Episode 160: Orwell on Totalitarianism and Language (Part Two)

0:00 Dylan: Yeah, that's a good place.

0:01 Wes: Why do people do this? Why. Why totalitarian regimes? And then in this book, you know, we might think of this as sort of not even something that could really come to pass. It's sort of the ideal limit of totalitarianism, total totalitarianism. It's what would happen if people could really fully control your. Your minds. But then the question is, why do it? And o' Brien will tell him at the end, why. So this is on 336, on mine. Obedience is not enough unless he is suffering. How can you be sure he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is inflicting pain and humiliation.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment. A world of trampling and being trampled upon. A world which will grow not less, but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claim that they were founded on Love and justice.

Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self abasement. And then moving on down just a little bit. There will be no loyalty except towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. Moving on again. But always, do not forget this, Winston. Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.

It's like Orwell. He wanted to think of the bleakest possible thing and put that down on paper. And I think he succeeded.

1:52 Dylan: Yes, I think he did. I found myself more horrified reading this than I've been about imagining something in a long time. This involves a kind of diagnosis of the human soul. That there would be, at the very least leaders that would understand that power motivates them in this way and that they are motivated day after day out of the pleasure of being the boot stamping the human face forever.

2:28 Wes: Well, it's not even. So, here's the way he puts it. This is page 332 in line. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others. We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness. Only power. Pure power. So even to say pleasure, you know, implies a kind of hedonism that o' Brien rejects.

2:50 Dylan: But how does that jive with what he said earlier, right? That every moment there's the thrill of victory, the sensation of tramping on the enemy who is helpless. I know that, he says later, that is pure power.

3:01 Wes: I know this is a problem that all will to power theories face, which is, are they reducible to pleasure? We should think of Nietzsche here, of course, as well, when we should take seriously the radical notion that there could be some other primary motivation other than pleasure, and perhaps even more fundamental than pleasure, even if it turns out to be incoherent, which you're right, it may be.

3:23 Dylan: It may be that there's lots of things that provide pleasure. And it may not be that the pleasure that's motivating, it's that the thing itself is motivating and part of its sign is the pleasure, I guess. But control and the notion of having power is pleasurable, right? I mean, it's part of the way knowing things is right? That in getting to know things, I think it's inarguable that part of that involves the feeling of power, of control over something. But is that diagnosis of how we work, you know, that someone like o' Brien or the o' Briens could exist, that they're absent of any of those connections that would cut across power for power's sake? I guess in this world it is, right. The usual story involves someone loving power for power's sake or pursuing power for power's sake, but having other things that they actually love. There's always a crack. Right. Well.

4:20 Mark: And I find it difficult to put together the will to power idea with the I'm subordinating myself to another entity, and so it's really the will to the power of that entity. Like, those seem two different kinds of psychological phenomenon that don't go so well. Like, I am entirely driven by the will to power, but I identify with the whole of creation, with Gaia. Ha, ha, ha. I am all powerful. Like, no, that doesn't work.

4:45 Wes: Well, the reason he explains why, which is that. But, you know. So Winston looks at o', Brien, and o' Brien at this point is reading Winston's thoughts. And one of the thoughts he reads is, well, you. You look old and run down yourself, so what's the point? You know, you're just a human being and you're going to die. And the whole point is that you obtain immortality through the collective. There is no will to power unless it's the power of the collective that you identify with. That's page 333 in mind. That power is collective. The individual only has power insofar as he ceases to be an individual.

5:21 Dylan: I'm sympathetic with Mark's criticism, which is, how does that work, Dylan?

5:27 Wes: Freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom.

5:31 Mark: But we're trying to determine, is this an analysis of human nature or is this hyperbole? Of course, there's serious political commentary going on here, but. But I've also heard, just Look Up Satire, 1984, that talking about the boot stamping on the face, the extreme to which it is given, if you take it as satirical in a strong sense, not just in the detail, but in this particular formulation, then maybe he's being a little more playful regarding human nature, such that this is not actually a serious claim about.

6:02 Wes: So he does say, right now, it's a nationalism. Nationalism is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige for the unit. Not for himself, not for himself, but for the nation or other unit. Yes. In which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

6:22 Mark: But don't you think people sign on? Okay, well, so I guess the question is the sinking is how that works. Like, if it's really sinking, but you don't get to participate. At least even the lower classes here in the picture get to participate in the thrill of victory. That, you know, this I'm watching it on.

6:40 Dylan: It's just like the way thugs do, right? I mean, you know, you have the leader, but then you have the henchmen, right? And why do the henchmen do that? Because they're participating in that power.

6:49 Mark: Or football fans, they're not. They're not winning at all.

6:53 Wes: Also, Orwell's association of power and prestige is actually spot on. Like, I don't have very coherent thoughts on all this, but I can point to the types of things people should think about if they want to think about the will to power as a fundamental motive. And one of those things is just the sense in which power. It's not like other pleasures and the having this positive sense. It's more about undoing insecurity. It's more about coping with anxiety and fear and, you know, the fact that you're going to die and the fact that anyone could destroy you at any time.

And the only way to undo all that is to have absolute power. And the other aspect here, o' Brien says, well, what does power mean? Well, really, ultimately, it must be power over other human minds. I think the train of thought to follow there is the master slave dynamic in Hegel, the sense in which we are constituted by sort of internalization of a fantasy of the recognition of others. And in fact, this is why Winston's place of intimacy and privacy. This is another sense in which it turns out not to be so. Because even in our most private place, right, we have internalized the, you know, societal precepts.

We have a superego, we have a conscience. And that private place is overrun with the kind of fantasy of the surveillance of others. It's the internalized Panopticon. So that's the sense in which power ultimately has to be the power of other human minds. If we are to sort of escape that predicament, escape the predicament of being constituted by the recognition of the other. We must, you know, have the thing which Hegel says we can't have, which is to be the total master of the mind of the other, which o'

8:41 Mark: Brien gets to do. But if other portions of the group organism, that is the party that don't get to do this messing with the minds of others. You know, they're only having the vicarious, what power over the potentially imaginary citizens of the other nation that your nation is conquering. Whatever. So that's a much far removed. It seems like that would not be satisfying their will to power. So for them to sink their individuality into that group and not get this direct juicing of being able to cause someone else to suffer or make someone else's mind change then would not actually be.

