"All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome"
About this Quote
Orwell skewers political prediction as a kind of wish-fulfillment cosplay: the future becomes legible only when it flatters the forecaster’s tribe, and reality turns “optional” the moment it threatens morale. The key verb, “vitiated,” isn’t just “wrong” but contaminated, spoiled at the source. He’s not calling out a few bad pundits; he’s diagnosing a chronic corruption in how modern politics thinks.
The line works because it refuses the comforting story that people are mainly misled by complexity. Orwell’s target is simpler and nastier: motivation. “Coincides with their own wishes” exposes ideology as a filter that doesn’t merely interpret facts but pre-selects which facts get to exist. Then he tightens the vice with “grossly obvious facts” - not subtle data points, but the kind of evidence you’d have to step over on the sidewalk. The subtext is an accusation of complicity: ignoring the unwelcome isn’t an accident; it’s a choice that preserves identity, status, and emotional safety.
Context matters. Orwell writes out of a century where propaganda, total war, and ideological fanaticism made mass self-deception a civic force. He saw how intelligent people rationalized atrocities, waved away inconvenient reports, and treated politics like a loyalty test rather than a truth-seeking exercise. Read now, it lands as a brutal prehistory of the algorithmic age: timelines that reward confirmation, parties that punish doubt, and a public sphere where “prediction” often means auditioning for your side. Orwell’s cynicism isn’t nihilism; it’s a warning that democracy can’t function when wishing becomes a substitute for seeing.
The line works because it refuses the comforting story that people are mainly misled by complexity. Orwell’s target is simpler and nastier: motivation. “Coincides with their own wishes” exposes ideology as a filter that doesn’t merely interpret facts but pre-selects which facts get to exist. Then he tightens the vice with “grossly obvious facts” - not subtle data points, but the kind of evidence you’d have to step over on the sidewalk. The subtext is an accusation of complicity: ignoring the unwelcome isn’t an accident; it’s a choice that preserves identity, status, and emotional safety.
Context matters. Orwell writes out of a century where propaganda, total war, and ideological fanaticism made mass self-deception a civic force. He saw how intelligent people rationalized atrocities, waved away inconvenient reports, and treated politics like a loyalty test rather than a truth-seeking exercise. Read now, it lands as a brutal prehistory of the algorithmic age: timelines that reward confirmation, parties that punish doubt, and a public sphere where “prediction” often means auditioning for your side. Orwell’s cynicism isn’t nihilism; it’s a warning that democracy can’t function when wishing becomes a substitute for seeing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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