O’Brien
Article
O’Brien is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between February 16, 2022 and August 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Think about whether you have no other way to think about this except to think “O’Brien””; “to bring O’Brien and the others to justice; to watch them suffer”; “my fondest wish would be to bring O’Brien and the others to justice”. It most often appears alongside 1984, Apollo Mojave, Charity.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: February 16, 2022
- Last seen: August 09, 2024
Appears In
- Book Review: Sadly, Porn
- Justice Creep
- Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep
- Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
Related Pages
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- 1984 (2 shared issues)
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- Apollo Mojave (2 shared issues)
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- Charity (2 shared issues)
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- climate justice (2 shared issues)
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- economic justice (2 shared issues)
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- environmental justice (2 shared issues)
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- