Friday, June 27, 2008

Quotes for Mr. Evil

I've been reading Orwell's 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. Orwell was a committed Socialist and social activist who always tried to look at the real conditions and concerns of working people and who was always prepared to cut through the bullshit spouted by many who claimed to share his concern for the conditions of the working class. This made him something of a pariah with much of the left, of course. I thought these quotes might be of particular interest to a certain Mr. Evil of Discovery Bay.

"Sometimes I look at a Socialist--the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation--and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard."


...and...

""The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists,revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders."

4 comments:

ulaca said...

Another disaffected "leftie", Dostoevsky, pointed out the tendency of radical ideologists to combine an altruistic desire to alleviate injustice and suffering with a supreme contempt for the masses who were actually suffering.

ulaca said...

"The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature"

I'd be interested to know what it's like. I ran across both in my studies: Chomsky's linguistics (especially his early stuff) is fascinating, but can only be read "in translation", while Foucault's early book "Madness and Civilisation" is very thought provoking onthe nature of "madness" and its "treatment". The later stuff is mostly hogwash.

David Biddlecombe said...

OK, I'll chuck up some thoughts about when I get time to post.

Gweipo said...

great quotes. I grew up in that in SA during the apartheid era where you could just substitute socialist for "white liberal" and working class for "black person"