
George Orwell (1903-1950)
At eight p.m. on Thursdays, the British public applaud the National Health Service. They cheer, blow trumpets and bang their pots and pans. It’s a moving show of national unity and I’m sure it’s heart-felt, but it is also deeply illogical.
Since 2010 the majority of Brits have voted consistently to elect a Conservative government. This is a political party that is ideologically opposed to well-funded public institutions and seeks instead to replace them with private ‘for profit’ provision. As a result the NHS has suffered a decade of underfunding, and was in very bad shape long before this pandemic hit. This is no great secret. It is therefore logically inconsistent for anyone to applaud the NHS who has also voted enthusiastically to undermine it.
Perhaps I think about things too much, but it leads to other curious angles on current affairs. I’m speaking of the case of a ninety nine year old man, raising millions in support of the health service. He’s done this by walking up and down his garden, aided only by his walking frame. Along with our care-workers and clinicians this gentleman deserves our admiration. But in our rush to emotion, we risk missing the point, that he should not have had to do it in the first place. That a vital public service relies on charitable fundraising at all is indicative of our national failure. That’s the logical way of looking at it – but we do not react to the world in logical ways.
That we turn out and vote at all is an illogical act. My one vote can make very little difference to the outcome of an election. But I vote anyway. Why? Because I align myself with a set of ideals that appeal to me on an emotional, rather than a rational level. And it’s emotion, rather than logic that’s the major call to arms.
Left-of-centre politics aligns with support for properly funded public services. That’s logically consistent. But that people can vote the other way, yet also revere the NHS, suggests we humans are capable of holding two opposing ideas at the same time. It’s called ‘Doublethink’, a term we first encounter in George Orwell’s chillingly dystopian novel 1984. Doublespeak renders us vulnerable to political manipulation by our being so easily accepting of a thing as factual, when logic would otherwise deny it.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed,…
George Orwell, 1984
We are indeed strange creatures, gifted with the power of logic and reason, yet also blinded by and carried away by our emotions. To know, and yet not to know – at the same time – it seems, is to be truly human.