Closer To The Ideal

George Orwell describes a school in Pennsylvania (a bit of parody on my part, and then, afterward, the original text):

Inside his bedroom a voice was reading a list of figures which had something to with recent school team scores, from various sports. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. The student turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the built-in computer it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way to turn it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were part of the uniform worn at the School. His hair was fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-mustachioed face of the principal gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. SCHOOL OFFICIALS ARE WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into the student’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering th single word DARE. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Drug Task Force snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Drug Task Force mattered.

Behind the student’s back, the voice from the built-in computer was still babbling away about various team victories. The built-in computer received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that the student made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision that the medal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the School Officials plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

The student kept his back turned to the built-in computer. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Central High school, his place of education, towered vast and white above the grim landscape. This, he thought, with a sort of vague distaste – these were the suburbs of Philadelphia.

The Central High school was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, into the air. From where the student stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the School:

DRUGS LEAD TO DEATH

SEX LEADS TO DEATH

FAILURE TO GET INTO COLLEGE LEADS TO DEATH

…
For some reason the built-in computer in the bedroom was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which the student was now sitting and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, the student was able to remain outside the range of the built-in computer, so far as sight went. He could still be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was peculiarly beautiful book. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Students were supposed not to go into junk shops (”Drug dealers could be in there,” it was often said), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things such as authentically vintage clothing which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his backpack. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary, a paper one which the School Officials would be unable to read. This was illegal (since there were no longer any rights for students), and if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by either death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced labor camp. The student fitted a nib into the pen. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real pen. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into Speakwrite (voice to text software) which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

The principal is an asshole

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him.

…For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The built-in computer had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that had had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything woudod be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monolgoue had dried up.

…He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step.

This is, of course, in reference to the way schools are run in Pennsylvania.

I offer this as a contest. Take the opening pages of 1984 and do your own remix. Post it either in the comments here, or on your own blog. I post below the material I was working from.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way to turn it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were part of the uniform of the Party. His hair was fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-mustachioed face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Thought Police, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston’s back, the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron and the over-fulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the medal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew,even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought, with a sort of vague distaste – the was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth century houses, their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden like chicken houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry Of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

…
For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops (”dealing on the free market,” it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things such as shoelaces and razor blades which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried ti guiltily home in his brief case. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by either death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced labor camp. Winston fitted a nib into the pen holder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficult, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite, which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink, and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was 39, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

…For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monolgoue had dried up.

…He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step.

Clearly, if totalitarian rule ever comes to the US, it will justified as necessary to protect the children.

I’ve noticed this too. Few people will do things they know to be evil, but they can rationalize the worst kind of behavior, and convince themselves that bad behavior is good. And when there is an incentive involved, the bias gets a lot worse:

Incentive-cause bias, both in o ne’s own mind and that of o nes trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call ‘agency costs.’

Here, my early experience was a doctor who sent bushel baskets full of normal gall bladders down to the pathology lab in the leading hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. And with that quality control for which community hospitals are famous, about five years after he should’ve been removed from the staff, he was. And o ne of the old doctors who participated in the removal was also a family friend, and I asked him: I said, “Tell me, did he think, ‘Here’s a way for me to exercise my talents’” — this guy was very skilled technically– “‘and make a high living by doing a few maimings and murders every year, along with some frauds?’” And he said, “Hell no, Charlie. He thought that the gall bladder was the source of all medical evil, and if you really love your patients, you couldn’t get that organ out rapidly enough.”

Now that’s an extreme case, but in lesser strength, it’s present in every profession and in every human being. And it causes perfectly terrible behavior. If you take sales presentations and brokers of commercial real estate and businesses… I’m 70 years old, I’ve never seen o ne I thought was even within hailing distance of objective truth. If you want to talk about the power of incentives and the power of rationalized, terrible behavior: after the Defense Department had had enough experience with cost-plus percentage of cost contracts, the reaction of our republic was to make it a crime for the federal
government to write o ne, and not o nly a crime, but a felony.

