Rereading Nineteen Eighty Four – Part III Chap 3 (8)

Winston, still not broken, hearing the insanity O’Brien has babbled about the power of the Party;  exclaims:”But you… are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.”‘Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut -them out of existence. Oceania is the world.’—————–This kind of chauvinism is common in the United States.  The idea that America is ‘the world’  that what happens in America matters, no where else is common.

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Winston, still connected to logic and reality tried

‘But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.’And without  a pause O’Brien responds:

‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals — mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.’——-This portion is shocking in the prediction that people would become so stupid that they could deny science. At the time 1984 was written people were far more intelligent then they are today.  ——-