Do You Understand Why?

As you lie there, you have often wondered—you have even asked me—why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, ‘I understand how; I do not understand why’?

― George Orwell, 1984

**********

Dear Kate,

You understand how to work life, but do you understand why?

Today's quote is from 1984, probably the most well-known dystopian novel, in which, as always with all dystopia, the world is under a totalitarian rule.

What do you think, does the totalitarian regime bring about a dystopia, or the other way around, or there is no simple if-then causality whichever way?

Living in a good world, we seem to think there are bad people who make things worse.  The solution to our trouble then, of course, is to root out the badness in our mix and get on with our good life again.  "Back to normal" we deserve and we will, if only those people are....

"Those people."  Who are they?

For a democracy to flirt with authoritarianism (a system that wants full political power, as compared to totalitarianism, wanting everything), "those people," then, have to be most people.

Hannah Arendt in her classic on the origins of totalitarianism observes, "Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with folded arms to dare a no when a yes is demanded."

Not a beautiful picture, but one we find necessary to make life work.

I can't work my family if I can't make most in my house happy.  I can't bring myself to church if I can't tolerate the flimsy philosophy about some flimsier deity.  I can't get myself to work if I can't accept how futile our collective effort was and is and, based on where we shoot from, shall ultimately be fruitless.  Who am I to say no to generally accepted life principles?

Life is exhausting, ever wondered why?  Instead of being generative, creative and thus hopeful, we kinda just need to let it run its course and use it up.  Choices are already made, and death just kinda happens.

It is interesting for me to observe those who have experienced the fuller spectrum of life situation, fled from an authoritarian state to this democratic land of plenty, now living in de facto laissez faire, with all the time and money and liberty in the world to--finally!--flourish.  I know such a man, of all the drivels driven out of him, speaks most clearly when he asks a question that is meant to end with a full-stop: 有咩好講?

"What is there to say?"

You might think that's the mantra of his former dull, oppressed life.  No.  (I wouldn't know what his mantra was if there was one back then; I wasn't there.)  The mantra is that of a free man, emancipated as any man shall ever be, yet, for that, his imagination more emaciated than it should ever be.

If life was chosen for him then, death is taking over now.  Things just kinda happen in a massive way, the lot of us being carried off by the giant wheel of history, many trampled under it, glad to know not me not today.  Not yet.

"What is there to say?"

The "saying" doesn't even have an active, specified speaker, for the conclusion is foregone.  He would rather make no decision than to make a wrong one, self preservation his first and last calculation.

"If you cling to your life, you will lose it, and if you let your life go, you will save it."  What do you think Jesus was talking about?

Yours, Alex