It's a vain pursuit of the will to power. Like in Boethius. By seeking fame, you're trying to get happiness, but it's not going to work out that way. Well, you're trying to fulfill the will to power, but by sinking yourself. You know, unless you're really at the top of the food chain by identifying with this thing that really looms over you, you are not ultimately going to get the power you seek.

9:39 Dylan: You know what it makes me think of also? Who is Harry Potter?

9:46 Wes: Sorry, it was just unexpected.

9:48 Dylan: Well, I think of Professor Umbridge, I think of Bellatrix and I think of the whole Voldemort thing going on.

9:56 Mark: Right.

9:57 Dylan: So Voldemort is a character like Big Brother, Right. Or is authoritarian power for power's sake. He wants to be immortal, control everyone, everyone pays homage to him. There may be a little bit less of merely power for power's sake and a little bit more of adulation. In his case that's required. But there are all these people that populate that world that are the sycophant, like the mid level managers of authoritarianism, like Umbridge and other minions who do his bidding and who subjugate others and have power over those others. Partly as a reflection of Voldemort in the case of Umbridge.

10:47 Seth: Right.

10:47 Dylan: She isn't a partisan of Umbridge, she's a partisan of power. She wants to run things and rule people for the sake of ruling them. Anyway, we didn't read that book, but that's what I was thinking of.

11:00 Seth: I can't comment because I don't know the reference.

11:03 Dylan: It's totally fine. You know, you can throw the flag on. I pulled an external source out of there.

11:09 Mark: I'm doing a search. Does Umbridge have any association with Voldemort before his return? There are plenty of things online about it if anybody wants to follow up.

11:19 Wes: It's a very complicated question. And yeah, I mean, Dylan, I'm with you in the sense that it. How does it not reduce to pleasure in the end? And this is the same thing, by the way. This will to power we saw with Freud and Civilization and its Discontents. Freud's phrase for this is death drive. Actually, I think the death drive and will to power are actually very closely related. But. So Freud also postulated that there was this motivation that couldn't be reduced to pleasure, even though he famously postulated his pleasure principle. And it's very hard when you look at it closely. It's very hard to see how that's possible. How is there another fundamental human motivation which isn't really reducible to pleasure? I haven't been able to work that out, and I haven't been able to work that out with power either. But I think it's something that should be taken seriously.

12:02 Dylan: Sure. Another observation about it is that whether or not o' Brien is Big Brother or not, one feature that seems to be true just thinking about power, and maybe in particular totalitarian authoritarian regimes, is they're filled with people who are participating in it in a way that they enact that authoritarian behavior in their sphere of influence, even if they are themselves subject to similar kinds of authoritarian activity above them in terms of the hierarchy.

12:37 Wes: The other thing is they all get to love Big Brother. And I think that's a really important thing, actually, because we talked of this whole. The loss of the domain of privacy and intimacy and this whole motif that goes through this. So, for instance, at the very beginning of the book, he talks about seeing these newsreels. And in one of them, there is a mother. She's a refugee. Her boat is being shut up, and she's covering her child with her arms as if that could do something. And he associates this with his mother and her sort of protective way she would lay her hands on him.

And the sort of loyalty and intimacy of that is that it doesn't matter if it's actually protective. It's the sentiment that counts. And it's the sentiment that Big Brother, ultimately, he hopes, can't take away from him. He can't take away his love for Julia. The Big Brother can't take away the meaning of such moments, even if he can blow you to bits. Now, the weird thing is he develops an intimacy, a replaced intimacy with o', Brien, which calls back to all of this stuff. So, for instance, on page 316 of mine, this is chapter to the last section.

After torturing him for a while, Brian puts his arm around Winston's shoulders. And it's comforting to him. And Winston has all this relief and gratitude. And then, so here's a really creepy. If he could have moved, he would have Stretched out a hand and laid it on o' Brien's arm. So that's a direct callback to his mother putting her hand on his arm, that protective act which is repeatedly mentioned through the book. He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling that at bottom, it did not matter whether o' Brien was a friend or an enemy had come back.

O' Brien was a person who could be talked to. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as understood. O' Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while it was certain he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some sense, that went deeper than friendship. They were intimates somewhere or other, although the actual words might never be spoken. There was a place where they could meet and talk, which he thinks is the place where there is no darkness, which is actually the place of surveillance. So what I think the point of all that is what happens is the idea of the intimacy involved in privacy and family.

It gets ripped apart, and the intimacy gets transferred to the public and to the collective and to the party. The intimacy, in a sense, it's destroyed. It really is destroyed. And they really can control your mind and make you not love Julia, but. But they still have to leave you with the illusion of intimacy. That's why the love of Big Brother is actually necessary. And even though it'll be a world of hate, there has to be this love of Big Brother, and there has to be this, you know, all the ideas that run through the book. Oh, this. You know, the room in Charrington's shop is a place where we can have privacy.

It's actually. It's a room of surveillance. Everything that seems to be private and intimate is actually. Even the. And the sentimental things like the engraving of the church on the wall, which holds a lot of meaning for him. What's meaningful is actually turns out to be an instrument of surveillance. It turns out to be a telescreen.

15:52 Dylan: That all sounds pretty spot on. But note that the manifestation, the tactical implementation of that intimacy with Big Brother, after you've obliterated all the genuine intimacy, is still through an individual. It's through o'. Brien. Right. So it's still manipulating the tried and true means of conventional intimacy, of a person putting their arm around you and speaking to you directly.

16:20 Wes: You take them out on a date, you torture them a little bit.

16:23 Dylan: No, it's absolutely like another sign of the horrible kind of corruption that's going on. And the doublespeak of it, but it still remains that it's having to work through the same structures.

16:38 Wes: But remember, he's not really cured until the very last scene. He doesn't really love Big Brother until the very end. And it's mediated by this announcement of a great victory.

