I am making slow, but steady progress in my recovery. The tonsillectomy has by far been the most difficult to recover from, but I am now just at something like a bad sore throat. My fever continues to fluctuate, and I still require quite a bit of water, but I can eat anything I want. I had some small delays in starting the new book, "1984," due to illness and travelling (I haven't actually read or listened to any books so far during my recovery because I have just been zoning out so badly.), but I am starting today and should keep up a fair pace of it.
In starting reading, I find it interesting to note that George Orwell's novel was written around the same time that Ayn Rand was herself writing. Their themes are similar, a totally overreaching government system that seeks to control every aspect of civilisation and culture. The difference is that Ayn Rand, having grown up during the communist revolution put it as the enemy of freedom, whereas George Orwell, writing from a western perspective has imagined that such oppression would likely come by way of a totalitarian dictatorship. We see by their parallel works how similar both of these philosophies can be.
Now, let us read on and enlighten our minds.
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I have been reading, and I find it a bit interesting how he speaks about the mindless frenzy of the masses. He even talks about getting caught up into it, even if his thoughts behind his frenzy are against what everyone else seems to be for. I know that I have experienced many times people that can be die hard for something and relate it to a person, even if the grounding is totally wrong. I didn't see the film, but I cannot help but relate the character from The DaVinci Code and his devotion (albeit separate from masses) to be somewhat of a similar frenzy.
More thoughts to come.
I finished the book a couple of days ago. I found that I was intrigued with the main character through most of the book, and how frustrated I was that it jumped large chunks of time at the end of the book, just showing the milestones of change in the character that occurred. He was such a well developed, thoughtful, reasoning individual, and then in a few pages he was thinking like everyone else out there.
Aside from that, the ideas portrayed in the book were very interesting. I think that the afterward in my book brought back some interesting thoughts, speaking of this book as one of the three unUtopias. The other two were We and A Brave New World. I have read We (it was an assigned book in high school, which sort of ruined it for me), and found that there were some pretty strong similarities in the goals of the leading organization. And I couldn't help but think that this plan of making decisions for people has been attempted before, and will continue to be attempted again. The thing that is most intriguing is that I never got the impression that the author was happy with the civilization that he created, but was portraying what he felt could happen if the things he observed happening in the present for him continued without controls.
That being said, I feel that an individual, if he/she has a set of values, but does not have any anchor upon which to base those values, they can be twisted and altered with time. Even those that have some solid place to anchor to will frequently be moulded by the experiences they go through. And if enough force is applied in the right way, that person can be manipulated in pretty extreme ways. The phrase priestcraft being enforced by the sword came to mind a few times that I was reading, and that it would mean destruction.
I also found it interesting that the true power was power over the mind, and that was the power that was sought after. That is what each person really only owns, their own thoughts and ability to make choices based on their circumstances (sometimes the only choice is how to think about and understand the things that are happening to you).
Well, those are my thoughts. Hope to get a little feedback which leads to more thoughts here.
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