Tag Archives: George Orwell

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It’s 1984 Again

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“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”  –George Orwell

It has been a pathetic spectacle to witness the ransacking of our federal government under the guise of serving the American public. Extra-legal acts of sabotage to agencies like the NIH have come with the explicit endorsement of the GOP and implicit acceptance of a somnolent public. We have to wonder what kind of country actually wants the self-inflicted wounds of wholesale firings and dismembered agencies. Few democracies have seemed so placid in the face of such self-destruction.

It tends to be the smaller declarations from the White House that capture its sloppy logic and daily rhetorical mayhem.

Consider the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf is shared by three nations. Though the  mental  fog may sometimes lift from his thinking, Donald Trump was logically out of his lane to overturn tradition and unilaterally assign a new name. Mexico and Cuba rightly have other ideas.

And for keeping the same geographical label, the Associated Press was suddenly barred from full access to the White House.

In overturning an uncontested place name Trump sought to turn a rhetorical whim into reality. Like his absurd palaver ignoring the sovereign states of Canada and Greenland, he squandered his authority to deny what others can clearly see. Such denial tries to sell a fantasy as the truth. Only small children and politicians engorged with a sense of power would try this kind of sleight-of-hand.

And so when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins put the question to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, her response was stunning in its audacity. The logic of Leavitt’s non-answer would bring no credit to even a child. She tried to sell the renaming as settled fact, and the traditional name a “lie.” “I was upfront on day one if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” she noted. And with a straight face she continued with a perfect example of doublespeak: “It is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America, and I am not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is. The secretary of interior has made that the official designation, and geographical identification name server, and Apple has recognized that, Google has recognized that, pretty much every outlet in this room has recognized that body of water as the Gulf of America, and it’s very important to the administration that we get that right.”

                                 Karoline Leavitt

The circular logic here tries to sell this weeks old fabrication as the status quo, presumably while the rest of us will avert our eyes to avoid noticing that Mexico itself shares over 1700 miles of shoreline along the Gulf. This kind of  binary thinking is Alice in Wonderland kind of stuff, spoken—amazingly—to a packed pressroom disappointingly silent except for Ms. Collins.

Ditto for the new administration’s insistence in the same press conference that gender is a simple two-tailed concept. In attacking efforts to deal with the dynamic nature of gender identity, Leavitt wanted to hold to a view of language that admits no well-documented subtleties. Apparently the Trump administration is ready to declare “that there are only two sexes, male and female. And we have directed all federal agencies to comply with that policy.”

Again, Leavitt can say this, but even in the precincts of the White House her truth is a forgery. She needs to get out more. It is settled science that gender is fluid, allowing no one-size-fits-all dichotomy. As the University of Iowa’s Maurine Neiman has noted, scientists of human reproduction “are in wide agreement that biological sex in humans as well as the rest of life on earth is much more complicated than a simple binary.” In fact, according to the Gallup Organization, nearly one in ten Americans identify as L.G.B.T.Q. Poor Ms. Leavitt wondered off into the weeds again to presume that it was her place to deny firm scientific proof. He attempt to usurp the prerogative of Americans to shape and affirm their own identity would have been wide of the mark even in 1894.

 

The Myth of Personal Authenticity

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Wikipedia.org
Source: Wikipedia.org

It’s not only our nature to be role-players, our mental health may depend on it.

One of the more interesting paradoxes about human communication is the high contrast between our admiration for personal “genuineness” against contradictory evidence that we are really many selves. To be sure, there can be no question that a perception of personal authenticity is comforting. We express justifiable contempt for liars, phonies, and acquaintances whose deeds and words simply don’t match up. “Two faced” or “duplicitous” are among the nicer terms used to describe folks who seem to have fallen short. And yet the evidence is all around us that our ability to function in various communities requires adaptations that turn us into distinct if not wholly different persons. As exhibit “A” consider George Orwell’s well-known description of a restaurant manager in his book, Down and Out in Paris and London:

I remember our assistant maitre´ d´ hotel, a fiery Italian, pausing at the dining-room door to address his apprentice who had broken a bottle of wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled (luckily the door was more or less soundproof) “Tu me fats—Do you call yourself a waiter, you young bastard? You a waiter!  You’re not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came from. . . Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a customer.  

This is a man who is simply doing his job.  A maître’d’s success requires a minimum of two selves, and probably many more. And he is not alone. His situation has its counterparts in ordinary lives that barrel through full schedules that require constant adjustments to the persona we offer to others. Indeed, a video crew following us around for a few days would probably record that most of us are virtual repertory companies of one, adjusting, enhancing or concealing aspects of our elastic and complex temperaments. We know the value of making the necessary adjustments. At a party, for example, its a good bet that vegetarians will not try the meatballs. But most will still fulfill the role of the compliant guest, perhaps not even mentioning their dietary preferences.

Our expanding repertory requires the mastery of a range of suitable scripts.  What can you say at a funeral? On a first date? At a job interview? As a group leader?  We listen and learn, using an increasingly familiar script to match the role, all the while growing comfortable in the part.

It’s not only our nature to be role-players, our mental health may depend on it. Adaptability is a cherished social skill. We are graded on it in primary school, especially in the United States.  There are countless sets of job reviews, psychological tests and ad-hoc measures of personal maturity that explicitly stigmatize inflexibility. In organizational life as in relationships it’s frequently  a person’s behavioral and rhetorical rigidity that gets them in trouble.  “Pathological” has become a near-synonym for the rigid thinker and obsessive behavior.

True, the single hold-out can be both the hero of a story or its villain.  For heroes  think of Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men (1957) or Lionel Barrymore in You Can’t Take it With You (1938). But in the organizational world we often decry leaders who can’t adapt to the times, or the under-appreciated talents of their subordinates.

To be sure, there are always the inflexible who try to make a career out of an ostensibly consistent and single identity. But frequently making an issue of violated boundaries begins to look like selfish prevarication. That’s what third acts are literally about.  Watching a film or play, we wait for the likely third act transformation of a character in trouble. Change is in the wind. Can they manage it? We want them to find the resources to become who they must.

Comments:  Woodward@tcnj.edu