16:48 Mark: And so there's also the difference. We could have this Buberish picture of the other. You know, that's what a human relation is, is a relationship between two fundamentally other beings who are somehow connecting on some level. But in this one, 211, in my version, during the same part where he's loving O', Brien, he's talking about how O' Brien is a real believer and O' Brien was being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, that Winston had ever had or could have, that o' Brien had not long ago known, examined and rejected.

His mind, contained Winston's mind. So that's a different relation of intimacy. It's not otherness, it's familiarity, because you have reduced yourself, or you have been hollowed out and filled with the guts of the Party, or surveillance has been so heavy and you've had so little freedom of independent thought that somehow, yes, the Party somehow can contain your entire mentality.

17:44 Dylan: In Winston's case, it's maybe because he is the example of an individual who is breaking out or asserting himself earlier in the novel, that the evisceration of his individuality is all that more destructive and horrible, that it ends up being the annihilation of him as almost as an entity. I mean, he's walking around in the end, breathing and talking. And there's even in his last encounter with Julia, something of the shadow of his individuality in some respect. Maybe the mere fact of that is why it makes sense to think that he'll eventually get shot, is that despite the conversion, it isn't completely gone.

18:32 Mark: Certainly we're all familiar with the. Just as people diving into philosophy and you think like, oh, I have an original idea. And you do more research like, no, no, 10 other people already thought of that. And especially because your original idea usually comes in reaction to some other text, some other idea that's been put forward well past people already contemplated that idea and anticipated all the reactions that you could possibly have and then some. The more you learn, the more you realized how you don't know how. Your tiny mentality is very predictable in the face of the whole.

So that macrocosmic scholarly thing. Well, there's not much to be scholarly about in this world. So you could actually have an individual like o' Brien that could. You know, you're basically like a child compared. You know, this is how Winston is just constantly. From the first time he is describing o' Brien as someone who just seems so wise and knowledgeable. And this is, I guess, part and parcel of the image of Big Brother as knowing all, but part of that is like God. And even your rebellion is part of his little plan.

19:32 Wes: Yeah, and I think that's important. That's this idea, that rebellion, that even when we think we are rebelling and sort of asserting our individuality and our freedom of thought, that often we really are succumbing to our own indoctrination. And I think that's important. In both the Politics and English Language essay and the Notes on Nationalism, Orwell ends those essays by saying, these are things that we all do. It's not just the other side that does it. This is a human tendency, and it's not even eradicable. Like, all we can do is try to notice it in ourselves and fight against it, Right?

20:07 Mark: Yeah.

20:07 Wes: Well, you fight against it. You can't eradicate the feelings, I think he thinks. But he says in Notes on Nationalism, basically you can notice it and prevent it from infecting your considered judgments. It's one thing to have a passing nationalist kind of frenzied feeling, and it's another to actually have whole theories and consider judgments and basically bigoted ideologies based on those feelings.

20:30 Dylan: Yeah. And in Politics in the English Language, while acknowledging that even he himself, probably in the very essay in which he's lambasting against using worn out tropes and dead metaphors, is that you need to be constantly trying to come up with new ones in new turns of phrases that are rooted in the concrete experience. To say, this is what I'm trying to say, and it's a constant level of activity of an individual in a creative act, that while acknowledging that it won't always be successful, it will be successful sometimes. And the fact that it's not always successful is not failure.

It's more than just the trying that's important. It's the trying and understanding that you will succeed at times. And that's what's the important part that to me was reflected in Winston. I mean, in the end, it's what gets driven out of him. That's a way of paraphrasing him and Julia saying that their love, they'll never betray each other. Ultimately, there's no way they believe that. There's no way they can take that away from them, the genuine love they have. They might say all kinds of things, give away where they're located, all kinds of things under torture.

But in the end, and they can't get so far into them that they would genuinely sell them out over themselves. And of course, in the novel, that ends up not being true. It ends up that Winston and Julia both sell each other out.

22:01 Seth: In fact, they signal that. They tell o' Brien that that's exactly what he needs to get them to do. When he meets them to give them the book and they drink the wine, he says, would you be willing to kill hundreds of innocent people? Yes. Would you be willing to blind and deface a child? Yes. Well, you know, would you be willing to never see each other again? And they say, no. And he says, that's good to know. Thank you for being honest. Just like we know that. Yep. We know why they know what to put in room 101 for Winston is what happens in that room.

Right. They're just narrating the story of their own betrayal and torture. There's a couple of threads I kind of want to go back to. The theme about is this description or satire or what have you. So there's two things about the novel that I find a bit. I don't know. They're not comprehensible to me in the context of the universe that he builds. The first is there's no overt or apparent corruption by the elites or the inner party that's acknowledged and known by anyone. And, you know, I suppose it's possible that there would be completely surreptitious corruption.

You know, the fact that they get better food. We know they get better food, but there's no sense in which it appears as though there's an accumulation of capital or luxuries or what have you. And so in that sense, the thesis that they're just doing power for power's sake makes sense. But it seems unrealistic to me. And that's one of the reasons why I don't see this as a future for us, because we don't see capital at play and the forces of capital working. So it's totalitarian in a. Like a socialist state, almost without currency, even though there is some money being spent around.

And then the other thing is, it seems like this vision of the future requires slavery. So we have. The vast majority of people are these proles that are. They're subhuman. They're so incapable of any kind of political action that it's not even worth trying to indoctrinate them. They essentially live their lives in servitude, but in a weird way, freely. They have their own stores where you can actually get things that Party members can't necessarily get. And I think he says at one point, maybe it's in the Goldstein book. That the party's like 6 million people.

Or the inner parties like 6 million. And then there's like another 15 million party members. And then 85%. The rest are all proles. And if you want to ask whether the book has something to say about human nature, we're looking at the Party members to talk about cruelty or domination or will to power. But it also then, if you're going to look at it that way, you have to say there's a part of human nature that can be broken, never to be rebuilt. And the idea that there could be a completely oppressed subclass. That would have harbor absolutely no feelings, no desire for rebellion or revenge or something strikes me as incoherent.

25:01 Mark: So here's a quote to address the last bit. He's talking about the proles. This is in part one, chapter seven. The proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet he remembered how once he'd been walking down a crowded street. When a tremendous shout of hundreds of women's voices had burst from a side street a little way ahead.

