What is a fractal ?

Monday, 14 September, Year 7 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

Nevermind that.

Instead, consider the following quote :

I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood outlook. Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child's mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child's vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How would Crossgates appear to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as it was in 1915? What should I think of Bingo and Sim, those terrible, all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would be no more frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse. Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old, whereas–though of this I am not certain–I imagine they must have been somewhat younger than I am now. And how would Johnny Hall appear, with his blacksmith's arms and his red, jeering face? Merely a scruffy little boy, barely distinguishable from hundreds of other scruffy little boys. The two sets of facts can lie side by side in my mind, because these happen to be my own memories. But it would be very difficult for me to see with the eyes of any other child, except by an effort of the imagination which might lead me completely astray. The child and the adult live in different worlds.
~ E. A. Blair - Such, such were the joys (1947)

The man, throughout, in his essays and in his scant actually readable literary production, wonders how it is that the same truth can be and not be at the same time!

In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.
~ id, Notes on nationalism (1945)

Hence there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner of thinking, in which words like "democracy" can bear two irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong simultaneously.
~ id, Writers and the Leviathan (1948)

In between these two sterile wonderments, the man himself, by his own hand, in his own words of his own volition writes the explanation. It turns out that the mechanism powering socialist thought is exactly the working of mental infantilism. A derivation of memory is what allows things to be "known and not known", a derivation as you'd expect most active in stupid people. Because who could have foreseen socialism as the obligatory ideology of the dumb, seriously now!

And then he proceeds to know it and not know it at the same time! Exactly like that other oh, so very unbearable fact. An endless carousel of things known and not known, their presence known and not known, its presence in turn known and not known ad infinitum.

That crooked lisp of the human mind, continuous everywhere, useful nowhere!

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3 Responses

  1. Interestingly, "Such, Such Were the Joys" was not published during Orwell's life, as he did not dare to risk a libel suit. When it was finally printed (in USA) the school - actually a place called St Cyprian's - was renamed to "Crossgates". There were other men of letters who went to St Cyprian's, and not all of them agreed with Mr O's description thereof.

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Tuesday, 15 September 2015

    Amusingly, if somewhat unsurprisingly for the sort of scumbag he is, he omits to mention that any literary ability he might display is entirely the product of the woman's training, his own talented contribution consisting strictly of making sure that end result is less than it could have been and not more.

  1. [...] that happened to a crowd. N.A. [↩]This ontological waffling, muchly reminiscent of the bedwetting Blair, is very much specific to that generation, and very much their secret, shared code - exactly the [...]

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