last changed 2012/07/21
Ever wish you could get the Cliff notes for writing popular posts? Skip the years of studying marketing and psychology, skip the countless hours honing your writing skills, skip the painful process of trying and failing over and over until you get it right. Just go straight to what works, and forget everything else. Wouldn’t that be nice?
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I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
George Orwell

[I]t is becoming increasingly obvious, that the state is not based on men of strong spirit and natural power. It is increasingly based on the ignorance and passiveness of the people.

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy - or even two orthodoxies, as often happens - good writing stops.

[..]

No tirades against "individualism" and the "ivory tower", no pious platitudes to the effect that "true individuality is only attained through identification with the community", can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

Every powerful state relies on specialists whose task is to show that what the strong do is noble and just and, if the weak suffer, it is their fault. In the West, these specialists are called "intellectuals" and, with marginal exceptions, they fulfill their task with skill and self-righteousness, however outlandish the claims, in this practice that traces back to the origins of recorded history.

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The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

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At this stage of history either one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and by now that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elite should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must - namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena.
Noam Chomsky

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
George Orwell

Ever wish you could get the Cliff notes for writing popular posts? Skip the years of studying marketing and psychology, skip the countless hours honing your writing skills, skip the painful process of trying and failing over and over until you get it right. Just go straight to what works, and forget everything else. Wouldn’t that be nice?
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