----- Original Message ----- From: Natasa Tucev tucev@tesla.rcub.bg.ac.yu
Fiona wrote:
IIRC, what the Federation wanted in reconditioning him was somebody who
was
rational and reasonable, but who had apparently changed his mind-- they
had
to make it look natural, rather than like he was coerced. Consequently
they
could not have turned him into a zombie, but left him with his reason and critical faculties intact-- which evidently provided a basis from which to start questioning the state again.<
So how did the rebels contact him again? By involving him in a discussion about the Federation colonial policy, for instance? Or by telling him the brief history of the resistance? No, they talked about his family. They
knew
he was thoroughly indoctrinated, but hoped that he was essentially still a good man.
I'd agree mostly but take issue with the word "good." You can love your family and not necessarily be good, or even ethical. Goebbels was a family man.
Anyway, Blake didn't know what information they had on his family. It was that fact-- the mystery-- that ultimately lured him out.
I believe that one of the ideas implanted in Blake's mind was total obedience to the system. Therefore his decision to make even a minor transgression - leave the dome - was actually very difficult to make. E.M.Forster wrote (more or less, I don't know the exact words), 'If I ever get in a position to choose whether to betray my state or my friend, I
hope
I'll have the guts to betray my state.' Blake had the guts to disobey the system, because love for his family was more important. He didn't know anything about the Federation's evil nature at that moment, nor about his own past, but he still made the right decision. It wasn't intellectual, it was emotional.
Of course, I'm not saying that it's impossible to resist an ideology by means of logic, reason or information - I'm just saying that even in
drastic
cases, such as Blake's, it is still possible to find a portion of the self the system hasn't affected.
Firstly, I have never disagreed with you on this point, just that I think you have to take the self as a whole-- social bits, biological bits, psychological bits. Secondly, it still surprises me that you continue to refer to being affected by one's society in terms which suggest that you consider it wrong or "false": I consider myself a product of my society, and I neither follow my society's norms slavishly nor resent the fact that I am a product thereof.
For that matter, in the course of my work (which is mainly focused on Germany these days), I have met a number of old people who lived under the Nazis (and in some cases, the Communists afterwards). I would say that most if not all of them had large portions of their life that the system didn't affect-- the sun came up and the factory whistle blew exactly the same under a fascist governement as under a democratic one. They were, and in most cases still are, human beings.
Anyway, the family which he loved was a bogus one--they were killed,
Excuse me? People that you love become bogus when they die? Presumably
your
love for them also becomes bogus?
Now you're missing the point. Of course Blake's family did not become bogus when they died. But the point is, the people he believed in and for whom he transgressed the law by leaving the dome were not in fact his family-- they were a series of faked letters written by agents of the Federation in order to convince him he still had a family. Would he have left the dome if he had known they were dead? On the Liberator, it is not the fact that he loves his family that saves him, but the fact that he knows what he was told about them was a lie. By contrast, Jenna and Avon are trapped by their love for their families.
and the
letters were faked, and his feelings for them formed part of his conditioning-- the point of the letters was to maintain for him the
fiction
that he had never been a rebel.<
What does this imply? That he had different feelings for his family before the conditioning, and that the Feds conditioned him to love them? It
doesn't
make much sense to me.
No. What I'm saying is that, you appear to be saying that the Federation attempts to destroy love. In the case of Blake at least, they did not even attempt to destroy it-- rather, they used it to their own advantage, as the system did in 1984. And may I point out that the oh-so-moral resistance equally used his love for his family to induce him to risk arrest, even though *they* knew his family was dead.
Your statement, BTW, suggests that people who have been socially or
mentally
conditioned by the Federation are not human-- which seems an odd thing to say about Travis, Par, Maryatt, Bellfriar, Kasabi et al.<
My statement doesn't suggest this at all. I am talking about the possibilities to remain human in spite of social conditioning, which some
of
the characters you've mentioned have managed to do.
Once again, you seem to be making a very hard-and-fast point. Social conditioning, even in a fascist state, does NOT destroy people's ability to be human-- or even to be moral. And I would also add, again, that being "human" does not necessarily mean to be moraly good. Hitler was human.
You seem to have a vision of fascist states that is straight out of "Warlord," with drugged zombies riding escalators. The point is, you cannot have a functional society like that. The true horror of the fascist state, IMO, is that the people living in it and running it are human, and capable of loving others and enjoying life even as they do terrible things.
You seem to be making a very hard-and-fast point here. I would once again
restate that the theory of the person as I understand it is that persons
are
a combination of influences from their culture and upbringing, biological matter and individual psychology-- what you seem to be arguing is that to
be
influenced by a culture is to be "completely blinded by [its] ideology." Even in a totalitarian society there is a middle ground.<
This theory seems OK to me. I don't think I'm contradicting it. I was just talking about some drastic examples. I'm trying to say that we are not completely trapped by our culture's system of thought - if, for instance, you live in an anti-semitist society, you as an individual needn't necessarily hate Jews; if you are a man and live in a chauvinist culture, you needn't share your culture's opinion that women are inferior; in my case, if I live in Serbia, I needn't be a nationalist. An individual can resist these wrong commandments imposed by his or her culture, because of this 'residue of personality' which I'm talking about.
I agree with you totally! It's just that I don't think it's a "residue." I think it's all bound up with other aspects of your life and personality, which includes cultural influences.
But I'll stop it now, because I think we've reached the point at which we're down to our respective theoretical stances, and I don't think we can reconcile those. You have your discipline, I have mine <respectful g>.
To return to Winston's mother: she appears, as I recall, in a brief
flashback scene, in which Winston steals food from his sister, runs away
and
returns a few hours later to find the house empty except for rats (establishing his phobia of the creatures). I don't see her particularly resisting anything in that scene.<
You've forgotten that she also appears in Winston's dream, where Julia and Shakespeare also appear. Dreams, to quote Jung (him again!) can be compensatory to our conscious attitude, they can bring a one-sided state
But in that case it's not the mother herself, it's what she symbolises for Winston, because she's appearing in *his* subconscious.
consciousness into equilibrium. So I'll quote from Winston's dream, and
let
this be the conclusion to this post. I have to go, before my kids start eating marbles in the other room.
Oh dear-- are they OK :)?
'The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death... had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible.
Tragedy,
he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by
one
another without needing to know the reason. His mother's death tore at his heart becuase she had died loving him... and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that
was
private and unalterable.'
Again, though, this is Winston's take on her actions.
I think the real comfort in *1984* lies in the glossary at the end, in which Oceania is referred to in the past tense, reminding us that such regimes do end, eventually.
Fiona
The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Available for public perusal at http://nyder.r67.net
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