It was a great, formidable cry of anger and despair. A deep, loud O that went on humming like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It started, he had thought, a riot. The proles are breaking loose. At last, when he reached the spot, it was to see a mob of two or 300 women. Crowding around the stalls of a street market. With faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment, the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans anyway and charging too much for them.

So the women are freaking out. It's basically like a Black Friday sale. And it's people fighting to get in the Walmart. That's what's going on here. And so, yeah, they do social engineer the proles enough to give it. Like they make pornography for them. They, you know, basically give them circuses

26:18 Wes: they have, you know, they do physical labor. They have films, football, beer, their petty quarrels. He's basically describing, you know, it's a caricature of working class. Well, and the sense in which they're kind of bought off with these very basic pleasure. You know, they labor so much that they don't have that much time. And then on their time off, they engage in all this low culture type stuff.

26:47 Seth: Yeah, I get it. I just don't. It doesn't seem credible to me.

26:51 Wes: I mean, the proles are. I don't know, aren't they the ones who are likely to put a populist in power or even a fascist dictator? Ultimately, yeah.

27:05 Mark: That's really the part that I didn't remember about this book. Like that there were three classes. I was thinking this was. Again, I haven't read Brave New World either for a long time. But I'm pretty sure that's just a matter of there's the rulers, whatever that is, and then there's the citizenry. And there's no distinction between the middle class and the lower class that have to be brainwashed in different ways in that. So this part of the theory also. Right. It seems like they should have to put more effort into brainwashing the proles. This division just can't be as sharp as is being made out here. And yet this is what he's putting forward as his version of the Marxist theory of history. That there's always three classes and that the bottom one is always more or less impotent and irrelevant. Even though they may.

27:47 Wes: We should be careful about saying this is like, again, it is a satire.

27:51 Dylan: Well, especially since the proles seem to have things like families, whereas the Outer Party that Winston is part of, you know, that kind of thing doesn't exist. They've, you know, they've obliterated the family in that environment. And so the fact that there's attachments and love and other kinds of individuality in the proles. Maybe it's just we don't get the details on how they're actually subjugated more than economically. But it seems, given the amount of work that has to be done to keep the members of the Outer Party in their place and just the whole activity with Julia and Winston, that you would have at least some numbers of members of the proles that would have the same kind of intellectual acumen that would, on an individual basis, even if it doesn't rise to the level of generating an actual revolution, but would cause the same kinds of challenges for the Party.

And the inner party and they would have to control.

28:59 Wes: Yeah, that does say. They do say that.

29:01 Dylan: Okay, well then there you go. Okay, so he does take care of that. You just kill them.

29:05 Wes: And we know what Stalin did. He just killed them by the millions.

29:08 Dylan: Well, yeah, I mean, at least in Orwell's time, it's not an unreasonable thing. Right. Millions and millions and millions of people can be rounded up and killed.

29:19 Mark: So some of the reaction of this book, you know, he was considered. He was accused of being just hysterical. This is a hyperbole.

29:28 Dylan: This is not anybody but apologists for the corruption of. Of Stalinist Russia that called him hysterical.

29:36 Mark: Well, Wes, you're the one that read a million secondary sources in this. Maybe you can respond to that. I don't even remember this point where that came from.

29:45 Wes: So yes, he did get a lot of blowback from because the intelligentsia was dominated by a lot of Stalin sympathizers at the time.

29:54 Dylan: Apologists at least. Right?

29:56 Wes: Yeah. And he had had problems getting. So for instance, even publishing Homage to Catalonia was a problem for him because people didn't want to hear about criticism of Stalin and the hard line Communist Party. That's how crazy it was. He even had trouble publishing. So I don't know. But I do know people wonder, well, is it meant to be a prediction of some sort? Is it meant to be realistic? And if so, isn't that kind of unrealistic? Or is it simply a sort of thought of experiment where you take totalitarian mentality to its extreme, something that couldn't really exist in the real world but is a sort of object lesson, even though it's a caricature? I don't know what are you thinking of with the hysteria Mark?

30:46 Dylan: I'm pretty sure I read exactly that phrasing that he by critics.

30:51 Wes: I was thinking of this guy Deutscher.

30:53 Dylan: Yes. Was considered in fact. Yeah. It's one of the secondary sources that I read that you had recommended. Wes, I forget which if it was a moral implications of despair or was the reversible opposite. So I think it was a moral implication. It doesn't matter that contemporaries who my recollection was that they were at least the examples given is they were apologists for Stalin's purges called his portrayal an explicit hysterical reaction meant to defame the communist movement in Russia and was missing the mark because they just didn't get it right.

31:34 Mark: Well, putting aside that we have no representative of that view here and it's not going to be something we're going to be in favor of at all. But I could see certainly it is used hysterically. Comparisons to Orwell are used hysterically all the time now on all sides of the political spectrum. One of the main reasons we're considering this now, one of the first things when I was looking up Orwell and contemporary thought is like some article on stop comparing the current administration to the world of 1984. The fact that we're allowed to criticize means that this is not like 1984, like right there.

32:14 Wes: Well, even Stalinist Russia doesn't rise to that level. It's close in some cases.

32:19 Mark: And I guess it's sort of a slippery slope argument that you say, well, once you start imposing orthodoxy or some sort, then you'll inevitably go down this slope where all humanity is destroyed. And when you get to that picture of the boot stamping on the head and we're explicitly advocating fear and hate and that's the foundation of our society. Like, like, come on. Even the most people that might approve of other aspects of the program still think that what they're doing is for some positive ideal of equality or something like that. And you might say, oh, we have to stop free capitalist trade because that leads to systematic oppression.

Or if we want to take the current example, we need to stamp out forms of offensive speech because of the long term harm that they cause. But ultimately, of course, that is in service of something good. Not. It's not for power, it's for power's sake and based on fear. Like, that's ridiculous.

