« I knew the answer in 1964 but I forgot it by 1965 | Main | Aldous Huxley Discusses 1984 vs Brave New World with George Orwell »
August 25, 2016
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events.Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one's subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one's thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality. George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose
Posted by gerardvanderleun at August 25, 2016 11:18 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
I'm glad Orwell penned this. It explains what I'm seeing in my own life.
Posted by: Mother Effingby ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://americandigest.org/sidelines/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 25, 2016 1:58 PM