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Barcelona’s George Orwell Plaza now has multiple surveillance cameras, ironically confirming that Big Brother has arrived, has been normalized, and has been ignored (BCN2024a)

Yes, the rumors are true and the irony is confirmed. I’m reasonably assuming that most locals and tourists don’t get the irony and —worse— don’t care now that absurdity has been normalized

George Orwell (real name: Eric Author Blair) famously predicted the dystopian 24-hour surveillance-technopolice state in his classic book titled 1984. Orwell is generally highly esteemed by authors who respect the truth and the power of language to form the ideas which precede and enable action, and this is why I included mention of Orwell in the 2014 and 2016 editions of Inflammation Mastery:

Anyone and everyone over the age of about 16 or 18 should be familiar with this work—not simply for the story of a guy who tries to rebel against the system and then gets crushed by that system—for the ideas and especially the vocabulary that he introduces:

  1. Doublethink: “To hold two contradictory concepts in your mind simultaneously.”1 This is not metal flexibility but rather mental mush, signifying that ideas have no distinction or identity and therefore can flow from one to the other.

  2. Thought Police, Thought Crime—thinking the wrong/unapproved thoughts: The arm of the Inner Party that seeks out those against the Party, searching out anyone with even the smallest thoughts against the Party or Big Brother. Their powers of observation force everyone to live as though they are always being watched or listened to.2

  3. Limitation of language as a means to limit thought and therefore action

“People don’t have the language and therefore do not have the thoughts to think clearly and to see through the lies and propaganda and therefore because of their intellectual and linguistic limitations they are permanently trapped in a paradigm and world-view from which they cannot escape. Most people these days don’t even have the words to enable them to think and analyze their situation, let alone find a way out of it. ” DrV

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The absurd society that Orwell wrote about has now been completely normalized—in fact, in the most recent years, it was promoted as “the new normal” and continues to grow:

  1. constant surveillance

  2. government control over personal decisions

  3. widespread personal isolation, depression, disempowerment

  4. thought-control

  5. food scarcity—notice the recent slaughter of chickens and cows

  6. constant war—for reasons that no-one can understand nor explain

  7. collapse of society and major cities (just look at Philadelphia, Detroit, San Fransisco, etc)

  8. the government has re-written history and brainwashed the population

  9. people are isolated, society is fragmented, the family structure is mostly destroyed

  10. people don’t have the language and therefore do not have the thoughts to think clearly and to see through the lies and propaganda and therefore because of their intellectual and linguistic limitations they are permanently trapped in a paradigm and world-view from which they cannot escape. Most people these days don’t even have the words to enable them to think and analyze their situation, let alone find a way out of it.

Nearly everything that Orwell predicted is now a “normalized” part of daily modern life, even more so since the start of the pandemic which was used to bring in “build back better” and “the new normal” which are perfect examples of newspeak.

Likewise, most people these days don’t even have the words to enable them to think and analyze their situation, let alone find a way out of it.

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1

https://www.thoughtco.com/1984-vocabulary-4685440

2

https://www.gradesaver.com/1984/study-guide/glossary-of-terms

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