Written on 2012.1.15
I heard a serious joke that goes like this: A German went to a church to confess, and the priest asked the German why he was confessing. The German said that he took in a group of Jews during World War II, and the priest wondered that it was a good thing , the merits are boundless, why repent? The German said wryly, I also... charged them a rental fee. The priest reached out and stroked the back of the German's head, which was exposed due to the deep guilt. , I thought about it, but I haven't told them yet, World War II is over long ago!
As a joke, there is no obligation to stand up to serious scrutiny, but if you take a joke as a joke, you will have nothing to say. So, we might as well want to see you. It can be speculated that the Germans may have taken in the Jews simply because of their kindness at first, but kindness cannot be used as bread, not to mention that in extraordinary times, relief must take risks. In this way, it is considered as the return of venture capital, and the collection of money is just like what the priest said, which is reasonable and reasonable. The problem lies in the fact that the benefits of the Germans were built on the basis of wartime. The end of the war means that there is no profit to be collected. Compared with today's collection of shelter fees from Jews who are grateful to Dade, back to the time before the war. In a post exploited by capitalists, it would be unwise. The bug in the story is that the Jews who have been hiding in the house for a long time, even if their business acumen is in a flash, no matter how loud the abacus strikes, there is no white wolf to deal with. Where is the steady stream of money to pay the rent? For the story to continue, the only reasonable explanation is that if the Germans wanted to profit, they had to make the Jews work and enslave them with the lie of wartime. Fortunately, the Germans finally went to repentance (whether they repented or not, I don’t know, after all, looking for a priest can be interpreted as taking advantage of the professional ethics that a priest can’t leak the information of the penitent to the outside world, just to be happy and go back. On the original road), it shows that the momentary interests are obsessed, and after all, the glorious side of human nature cannot be annihilated. But when I turned to think about it, I couldn't help worrying: what if it was not profit but power that drove the Germans? This is to tell another story - "Dog Tooth".
In "Dog Tooth", the father blocks all social information outside the family and confines the children at home, telling them that the child can only drive away from home on the day when the tiger's teeth fall off, and uses this as an excuse to domesticate the child as his own servant With playing pet, the eldest daughter finally smashed her tiger teeth and hid it in the trunk. Until the end of the film, the doubts lingering in my heart are still stagnant. Forget it was Nietzsche or who said it: some people rule in order to rule; some people rule in order not to be ruled. The former and the latter, I can understand (and respect the latter), but the scope of my understanding is: there must be a suitable ratio between the effort and the reward. Therefore, in the film, the father's mastery techniques of control, such as: distorting the meaning of words and words, so that the child's knowledge is in his own control, without the ability to think wildly; finding a prostitute for his son to vent his natural rebellious adolescence The animal instinct of rebellion; the only plane that slipped through the net, explained with a toy... In my opinion, so many decades of hard work, and the reward - to a few slaves (hard to believe that this father still It is not cost-effective and irrational to take the child as a parent) to take life and death. Although I reach others, I really can't be persuaded by the phrase "the temptation of power is beyond your imagination".
Of course, you will say, this is just a story. The same story also has "The Truman World", who can explain how people go so far in ignoring human rights in order to peep into a person's privacy history? But I was always vaguely unwilling ("The Truman World" still gave the final viewership benefit far higher than the production investment), and always felt that a good story should not be just a story.
With this doubt in mind, I read "1984". When I saw O'Brien say to Winston, "Obviously, you think hatred consumes more energy than love", it dawned on me: that was my doubt.
"1984" gave me a big shock, but until I finished reading it, I found that, just as Winston's feeling after reading "that book" was "not new, but more systematic than his own messy thoughts", this is also How I felt after reading 1984.
In "that book," O'Brien wrote: "...but this is not enough to explain the party's urge to seize power...to understand why, it is necessary to first understand the motives that lie behind it. The motive is..." Apparently, Orwell took my doubts as one of the best selling points. However, despite going farther and deeper than the joke film, it was only a far-fetched idea of “what happens in everyone’s mind at the same time is the real thing” after all. Not only did it fail to convince me, but I felt delusional.
Under Orwell's presupposed extreme authoritarian system, the purpose of "Big Brother" is only to get everyone to have the right idea - no idea. The method is exactly the same as the father in "Dog Tooth", manipulating vocabulary, but it is more thorough than the father's misinterpretation in "Dog Tooth" - simply deleting words, so that heresy has no language to convey, that is, " When the language reform reaches its perfect state, the revolution will be completed.” In the end, an established system of “individual demise is not death, the party is immortal” will be established.
It is worth mentioning that the most inexplicable O'Brien in the novel - a lunatic who is as penetrating as a mirror but most loyal to the party, in my opinion, is not so much sinking into power as it is about immortality. Belief, and belief—however morally judged, is known to be justifiably irrational. If my doubts are destined to have no scientific answer, this role may serve as an explanation for appealing to sensibility.
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