News Item: "Could heated talk over the dinner table become a HATE CRIME? Lawyers call for offence to be extended to private dwellings--meaning conversations at home could spark police probes and prison sentences."
--Daily Mail, November 3, 2020 (here)
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The way she [Julia] put it was:
"When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?" [Emphasis added.]
That was very true, he [Winston] thought. There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
--From Chapter Two, Section II, of 1984 by George Orwell (Signet, pp. 110-111)
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| A later Signet edition (1959) with cover art by Paul Lehr (1930-1998). |
An excellent perspective.
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you're back!
ReplyDeleteThank you, both.
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