14 – BUYING THE FARM?

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

- George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

November 14, 2024

This is surely the most famous quote from Animal Farm, long a classic piece of political satire.  (George Orwell was the pen name used by Eric Blair. I think Blair chose this pen name because “Orwellian” was to be such a brilliant term for describing absurd politicized language!)   

The “all animals are equal” quote is a great illustration of an insight that Orwell offered in his essay Politics and the English Language:*

“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

The quote from Animal Farm’s exemplifies the pigs’ systematic abuse of logic and language, by way of contradiction. “All animals are equal” implies that all animals are equal to one another, but leaves wiggle room so that one can read/misread the word “equal” as a relative term rather than an absolute one.  Could there be degrees of “equal”-ness, just as there can be degrees of colourful-ness, for example (more colourful, less colourful)?

What is really a logical fallacy hides the fact that the two parts of the sentence are contradictory.  It then sounds no more absurd to say “more equal” than to say “more colourful.” But the content is nonsense – the notion that anything can be both equal and not equal at the same time is contradictory. 

The pigs, of course, did this because they wanted the power to control the other animals. Some 80 years later, it remains a useful reference point for assessing the current state of secular Western culture.

However, Western culture in the 1940’s had not yet normalized contradiction. Most people understood that contradiction was problematic, and they could distinguish sense from nonsense, and truth from lies. To be sure, people lied, but they knew they were lying. In Animal Farm everyone is “in” on the nonsense – Orwell, his readers, even the pigs.  We all recognize the nonsense for what it is!

In fact, Orwell’s intention in writing Animal Farm was to warn against the dangers of revolutions. Today, however, huge numbers of people – whether speaking or listening - do not recognize that contradiction is nonsense.  Take this brief excerpt from a panel discussion that took place on CNN just the other day; the topic in view is biological males playing sports with biological girls…

Shermichael Singleton: “I think there are a lot of families out there who don’t believe boys should play girls sports…"

Jay Michaelson (interrupting): “They’re not boys… I am not going to listen to transphobia at this table; I am not going to listen to you call a “trans girl” a boy…”

CNN Newsnight with Abby Philip, Nov. 11, 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DlM_2djAHg

[You can watch the relevant portion at the link above (starting at the 4:05 mark)…]

Jay Michaelson betrays no awareness at all that what he says is nonsense!  He is serious!  Worse, he is also sincere!! He believes that what he says is “true” and he quickly claims the “moral high ground.”  And while he does not believe that objective Truth exists, he demands that his absurd claims be accepted as the Truth!

Mr. Michaelson has normalized contradiction.  Like JFK Jr., he is piloting without an objective horizon** and that is a dangerous thing to do.  If you are not paying attention, though, you, too, will likely miss the absurdity of this nonsense!  Don’t!

Here, then, we confront the immediate cost of normalizing contradiction: meaningless words, nonsense/absurdity/irrationality; words without content, just a nice sound, and not seen for what they really are. From this flow innumerable indirect costs, which we will address in due course, but next time I want to take a step back and revisit the idea of "horizons" that I introduced last time, to develop it a bit more; then we will look at some high-profile words that normalizing contradiction has rendered meaningless – words that we should avoid.

*     Essay by George Orwell published in 1946 and available online in PDF format.

** I am learning on-the-fly. Since the previous post, I have come to see the need to flesh out the concept of "horizon" to distinguish between the objective (real) and the subjective (imaginery).