The mind is trained to believe what Big Brother claims to be reality. If one moment the authorities say 2+2=5, then 2+2=5. It always has been and it will be as long as Big Brother needs it to be. Winston Smith questions the realities he has been lead to believe and as a result is re-educated.
  To believe lies takes work though. And Winston works desperately to believe in the lies that he knows are lies. "The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as "two and two make five" were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain."
  The fence of morality, of truth, of reality itself, can be uncomfortable at times, but no one can deny its necessity. To deny that gravity pulls things down is more than plain stupid, it is dangerous. Truth is rarely convenient, and yet, I cannot live without it. With all of the unpleasantness of  1984, it at least reminded me of that.