Intellectual Honesty!

I recently finished reading Christopher Hitchens' book "Why Orwell Matters." Great book by a great mind and a great writer, about a great mind and a great writer, who wrote lots of great books, George Orwell.

Hitchens' is thorough, brilliant, funny, incisive. He writes with clarity & fierceness. He reminds us that Orwell was one of the few intellectuals, one of the few political writers, living in the 20th Century who really understood and was right about the three major "isms" of the time - Imperialism, Communism, & Fascism.

But Hitchens' also makes the case that Orwell is relevant NOW. Maybe now and more than ever! What did Orwell possess that allowed him to dig deep and uncover the truth? How was he able to wade through the paranoia, the propaganda, the lies and disinformation from all sides? It seems it was a combination of character & life experience, and a willingness to examine the evidence and his conscience relentlessly, and at all times. His special gift was to always be alive to the hard truths of our human existence.

Hitchens' believes it was Orwell's fierce adherence to "Intellectual Honesty" -  A moral duty to be honest. A person is being intellectually honest when he or she, knowing the truth, states that truth.[1] Intellectual honesty pertains to any communication intended to inform or persuade. This includes all forms of scholarship, consequential conversations such as dialogue, debate, negotiations, product and service descriptions, various forms of persuasion, and public communications such as announcements, speeches, lectures, instruction, presentations, publications, declarations, briefings, news releases, policy statements, reports, social media posts, and journalism including not only prose and speech, but graphs, photographs, and other means of expression.

We live in a renewed time of paranoia, propaganda and lies. Surprisingly our own Little Baby Man President is a liar and propagandist of epic proportions. And the GOP is cowed in the face of the lies and the unrelenting stream of Bullshit. The right-wing media is a 24/7 megaphone of Bullshit. Orwell is a guide, a light. Hitchens and Orwell are both gone. But their examples are a doorway to another way of seeing. Open your eyes, your ears, your heart. Think first. Reject the lazy idea. Dig for the harder truth. Every single day.