It's from Orwell

Solid reality is the kicker to a column George Orwell wrote a long, long time ago. Also, it's the name of my substack.

This Substack’s name comes from Orwell. Like all the good quotes. From this essay, where Orwell dives into themes more fully developed later, questions he’d obviously been ruminating on for some time. He wanted to get at the way discourse pushes us to believe contradictory things, to hold A and not-A to be true, simultaneously.

In Nineteen Eighty Four, this idea becomes Doubelthink, a key plank in the party’s control of society. Orwell saw doublethink everywhere, and when you read what he wrote about it, you start seeing it everywhere too.

Here, for the record, is the full context:

Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one’s subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one’s thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic.

In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.

At one point, I thought I’d call the Substack Contradictions and Absurdities, but that’s too long, and too open to misinterpretation. Plus, things are usually better named for what they are for rather than what they’re against.

I’m all for solid reality. I’m from Venezuela. Venezuelans know solid reality catches up with you. Hard.

Over the next few years, more and more contradictions and absurdities are going to be tested against solid reality.

And I’ll be writing about it.