Re: Haha, emo...
anonymous
June 3 2004, 01:10:01 UTC
Sadly I am in NYC. I would come by if I could. Happy BDay, by-the-by.
I was just doing a little reading, and I thought perhaps you might see the relevance:
[S]he had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship. The was she put it was:
"When you make love you're using up energy; and afterward you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all of the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, pgs 135-6 (1949)
Sound a little bit like some religious-right-supported regimes we know?
I was just doing a little reading, and I thought perhaps you might see the relevance:
[S]he had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship. The was she put it was:
"When you make love you're using up energy; and afterward you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all of the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, pgs 135-6 (1949)
Sound a little bit like some religious-right-supported regimes we know?
Sgt. O'Leary
Reply
Leave a comment