The real absurdity of the MoT as envisioned by Orwell is not that the truth is constructed, its that the "truth" is constructed
and always changing. And, that change is happening not just within the context of historians re-evaluating something decades later, or big events being retconned within your lifetime, but, from day-to-day and even hour-to-hour to fit the current needs of The Party.
Every time the Elite change their minds or new events occur, all of history has to change with them so they were always retroactively right and whatever happened was all according to plan. Thus, "history" is constantly revised , even when those doing the revising can remember having written it down only maybe a week ago....
More than just the state determining what the Truth is, and burying inconvenient contradictions. Their version of the official record is
ever changing and nobody questions how such a malleable official record could possibly be true. (Because they can't, they'll be disappeared as traitors if they do)
They aren't just reshaping history, they've
destroyed it as a concept by making it completely arbitrary and useless.
The world of
1984 is one where you can't be a historian not just because the facts are being hidden and suppressed, but, according to The Party, nothing has ever changed. They've always been in charge, always been right, always been at war with Eurasia, and will always BE right. There literally is NO SUCH THING as history. Just the official Party Line. You can't look in a history book and find when the war with Eurasia started, what objectives have been contested, or what the original
causus beli was, that information is not just missing, it's both unknown and, in fact
, unknowable.
History as a concept has been destroyed to the degree that people don't even ask "what happened?" Not only can they not answer that question due to militant omnicensorship, they can't even envision a
need to ask: History is whatever the official narrative is at this second, and nothing more, enforced with fasciscistic glee on anyone who can't or won't perform the doublethink needed to accept it.
And Bobby thinks that's a GREAT idea, since the big problem the far-left has with objectivity is you might get different conclusions than they did if you are allowed to know the truth... Its why they don't have a problem with tolerating 'We Wuz Kangz" historical revisionism, ignore past documented "firsts" in culture or sports or science so that modern-day people who align with them and are "more diverse" get the credit instead, regularly reboot entertainment franchises or support social narratives deciding guilt or innocence over actual evidence at trial. And, dissenters saying "Hold up, we've tried this stuff before and it didn't work" or "How is this any different than when the Nazis did it?" are traitors to the narrative and Party who must be disappeared.
How it SHOULD have or COULD have played out is of more importance to them than how it DID.
It reminds me of the time I heard someone say the symbols for male and female were sexist. (never was sure if it was an intentional joke or not)
Well, the male symbol is supposed to be a spear and shield, while the female one is supposed to represent a hand mirror, so, you could argue it stereotypes all men as violent and warlike while all women are shallow and vain.... but, I think everyone except the screechiest of dangerhairs knows that the symbols have developed a neutral identity with us in modern use where we just use them as shorthand to tell apart the sexes without making any additional judgments or navel-gazing about stereotypes.
We don't use them to enforce sexism any more than we're encouraging violence by using Greek-rooted words in our language because the Greeks went to war all the time.....
