[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] In Front of Your Nose

[Bill Totten]

by George Orwell

Tribune, London (March 22 1946)


Many recent statements in the press have declared that it is almost, if
not quite, impossible for us to mine as much coal as we need for home
and export purposes, because of the impossibility of inducing a
sufficient number of miners to remain in the pits. One set of figures
which I saw last week estimated the annual 'wastage' of mine workers at
60,000 and the annual intake of new workers at 10,000. Simultaneously
with this - and sometimes in the same column of the same paper - there
have been statements that it would be undesirable to make use of Poles
or Germans because this might lead to unemployment in the coal industry.
The two utterances do not always come from the same sources, but there
must certainly be many people who are capable of holding these totally
contradictory ideas in their heads at a single moment.

This is merely one example of a habit of mind which is extremely
widespread, and perhaps always has been. Bernard Shaw, in the preface to
Androcles and the Lion, cites as another example the first chapter of
the Gospel of Matthew, which starts off by establishing the descent of
Joseph, father of Jesus, from Abraham. In the first verse, Jesus is
described as 'the son of David, the son of Abraham', and the genealogy
is then followed up through fifteen verses: then, in the next verse but
one, it is explained that as a matter of fact Jesus was not descended
from Abraham, since he was not the son of Joseph. This, says Shaw,
presents no difficulty to a religious believer, and he names as a
parallel case the rioting in the East End of London by the partisans of
the Tichborne Claimant, who declared that a British working man was
being done out of his rights.

Medically, I believe, this manner thinking is called schizophrenia: at
any rate, it is the power of holding simultaneously two beliefs which
cancel out. Closely allied to it is the power of igniting facts which
are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or
later. It is especially in our political thinking that these vices
flourish. Let me take a few sample subjects out of the hat. They have no
organic connexion with each other: they are merely cased, taken almost
at random, of plain, unmistakable facts being shirked by people who in
another part of their mind are aware to those facts.

Hong Kong. For years before the war everyone with knowledge of Far
Eastern conditions knew that our position in Hong Kong was untenable and
that we should lose it as soon as a major war started. This knowledge,
however, was intolerable, and government after government continued to
cling to Hong Kong instead of giving it back to the Chinese. Fresh
troops were even pushed into it, with the certainty that they would be
uselessly taken prisoner, a few weeks before the Japanese attack began.
The war came, and Hong Kong promptly fell - as everyone had known all
along that it would do.

Conscription. For years before the war, nearly all enlightened people
were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also
against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective. I know
very well the arguments that are put forward in defence of this
attitude; some of them are justified, but in the main they are simply
forensic excuses. As late as 1939, the Labour Party voted against
conscription, a step which probably played its part in bringing about
the Russo-German Pact and certainly had a disastrous effect on morale in
France. Then came 1940 and we nearly perished for lack of a large,
efficient army, which we could only have had if we had introduced
conscription at least three years earlier.

The Birthrate. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, contraception and
enlightenment were held to be almost synonymous. To this day, the
majority of people argue - the argument is variously expressed, but
always boils down to more or less the same thing - that large families
are impossible for economic reasons. At the same time, it is widely
known that the birthrate is highest among the low-standard nations, and,
in our population, highest among the worst-paid groups. It is also
argued that a smaller population would mean less unemployment and more
comfort for everybody, while on the other hand it is well established
that a dwindling and ageing population is faced with calamitous and
perhaps insoluble economic problems. Necessarily the figures are
uncertain, but it is quite possible that in only seventy years our
population will amount to about eleven millions, over half of whom will
be Old Age Pensioners. Since, for complex reasons, most people don't
want large families, the frightening facts can exist some where or other
in their consciousness, simultaneously known and not known.

UNO. In order to have any efficacy whatever, a world organization must
be able to override big states as well as small ones. It must have power
to inspect and limit armaments, which means that its officials must have
access to every square inch of every country. It must also have at its
disposal an armed force bigger than any other armed force and
responsible only to the organization itself. The two or three great
states that really matter have never even pretended to agree to any of
these conditions, and they have so arranged the constitution of UNO that
their own actions cannot even be discussed. In other words, UNO's
usefulness as an instrument of world peace is nil. This was just as
obvious before it began functioning as it is now. Yet only a few months
ago millions of well-informed people believed that it was going to be a
success.

There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all
capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when
we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show
that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this
process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or
later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a
battlefield.

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic
societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the
silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting
to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more
facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not
dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and
brutally. Goering could say 'Guns before butter', while his democratic
opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of
hypocritical words.

Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere,
and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for
years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda
posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant meal while the
proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the
workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of
the USSR that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to
be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions
of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return
home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in
frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war
quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were
plain to any dispassionate eye.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One
thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep
some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise,
when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may
simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually
wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was
right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when
either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one
cannot, of course, get rid of one's subjective feelings, but one can to
some extent insulate them from one's thinking and make predictions
cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people
are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two
and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of
sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to
be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place
simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have
chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's
political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested
against solid reality.

THE END

(c) 1999-2004 O. Dag – ¡C. date: 2000-02-12 & L. mod.: 2004-12-06!

http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose


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