874
PARTISAN REVIEW
as fascism, communism, totalitarianism, and Inquisitorial Chris–
tianity, all of which, of course, apply. Read it with more attention to
the defining traits and policies of lngsoc, the ruling party of
Oceania, than to the ideology that rationalizes them. Look around
to see which of the political currents now agitating us carries with it
the greatest number of those policies and traits. Only the neofemi–
nist movement, with its puritanism, its hatred of the body, its assault
on the family, its unisexualism, its insistence that children be raised
from birth according to a strict ideological regimen, its recurrent
revisions of the past, its denial of sensory reality and common sense,
its frozen-faced fanaticism, its ceaseless generation of watchdog
agencies, its
doublethink
(women and men are the same, but women
are nicer than men), its deformation of the English language for
political purposes, its relentless ferreting out of
thinkcrime,
its pre–
dilection for censorship, its faith in the enabling power of technology
-only Women's Liberation comes anywhere close to Ingsoc.
It
is no
wonder that the propaganda campaign against Orwell by feminist
apparatchiks is well under way.
In one small way I can claim a similarity to Orwell: my argu–
ment is with the Left, the Right being too mean-spirited, short–
sightedly self-interested, and mulish to bother with. In America the
Right has traditionally been fueled by fundamentalist Christianity
and Catholicism; now that Russia and the Third-World Left sup–
ports Israel's enemies, the Right has become increasingly Jewish.
You don't get very far trying to argue a man out of his religion.
2. Be skeptical of experts. An expert is someone who has in–
formation that the rest of us cannot evaluate or apply. His political
charge is to select from all he knows whatever will serve the interests
of the interests he serves. Partial truths can be more deceiving than
complete lies.
3. Trust your "instincts," as we call them. By the time you are
thirty-five your instincts are a synthesis of more experiences and
observations than you could formulate in another thirty-five down–
hill years of trying. Your instincts, that is, will be based on fuller and
more varied information than the arguments of experts or the logic
of theoreticians. Be skeptical of your instincts, because no one has
experienced and observed everything, not even in imagination or
through books. There will be times when your instincts tell you to
distrust your instincts.
4. Beware of people who give themselves over to causes not
their own. Beware of whites who devote themselves to black civil