33:18 Wes: Yeah, but that's not. I mean, this pretty clearly. Orwell's not trying to be predictive there. He's saying, well, how would an oligarchical regime actually be able to stay in power forever? What would it have to be? What would it have to look like? And in that case, his whole point is that they would have to be. It couldn't just be that they think that they're doing something good and they're unconsciously driven by power imperatives. Because it would all fall apart. This is all there in the book, in Goldstein's book. It would all fall apart. They have to be conscious of it.

That's why he has to have o' Brien understand that power is his true motivation. The party has to understand that, because if they didn't understand that, they would perish. So I think it really is a thought experiment and that part of it is just meant to give you the sort of logical outcome of what it would mean for a regime not to simply fall apart.

34:13 Dylan: And there's a twisted kind of figuring out that's going on.

34:16 Seth: Right.

34:16 Dylan: That if you say, oh, I figured out that I want to stay in power forever and really to make that happen, I really have to understand that my objective is not riches, it's not sex, it's not adulation, it's power for power's sake. And if I do that, then I have my strategic understanding that I can tie my tactics to in order to actually make it happen. So that self understanding gives a kind of twisted understanding of how to make it happen.

34:52 Seth: I would agree, but amend that statement to say instead of I say we.

34:56 Dylan: Yeah.

34:57 Seth: One of the important aspects of this is that the individual disappears into the collective. And so that consciousness of the maintenance of power for power's sake requires that no one individual is, you know, there can't be a cult of personality. Except in the case where the personality is manufactured as Big Brother.

35:16 Dylan: It's like the Borg.

35:17 Seth: It is like the Borg.

35:19 Mark: So the fact that there has to be this self conscious pursuit of power is what makes the whole thing as a thought experiment much less interesting to me because of what is essential. I was brought to comparison one of the readings that we had read for our new atheism episode, Dennett's Breaking the Spell, where he describes the tools that religions use to immunize themselves to objections. And that's the kind of thing you could see sort of as a semi natural phenomenon that these ideologies develop for themselves. Like the things that are described in this nationalism essays, the obsession, the indifference to reality, that being able to interpr given thing that happens as you know, our side is winning.

Like that's. We can completely see that in Trump and Trump supporters, like there's no. And you know, in religion the fact that if you even question it, it's not just a matter of questioning an intellectual principle. It's like you're insulting God. And so in this, in here, it's a Big Brother is made into this personality. So it's not just you having some healthy intellectual questioning, but you're betraying the one that loves you and gave you everything. The crito is coming to mind here. Again, what's essential to these sort of defense mechanisms that these ideologies might have is exactly that they are not planned, that they are.

They're sort of things that naturally grow out of. Or in Dennett's terms, it was that, well, the belief systems that don't have these defense mechanisms are not the ones that survive. This is explicitly put in a Darwinian metaphor. So if it's Ingsoc and the other two world governments are the ones that rose to power. It's because they were the ones that exhibited the strongest self protection mechanisms. And thinking about what those would be, I think is fascinating. But if you put that one of those is we have to explicitly know that we're in it for power and so sort of remove any veneer of the naturalness of these self protection mechanisms rising up, you know, as people just try to perpetuate the thing.

It does make it seem much more artificial, much more of a lab thought experiment than a what with the natural extension of what we already see in political parties.

37:38 Wes: Now, I don't know, you know, at the limit of something you can get something quite informative even if it's not possible. Right. In real cases people have to be deceived to some extent about their pursuit of the good. But if you want to look at it in terms of this completely unrealizable ideal limit. Yeah, you get something like complete self consciousness of one's motivation for power. That can happen. But it's interesting to think of that as the limit and look at real cases in comparison to that limit.

38:13 Dylan: Yeah, I think that you could get pretty close to that in substantial cases where you have people wholly dedicated to a group and they understand their role in it and they are single minded in the pursuit of the power of that group for the sake of that group's power.

38:35 Wes: Yeah, I mean Stalin, he killed millions of people and they weren't just most of them were party members and a lot of them were the highest and most prestigious people in the party, killed them or exiled them or eventually even got Trotsky.

38:50 Dylan: But it's really important to remember that he didn't pull the trigger himself on all of them. It's worse than that. He got thousands of people to willingly do that activity for him. He got people in his inner circle, he got soldiers on the ground who were running the trains, taking people out to gulags in middle of Siberia. He got generals and party insiders to sort out the logistics for how they were going to do this activity. To provide uniforms, provide weapons, to provide cars and trains and trucks and feeding the people that are going to be doing this, making decisions on how much they're going to feed the people that they're rounding up and how long they're going to hold them and which ones they're going to kill and which ones they're going to, not how they're going to put together sham trials for them and how those sham trials are going to look to make them seem like they're not quite sham trials.

Do they have a whole PR wing who's defending them and being apologists for them? I mean, the scale of that and the kind of cooperative collusion involved is staggering.

40:04 Wes: But the question is, to what extent do they deceive themselves? I mean, does Stalin know that it's all just, you know, about maintaining power? So, I mean, Orwell's criticism is that they betrayed the revolution, clearly. How could anyone believe that they were really honoring the revolution? They were trying to do something good. They were just killing all their political enemies and trying to stay in power. Yeah, because it's not the ideal limiting case. Conceivably there's a lot of self deception that goes on and maybe Stalin and, and many of his comrades think, well, this is what has to be done. This is, you know, this is the only way it's going to work. But at some level, you know, even if it's completely unconscious, let's say there has to be an inner o' Brien who's telling you that, yes, this is purely about power.

40:54 Mark: So I think we need our final topic here. We need to explicitly bring up doublethink, which I think is an extension of what we've been talking about, which is the hardest thing to get a hold of. Well, let's look at what he says about it and to what extent it is a real thing. This is near the beginning, page 32 to 33 on my version. Doublethink. To know and not to know. To be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies. To hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.

To use logic against logic. To repudiate morality while laying claim to it. To believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy. To forget whatever it was necessary to forget and then to draw it back in memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly forget it again. And above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety. Consciously to induce unconsciousness and then once again to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you have just performed. Even to understand the word double thinking involved the use of doublethink.

And this is, you know, key in the story, that he has to eventually be able to. Well, if the Party tells you that two plus two equals five, then you have to not only be able to parrot that back, you have to believe it, even though you know in some sense that you're deceiving yourself.

