Thanks for this, Dominic. Helpful.
Stephen V
> Adam Phillips has a line about how the ethical project of
> psychoanalysis is to find an alternative to sado-masochism as the
> basis for human relationships. I think that Orwell saw the
> relationship of master and servant (in the colonial setting, for
> example) as psychologically polluted - as *indecent*.
>
> Part of what Orwell saw was that Capitalism estranges people, and
> creates a society in which that relationship of deference and contempt
> is basic and endemic. Socialism would set limits upon private
> ownership and inequality of income, so that no two people would ever
> again be as unthinkably foreign to one another as the factory worker
> and the factory owner. That is not the sum total of Orwell's critique
> of the profit system, but it is an important strand within it.
>
> Quite aside from questions of economic justice, or the cruelty of
> poverty and the working conditions imposed on the poorest, this
> proposed elimination of the master-servant relationship was a question
> of emotional decency and hygiene. Orwell was wincingly aware of the
> attractions of sadism, of his own propensity for violent cruelty. The
> gloatingly intimate brutality of O'Brien is as much a projection of
> that inner propensity as it is a portrayal of the realities of
> totalitarian rule - Big Brother, with his ministries devoted to
> mass-producing pornography, rewriting history and punishing the
> damned, is very much a monster from the id, however much he
> masquerades as a Puritan super-ego.
>
> In as much as he identified Socialism with psychological hygiene, with
> curbing the tendency of people to behave like shits towards one
> another when the deep discrepancies in their conditions of life cause
> them to become fundamentally estranged, I suppose that Orwell was not
> emotionally incompatible with Socialism but rather emotionally
> compelled by it. But it must be said that his capacity for cruelty,
> for emotional distance, was immensely useful to him as a writer.
> Nobody fully in the grip of human sympathy and kindness could have
> exposed the shame and filth of the tripe shop at the start of _The
> Road to Wigan Pier_ with such exactness. And nobody with that talent
> for exact and cold observation could have tolerated, or been tolerated
> by, the sneaks and bullies who kept the comrades in order and
> followed, wheresoever it went, the Moscow line.
>
> Dominic
>
> --
> // Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
> // bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
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