From Orwell to Gladwell and Back
5th October 2016
Steve Sailer looks at trends.
Almost by definition, the powerful in the future will still continue to exercise dominion over the minds of men, but their methods of manipulation will change.
The technology of power is moving from the past’s emphasis on privacy and concealment toward more contemporary techniques of diversion, bias, misconception, and willful stupidity. The crude methods that George Orwell summed up in his image of the incinerator-chute “memory hole” are growing into more sophisticated devices for providing the public with misleading frameworks for mentally organizing (or rationalizations for simply ignoring) the overload of available facts, thus making it harder to remember or understand politically inconvenient knowledge.
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The memory hole, however, isn’t the only technique for regulating ideas. Among professional journalists, a trend is to take refuge in pedantic obscurantism about the meaning of terms. For example, Donald Trump’s reference to Alicia’s notorious tape of sex with a fellow reality-show participant as a “sex tape” has been widely denounced as totally lacking in verification, even though you can watch it yourself in ten seconds.