sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
It concludes
There are two questions. First, why do people choose from such a narrow range of clothes? Second, why do they attempt to erase the passages of their lives by making the young old and the old young?
Well, in both cases, they are eliminating distinctions. And, in both cases, they are afraid. [...] To be completely outside fashion is to send the message: 'I am nothing like any of you.' To send that message is dangerous: it courts loneliness, an especially frightening prospect. If your clothes don't make sense to people, then they proclaim that you are beyond sense: you are illegible. And that means no sex, no friendship, nothing. [...]
The elision of the ages, meanwhile, is also a response to the fear of difference. For the old, appearing young is a way of saying: 'I am not a person who is nearer death.' The young, who are still under parental influence, are prematurely aged to reinforce this tranquillising thought. [...]
At this point, the connection with the paedophilia demonstrations should be clear. At the most obvious level, the cause - like the non-choice of clothes - provides a crude unity in the midst of incomprehensible diversity. But, at a deeper level, fashion is now an aspect of the excessive glorification of childhood. There is, in effect, only one fashion. It changes every season out of financial necessity, but only marginally. This one fashion is that of the early teen, and it is embraced from babyhood to senility. People want to become children precisely because of their glorification of childhood as the only virtuous state.
In a world in which there are, increasingly, no borders, frontiers, walls or restrictions, people will be driven to construct their own. They find themselves belonging nowhere, and so they invent forms of belonging. These forms are crude: rather than new hierarchies of age, everybody is made to belong to one age; rather than a multiplicity of consumption, everybody consumes the same. Crudest of all are the anti-paedophile demonstrations: acts of social unification based on persecution; mob politics that treats law and reason with contempt. [...]
People don't know they are doing this because they think they are free. They think they are free because they are told they are free, and their apparent choices are glorified as the will of the people. But the will of the people turns out to be either a dull uniformity or, in the case of the paedophilia hysteria, a vengeful, anarchic irrationality. A baby with an earring, a ten-year-old in a boob tube, a pensioner in a shell suit - it is the end of difference, the impossibility of imagination, the loss of sense, the abandonment of aspiration, the end, not the beginning, of choice and, worst of all, the abject failure to engage rationally with evil.
In 1984, O'Brien tells Winston Smith that, if he wants to imagine the future, he should picture a boot smashing forever into a face. I say: if you want to imagine the future, picture a gang of identically dressed toddlers baying for blood that is, quite possibly, yours.
There are two questions. First, why do people choose from such a narrow range of clothes? Second, why do they attempt to erase the passages of their lives by making the young old and the old young?
Well, in both cases, they are eliminating distinctions. And, in both cases, they are afraid. [...] To be completely outside fashion is to send the message: 'I am nothing like any of you.' To send that message is dangerous: it courts loneliness, an especially frightening prospect. If your clothes don't make sense to people, then they proclaim that you are beyond sense: you are illegible. And that means no sex, no friendship, nothing. [...]
The elision of the ages, meanwhile, is also a response to the fear of difference. For the old, appearing young is a way of saying: 'I am not a person who is nearer death.' The young, who are still under parental influence, are prematurely aged to reinforce this tranquillising thought. [...]
At this point, the connection with the paedophilia demonstrations should be clear. At the most obvious level, the cause - like the non-choice of clothes - provides a crude unity in the midst of incomprehensible diversity. But, at a deeper level, fashion is now an aspect of the excessive glorification of childhood. There is, in effect, only one fashion. It changes every season out of financial necessity, but only marginally. This one fashion is that of the early teen, and it is embraced from babyhood to senility. People want to become children precisely because of their glorification of childhood as the only virtuous state.
In a world in which there are, increasingly, no borders, frontiers, walls or restrictions, people will be driven to construct their own. They find themselves belonging nowhere, and so they invent forms of belonging. These forms are crude: rather than new hierarchies of age, everybody is made to belong to one age; rather than a multiplicity of consumption, everybody consumes the same. Crudest of all are the anti-paedophile demonstrations: acts of social unification based on persecution; mob politics that treats law and reason with contempt. [...]
People don't know they are doing this because they think they are free. They think they are free because they are told they are free, and their apparent choices are glorified as the will of the people. But the will of the people turns out to be either a dull uniformity or, in the case of the paedophilia hysteria, a vengeful, anarchic irrationality. A baby with an earring, a ten-year-old in a boob tube, a pensioner in a shell suit - it is the end of difference, the impossibility of imagination, the loss of sense, the abandonment of aspiration, the end, not the beginning, of choice and, worst of all, the abject failure to engage rationally with evil.
In 1984, O'Brien tells Winston Smith that, if he wants to imagine the future, he should picture a boot smashing forever into a face. I say: if you want to imagine the future, picture a gang of identically dressed toddlers baying for blood that is, quite possibly, yours.