42:15 Seth: You have to forget that you ever knew that two plus two equals four.

42:19 Mark: Yes. Or that we were fighting Eurasia until last week.

42:23 Dylan: I mean, on the one hand, that idea of holding contradictions in place is in some way commonplace, Right? We do that all the time. It's this refinement of it that explicitly takes it as being the goal, even while we acknowledge that we hold things that are contradictory together at the same time. There's a way in which that rubs wrong, and we live with it, but it's uncomfortable. And with doublethink, it's utterly embraced in the most radical way.

42:57 Mark: Right? In the same way you might say, well, really, you say you're doing that for the public good, but really you just want power. But that's made explicit in the discussion we were just having. In exactly the same way, this doublethink. It's not just that you are a hypocrite, that you think you're so rational, but look at all these irrational things you underlyingly believe. You say you're an atheist, but then the plane starts to crash and you say, oh, God, help me, you know, whatever. Or all these kind of things that we hold on different levels and ways that we deceive ourselves about ourselves. Right? We had a whole episode on don't

43:31 Dylan: bring up Sartre right now. That bastard's just like.

43:33 Mark: Which according to his.

43:34 Dylan: Burning a hole in my brain right now. So.

43:39 Mark: Right. One of the secondary sources brought that up in trying to make sense of doublethink. I'm not going to try to elaborate it. It's just.

43:45 Wes: And actually, Sartre was arguing against Freud. That secondary source was not right. They acted like he was arguing a Freudian point of view when he was trying to refute Freud. Just the passage made it look like he was in agreement with Freud anyway, so.

44:01 Mark: But the way that we've elaborated bad faith in the fact is, unlike Freud, where there's an unconscious at work, is that. No, no, Sartre thought there was no unconscious, really. So it is you consciously deceiving yourself. So that sounds very much like double think here, except done programmatically, not just as an everyday coping mechanism, but as something that the government prescribes, at least by example.

44:28 Wes: No, it has to be conscious and unconscious at the same time, consciously to induce unconsciousness. And that's brought up elsewhere in the book as well. You have to have both.

44:38 Mark: Well, I don't know, at the same time, but in succession, right. In his rehabilitation, Winston kind of gets on board. Okay, I want to see that you have five fingers holding up Instead of four. Just because you tell me that it's five and I see four, but I want to agree with you. So he's like, ultimately, it has to become unconscious, but it has a conscious step.

44:59 Dylan: Is Winston engaging in doublethink when he is enjoying his work? He loves his work, but he knows that it's a horrible thing to be doing to destroying the past. Is that doublethink or is that a kind of bracketing.

45:16 Wes: No, I mean, I think any one of us would naturally enjoy having a creative job.

45:22 Dylan: I agree with that. I'm asking if that is an example of doublethink or is that an example of something else? I'm inclined to think it's an example of something else.

45:31 Mark: I think it is something else. Yeah. Because it's two different aspects. It's not, this work is good, this work is bad. That's only an apparent contradiction. Like, it's good in this respect and it's bad in this respect.

45:44 Dylan: There might be a kind of incontinence or lack of integrity about it in the sense of.

45:49 Wes: Let me just read another passage on doublethink, because I think it's later on and it sheds some light on it. Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered. He therefore knows that he's playing tricks with reality. But by the exercise of doublethink, he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious or would not be carried out with sufficient precision. But it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.

Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty, to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, et cetera, et cetera.

46:40 Dylan: Yeah. So that makes it clear that Winston's pleasure in his work is not a case of doublethink.

46:48 Mark: So isn't doublethink ultimately defensible to these people because they have a Rortian view of truth? They say, look, truth is a matter of public agreement. But we are on the side of this public. Ingsoc is the public as far as

47:05 Wes: we are the public

47:08 Mark: right. For Rorty, of course, it's a matter of a natural outgrowth of interested inquirers being clear minded.

47:17 Seth: But for Rorty has an element of consensus to it that this does not.

47:21 Dylan: Yes, Yeah, I mean, that's a bastardization of Rorty. I don't know why you're invoking that.

47:26 Wes: All right, let's leave Rorty out of it and just say relativism.

47:30 Seth: Please don't get Dylan started on pragmatism.

47:32 Wes: Let's just say relativist. Right.

47:33 Seth: I need to go to bed.

47:35 Wes: Okay. And leave aside the question of whether Rorty is a relativist in the way.

47:39 Dylan: So.

47:40 Mark: But yeah, just to relate this, that we've been having a discussion recently about this. And by reflecting on the difference between the way Rorty puts it in terms of sort of a naturally occurring consensus, or you could even say, you know, using Peirce. Well, it's what people would come up with if they were doing inquiry for an indefinite period of time. You know, it's an ideal limit. Something like that. That's what truth is. No, if you take it like the dumbest way of putting relativism is just social agreement. And then the social agreement is done by fiat because the society is constructed in a very non democratic way, then.

Well, you know, I guess there is an epistemology that would support this. It's not necessarily that the inner party believe in their hearts that two plus two objectively equals four. But I am deceiving myself and making myself believe whatever the party says. No, it's that I can engage in doublethink because I do think, really I fervently believe that whatever the party says in virtue of the party believing it becomes true. That actually is their theory of truth.

48:47 Dylan: That's different than relativism.

48:48 Seth: But you could have made the point without bringing up Rorty. I think.

48:53 Mark: Why don't you give your closing, Seth?

48:56 Seth: The last thought I have is just that it's been in fashion for a while that you would Compare and read 1984 and Brave New World together. And that they proposed two alternative dystopian futures where control mechanisms were different, but still both proposing kind of a similar kind of future. And one of the essays we read that Wes recommended mentioned that Orwell had published Animal Farm not too recently, before 1984. And it occurs to me that maybe it might be interesting to. It will tell us some things about what the purpose and aim of 1984 is if we stand it up in comparison to Animal Farm. So I might go back and just revisit that. And I had an amusing anecdote about watching Animal Farm as a child at a youth center because they thought it was a cartoon and we're showing it in a Double feature with Jason and the Argonauts and sent a bunch of 4 to 8 year olds home crying.

