Doublethink

"Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'."

- George Orwell, "1984"

I've read some interesting things today. First there was an article about Charles Darwin's notions of emotional expression in "lunatics" and his attempts to relate that to other animals. Kind of a useless article really, but interesting to me, as I'd not been aware Darwin wrote about that at all. Then there was a really excellent article about the intrusion of business language into health, and the implications of that change in language. As George Orwell portrayed so vividly in 1984, changing words does change the concepts they represent. As I noted on my blog a while back, what tends to happen is that informational and emotional content are robbed by these Newspeak-y changes in language.

The person gets lost - and that is perhaps one of the central things I'm reading into the third thing I've been reading today: Freud and Man's Soul, by Bruno Bettelheim. The individual. The individual variations in what is important. The variety of meanings. That really is what gives richness to any human interaction, and is precisely what these business words rob us of - and it's not just in business, or in health (though that would be bad enough); these words and their associated concepts are taken u with a frightening enthusiasm throughout (at least Western) society.

Anyway, all that has nothing to do with this photo. I was walking to work, and decided to take a bit of a different route. I walked then past and under this big sunshade jobby, and decided - despite my lingering neck pain - to point my camera up. The result is quite a different sort of photograph for me.

Oh, and my neck got a further insult this evening, as I was dive-bombed thrice by a magpie and once by a rosella, within a couple of hundred metres of home. The little baskets. :-p

Lumix DMC-G10 : f/4.00 : 1/800" : 14mm : ISO 100

Large version here.

Uploaded with Blipfoto iPhone app.