I read Fiona's last post from the archive, because for some mysterios reason the server I'm using has erased all my mail from 2/7/01. If by any chance someone else made a comment on this thread and used some other title, and if you'd want me to respond, please send again. Thanks.
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. Which was something the Federation couldn't profit from - it simply remained there, intact, in spite of their efforts to change him.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 of 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.
'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.'
N.