50:02 Mark: The horse is being taken off to a better place. I don't know if it was explicit enough to traumatize children. I don't remember the cartoon quite well enough.

50:12 Seth: Oh, no, no. In the animated movie, it's extremely explicit. I still have the image in my head.

50:17 Mark: Okay, there's. Well, my kids nursery school, they thought Westworld was for a kid show and they just started showing it to him,

50:28 Seth: the Yul Brynner one.

50:30 Mark: That is a lie. That is doublethink. As far as my closing. So I had raised the question at the beginning, what are we considering here? Well, it's the relationship between language and totalitarianism. I don't feel like we've made a lot of progress on that. I feel like what this book shows is that a certain kind of totalitarianism, the kind depicted here, which has certain things in common with actual totalitarianisms, but a good strategy that it could use is to take control of language. But that does not necessarily mean by converse, that any sort of control on language, like, say, for the purposes of political correctness or whatever, in turn leads to totalitarianism, or has by that virtue of trying to control language, a totalitarian aspect.

There's certainly a lot we could say about comparing the attempt to simplify language and to get rid of all the redundancy with the, actually, in a very similar time period, discussion of the Vienna Circle and the philosophers who are trying to, oh, shouldn't we have a philosophically precise language? I guess this was a few decades earlier, for the most part, with the Wittgenstein's Tractatus and stuff. Still, there was a lot of talk about philosophically reforming our language to avoid mistakes. And there was nothing in that that smacked of totalitarianism.

It's objectionable for other reasons. So I think that though this, it's an interesting connection. I think people make way too much of it. And the same way that people historically are comparing. Trump might want to be treated like Big Brother, but nobody else is playing along. So, like, we're not. There's no serious danger of this kind of thing, at least without him taking major control of the proles and having them walk around like you were talking about Seth in our political episode of making them walk around and enact his will and become his hit squad.

Or, you know, there would need to be much more infrastructure for us to seriously be afraid of this kind of thing happening. And likewise, when people react to any Sort of attempts to control or abridged speech or whatever. Like, oh, no, that's like 1984. Like, no, it's not.

52:40 Wes: I completely disagree here because the argument can't be, oh, it's totalitarian if you try to prevent people from saying things or having certain thoughts, but not if it's only the bad thoughts we prohibit. We'll only prohibit the bad thoughts. The point is, you have to be able to have the bad thoughts, too. And at a political level, you have to have a system of government which is completely agnostic about what the bad thoughts and good thoughts are. It doesn't mean they have to be agnostic as far as the political system, the liberal political system itself. But the desire to prohibit any sort of language, no matter how horrible or any sort of opinion, no matter how horrible we think it is, I think is a big mistake.

53:23 Dylan: By prohibit, you mean, like, make laws against, as opposed to make arguments against.

53:28 Wes: Not even just laws against, I think shaming. Trying to shame any sort of speech out of existence at the level of political discourse. Now, in your personal life, you do someone says bigoted things and you.

53:39 Dylan: No, Wes, I'm saying that it's different to shame it as it is to say you are wrong to be speaking that way. Right. You ought to be able to make an argument against somebody. It can't be the case that you have to sit by while somebody spews out vile shit all the time and not be able to say something about it. That's not what you mean, right?

54:02 Wes: No. Yeah. I think you can call something vile shit, although I think to be persuasive. I'm advocating persuasive discourse, even where we think people are saying horrible things.

54:13 Mark: In some ways, I think this is just. We're restating the conflict between Rawls and Sandel. So we just saw this week as we're recording, where Milo Yiannopoulos, you know, famous for I should be able to say whatever offensive thing I want to say. Well, it's finally been taken down for saying things in favor of the exact example that I used in our Tocqueville discussion. That man boy love in the Greek sense is okay. Like, that is speech that by sort of common consensus, we have decided is just really beyond the pale. And I guess I don't see a tremendous problem with that. I wouldn't put somebody in jail for talking.

54:56 Wes: No, I mean, if someone doesn't want him.

54:59 Seth: Yeah.

54:59 Wes: If he's disinvited to speak at the Republican, whatever that conference is and loses a book deal you know, yeah, obviously a publisher doesn't have to associate the. And all that sort of thing. Do I want to see him go to jail? You know, basically prevented? Well, not even just jail. Do I want to see him simply barred from public discourse? No, I don't.

55:23 Mark: Shame. You don't want to see him shamed.

55:25 Wes: No matter how vile someone's beliefs, I don't want some because it's not just the government. So, for instance, should he be barred from Twitter? Absolutely not. That's just the extent to which I'm a libertarian about free speech. I don't want anyone in a position of power effectively preventing someone from communicating because they don't like what that person says. And the reason why is because, yes, we all agree that man boy love someone advocating that is wrong. But I don't want someone else deciding ultimately what's allowable and what's wrong in the future. And again, it's not like anyone has to publish your stuff or this or that, but if powerful parties can actually effectively prevent you from speaking, I think that's dangerous.

56:10 Mark: But is it Orwellian? You could say it's objectionable.

56:13 Wes: No, Orwellian is more properly applied to the sort of reality bending aspects of thought control and newspeak and that sort of stuff.

56:22 Dylan: But I think what Mark is pointing to is unfortunately a very common mode of rhetoric and it probably has been common forever. There's a way in which it just feels like it's more common now than it was. They're just constantly having.

56:36 Mark: I rewrote the history book. So it's been common even though Orwell only wrote the book in 1949. It's been common forever. Sorry, go on.

56:43 Dylan: Not Orwellian, Mark. Substantially overstating what is the matter of fact in such egregious terms so as to inflame people against it. Right. You know, you have the term Orwellian or you say, well, they're just like the Nazis, or you know, pick whatever kind of horrible behavior that you want to associate with somebody or somehow wonderful behavior of putting in those tropes rather than speaking the way Orwell says you should, which is talk about things concretely and say what you mean rather than trying to build up something that is not actually a real thing.

