The "Enlightened"
As Orwell pointed out, the "enlightened" are essentially hypocrites. They complain about the "Military Industrial Complex," yet are apparently ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of the fact that they live the way they do because of the very evil they seemed compelled to condemn.
We don’t see them calling for the end of I-phones, or computers, or any other the other material benefits they enjoy as a result.
In the essay Notes On Nationalism, Orwell notes that the “enlightened” also habitually ignore inconvenient truths, because to acknowledge them would be to acknowledge that they have been mistaken in their beliefs.
This has nothing to do with intelligence either, but instead is more of a result of something like Arrested Development, carrying over from childhood the notion of “good guys” vs. “bad guys,” and not appreciating the complexities of the world.
“All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.”
George Orwell, "Rudyard Kipling" (1942)
http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip
We don’t see them calling for the end of I-phones, or computers, or any other the other material benefits they enjoy as a result.
In the essay Notes On Nationalism, Orwell notes that the “enlightened” also habitually ignore inconvenient truths, because to acknowledge them would be to acknowledge that they have been mistaken in their beliefs.
This has nothing to do with intelligence either, but instead is more of a result of something like Arrested Development, carrying over from childhood the notion of “good guys” vs. “bad guys,” and not appreciating the complexities of the world.
“All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.”
George Orwell, "Rudyard Kipling" (1942)
http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip