A revolution of thought; how AHA moments shape our lives.
There it is, a moment frozen in time when the rug gets pulled out from beneath your feet and fundamental thought processes are changed irrevocably once and for all.
Aha moment! Wake up world, we are well on course to a dystopian future once only thought to exist as fiction instagr.am/p/HFNxpjQ_jI/
— s2rt (@s2rt) February 16, 2012
I am re-reading George Orwell’s 1984 at the moment with the benefit of a few more years under my belt. There have been several slap-in-the-face moments where I can’t help but marvel how he seemed to understand the human condition well enough to create a dystopian vision that is relevant to the governments and societies of today. I offer up a few extracts, tit-bits to hold up to the world you have come to know, to draw your own conclusions against.
The first extract is the one used in the Instagram photo above:
Science and Technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.
And here is another to hold up to the 1%
For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society [is] only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
Or one for the continued drumming of fear at an event, though horrific and public, killed less people than die on the roads over a typical Easter weekend:
And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefor in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
Perhaps it’s time once more for a revolution of thought. Perhaps this is what is embodied in the outrage sweeping the globe. The challenging of outdated modes of thought which no longer get pride of place simply due to the length of their tenure.