So certainly right now you can't hardly hear somebody talk about bad things in public life without it being generally made so extreme as to. It's not a conversation. We're not trying to figure out what's actually going on to try to solve the problem. It's Always like some kind of Marvel comic book movie where the universe is on the line and there has to be no holds barred. You're with us or against us. And it's his own version of completely subverting and in its own way, a totalitarian kind of speech that is actually rife through 1984. The way in which a big brother speaks, putting aside the doublethink part, is just the way everything is.

It's a complete victory. It's extreme in every way. The only thing you add in doublethink is that tomorrow might be extreme in exactly the opposite way.

58:15 Mark: Yes, I agree. I'm actually not in favor of censorship, but I don't think it is corrosive of a basically free society to set kind of whatever public standards, you know, just like we don't. You can limit where advertising is going to be or whatever. I would not be in favor of, say, decency laws and prohibiting swearing or whatever, but, like, I don't ultimately think that it's incompatible with a free society to have rules like that rule.

58:42 Wes: You mean laws or sort of social conventions.

58:46 Mark: Describing it as.

58:47 Wes: I completely disagree with it.

58:48 Mark: Even laws. Well, all right. We'll have to have an episode on swearing or perhaps on white privilege, as we will next time.

58:58 Dylan: The only thing I would say, we didn't say much of anything about the writing of the book, and Orwell's a really, really good writer, and the book itself is utterly engrossing and deeply disturbing in its imagery and in everything about it. And so. So I really recommend just reading it as a great piece of literature.

59:21 Mark: Yeah.

59:22 Wes: I mean, to that end, let me just read, like, one beautiful thing in

59:25 Mark: here if I can find it, just while you're looking. Yeah. We didn't mention that he wrote it while he was dying of tuberculosis. And he said it's a great idea, but it really would have been much better executed if I didn't have tb, if I wasn't so messed up. And he was really meticulous in rewriting every little bit. I take him at his word that it probably would have. It's very sad that he died as young as he did, that we would have gotten better and better books, perhaps, as his skills advanced.

59:53 Wes: I mean, Orwell's a big. He's a hero for me. His whole. His politics, his writing, the way he writes, his sense of decency, the fact that he's willing to apply any sort of critical standard that he applies to others immediately to himself, and not pretend like his own side is just the ultimate good and the Other side's the ultimate evil. That sort of decency in humanity, I think, is just. It's so rare, especially in a political writer. So now I'm trying to find. He's. You know. There's this recurring thing where he sees a proletarian woman, large woman, hanging diapers and singing.

And she's singing. This thing that was invented by the Party and by a machine even. It wasn't even written by a human being. But. But she makes it sound very beautiful. And right before they caught, he sees her again. So he says. As he fastened the belt of his overalls, he strolled across to the window. The sun must have gone down behind the houses. It was not shining into the yard any longer. The flagstones were wet, as though they had just been washed. And he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney pots.

Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent and pegging out more diapers and more and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave to 20 or 30 grandchildren. Julia had come to his side. Together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he looked at the woman and her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare like buttocks protruded. It struck him for the first time that she was beautiful.

It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of 50, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work that was coarse in the grain, like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so. And after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

1:02:01 Dylan: The whole section is just fantastic writing.

1:02:04 Wes: Yeah. So the very end, right before they get caught. So you skip on a little more and they're looking at her. The birds sang. The proles sang. The Party did not sing. All around the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil and the mysterious forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan, everywhere stood the same solid, unconquerable figure made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.

Well, he's deluding himself there. I mean, Winston is. But anyway. But that whole part where he's sort of doing homage to the working class, you know, that, that is like, that's the way Orwell feels about the working class and people and the average person. And he believes in a, in democratic socialism and in the idea that the only decent kind of government is one that really accounts for the well being of all those of everyone. And that's not something you necessarily know when you read it in high school. Right. You just see it as an anti communist story.

But his criticisms come out of this, you know, a deeply held affection for people, I think.

1:03:19 Dylan: Yeah, that comes across in the essays too.

1:03:21 Mark: All right, well, our episode next time on White Privilege, there will be several articles you can look on partiallyexaminedlife.com upcoming for a list of which ones we actually pick. If you want to read them before you listen along with us, before you listen to our discussion where we're going to have Lawrence Ware on again with us. Who has taught a class in that, so should be a lot of fun. Our closing song is going to be called Civil Disobedience and it is written by Jonathan Segel. You might remember Jonathan from our Schopenhauer on Music, episode 115.

And then he brought his Camper van Beethoven bandmate Victor back with him on episode 118. Finally, after a year of running the Nakedly Examined Music podcast, circled back to having him talk about his own music, his new album. But this song was one he recorded by himself for a solo album. And you can hear us on episode 38 of Nakedly Examined Music talking about that version of this song. You can hear that. And then he didn't actually re record it, he actually just took that same track. And David Lowery's voice got overdubbed as the lead vocal and other things got added.

So in the end it is quite more lush. So what you're about to hear is the version off of camper van Beethoven's 2004 album New Roman Times. To hear the interview with Jonathan and the other one with David Lowery, of course, go to nakedlyexaminemusic.com thanks guys. Everybody should go to our Facebook page and join the discussion. Follow us on Twitter. Go give us a nice review on the iTunes store, etc. Maybe donate something if you have not already done so. Thank you and good night.

1:05:04 Dylan: Good night.

1:05:05 Wes: Good night.

1:05:05 Seth: Good night.

1:05:35 Mark: When they come to your home, you know they'll never leave you alone. You know you're on that list

1:05:56 Wes: I

1:05:56 Mark: guess you won the one they missed. Have you been doing something wrong? Well, I guess you've known that all along. So when they come to take you away Are you going to go with them on that day. Will you know what to do? Will you know what to do? Will you do it? Will you do what you know how to do? When they come into your house Are you gonna hide like like a little, little mouse? You know you're in there for fight But I guess you've known that for a while. There's no room for folks like you what can you say? What can you do? So when they come to take you

1:08:23 Seth: away

1:08:26 Mark: I am gonna go with them on that day Will you know what to do? Will you know what to do? Will you do it? Will you do what you know how to do? Sa. Sam. Will you know what to do? Will you know what to know? Will you do. Will you do what you know how to.

Sa.