Life in a Chinese factory:

The training begins immediately on the second day upon our arrival. At first I thought we would be informed of some professional operative skills and knowledge, but instead, we were taught the factory’s regulations, culture, and acknowledgment of Foxconn’s business concept. By now, I think it is safe to say that the training is a part of Foxconn’s brain washing process. A supervisor told us that working at Foxconn requires total obedience; you do not need to be intelligent or highly skilled. After a week of training, we concluded that at Foxconn, we shouldn’t treat ourselves as human beings, we are just machines. During the week, we also had a health examination, a very simple blood test, a blood pressure test and a vision test. We did not receive any results afterwards.

After the one week of in-class training, we begin our on-site training, which is a modest way of telling us that we have to work as long as regular workers, with minimal compensation. Since we are still under training, Foxconn did not give us a contract to sign.

I consider myself lucky because one week after the on-site training I was selected by a CCPBG recruiter, which means I am officially a regular worker. When the selection takes place, it seems like a slave market where slave owners get to pick suitable slaves. There were about a couple hundred of us going through on-site training, and when the recruiters from other companies on Foxconn campus come, all of us have to stand straight in lines, putting our hands behind our backs, and wait for these recruiters to pick. After the selection ends, those who did not get picked go back to their work post. They cannot become regular workers until being picked so I was very lucky to be selected the first week. Many of my classmates are still doing on-site training waiting to be picked.

Twenty people including myself were selected and brought to the workshop where I will finally begin as a regular worker. First, the supervisor and assistant manager explain to us the rules of the workshop: no talking at work, no leaving work post at will, and etc. Then, the section supervisor gave us a lecture, emphasizing that we are no longer in school and that we have to work hard. Afterwards, I was assigned to my post, and few days later, I was offered a contract to sign. Since I was very inexperienced at that time, I did not even look at the contract details, and I still have yet to take a look at what exactly is on my contract.

My work post at that time was connecting computer wires. Later, I was assigned to another production line that produces CD-ROMs. I believe the whole workshop is producing for Sony.

Everyday I wake up at 7 AM, head to the workshop at 7:30 AM, place all personal items that contain metal, such as mobile phones, keys, pens and etc., into the shoe shelf, change into my uniform, and begin working at 8 AM. Although CCPBG states that work begins at 8 AM, it actually requires workers to be present at the workshop by 7:30 AM, and those 30 minutes are unpaid.

Although the industrial sector in China has seen significant liberalization over the last 31 years, the government still plays a large role in managing agriculture and labor relations (all the way to coercive laws limiting how many children families can have). As such, the poor treatment of the workers is a political issue, and will probably only have a political solution. This would be an area where labor unions could probably do some good – the political pressure they might bring would be exactly what is needed.

Robert Hoekman is writing about the death of “Tyler”, a pit bull dog. I find it unusual, and uncomfortable, to see this much anger in a public forum:

We were all so confident that Rachel, his would-be new owner, was the right person for him. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

Less than nine hours after leaving him in her care, she did the exact thing we explicitly told her not to do, the one thing that most blatantly defies common sense: she let him off of his leash. In less than nine hours, she took away everything we did, everything we hoped for, and every chance Tyler would ever have at living the life he deserved.

Tyler was depending on Rachel. We were depending on her. She failed at her commitment to love and support this wonderful, sweet, and loyal dog so miserably and so quickly that it has absolutely stunned each and every one of the amazing people that have volunteered their time and energy to bring Tyler home safely. Even worse, Rachel opted out of continuing to aid in the search, citing her outrageously absurd belief that Tyler would simply go back to doing what nature designed him to do best: be one with the Earth through his nomadic and migratory instincts.

People who never met Tyler, my wife, nor myself came to the area night after night, morning after morning. They hiked through the preserve. They walked neighborhoods. They posted flyers. They talked to everyone they came across. Every last one of them did so much more than Rachel could be bothered to do. Every one of them cared so much more than she ever could.

I wish more than words can say that last Saturday had never happened — that we had decided to keep Tyler ourselves and not brought him to his new owner’s apartment and said goodbye. I wish we had been able to see her naivete and arrogance before it was too late. I wish so many things were just slightly different than they were.

I will never forgive Rachel for her foolish and fatal decision. Tyler will never have the chance.

Even if “Rachel” is a fictional name, I assume that if I made an effort, I could find out this woman’s real name.

I’m curious if it is ever wise to express this much anger in a public setting? I’d be angry as hell if someone’s lack of responsibility lead to the death of an animal that I cared about, and I might even vent about the incident in public, but I don’t think I’d give enough details that other’s could figure out who I am talking about.