I find it eerie how intellectually close O’Brien’s mindset is to that of the pure Post-Modernist of today (for the purpose of comparison, we will disregard the fact that the word ‘pure’ in relation to post-modernism is an oxymoron). If a meteor smashed through a roof, someone then cleaned up the mess and patched a hole in the roof, then erased the memories of those in proximity at the time, then the meteor never fell. This is exactly how O’Brien deals with Winston’s refusal to depart from the bare physicality of arithmetic on the fingers; the key similarity is that both the State in 1984 and modern philosophers of today deny the existence of an objective truth—even a physical one; this is why not many scientists are prepared to become post-modernists, because the degree of doublethink required is too great. Hawking, one of the greatest contributors to physics in the 20th and 21st century, searches for a ‘Theory of Everything’; to have a theory at all, one must believe in some sort of exterior truth, wherever it is from.
I find it eerie how intellectually close O’Brien’s mindset is to that of the pure Post-Modernist of today (for the purpose of comparison, we will disregard the fact that the word ‘pure’ in relation to post-modernism is an oxymoron). If a meteor smashed through a roof, someone then cleaned up the mess and patched a hole in the roof, then erased the memories of those in proximity at the time, then the meteor never fell. This is exactly how O’Brien deals with Winston’s refusal to depart from the bare physicality of arithmetic on the fingers; the key similarity is that both the State in 1984 and modern philosophers of today deny the existence of an objective truth—even a physical one; this is why not many scientists are prepared to become post-modernists, because the degree of doublethink required is too great. Hawking, one of the greatest contributors to physics in the 20th and 21st century, searches for a ‘Theory of Everything’; to have a theory at all, one must believe in some sort of exterior truth, wherever it is from.