And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”
Feelings one “has”; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its “content” or object; it is between I and You.
In governing effectively, coercion is perceived as impoverishing and dehumanizing. So the consummate political model in Daoism, corresponding to the consummate experience itself, is described as wuwei (“noncoercive activity”) and ziran (“self-so-ing,” or “what is spontaneously so”).
“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”
And by reflecting on it we can perhaps detect one more characteristic which art must have, if it is to forgo both, entertainment-value and magical value, and draw a subject-matter from its audience themselves. It must be prophetic.
For words are not mere tools, neither are they mere symbols. They are representative realities; they remind us of the inevitable connection between imagination and reality. . . . The corruption of speech involves the corruption of truth, and the corruption of words means the debasement of speech which is the debasement of our most human and historic gifts. [John Lukacs]
Jonathan Swift, “On the Difficulty of Knowing One’s Self,” says you must have a reflective mirror to achieve self-knowledge: “A Man can no more know his own Heart than he can know his own Face, any other Way than by Reflection.” For Swift this reflection comes from the regard of others.
Meaning perception is our ability to step back and see something as a whole, to see the forest, and not only the trees. Immediacy perception, as its name suggests, is our ability to focus on individual details, what is immediately before us. It is like a searchlight. It has a powerful beam, yet it has one problem: “it can only focus on one thing at a time,” hence Hume’s failure to see the connection between cause and effect.
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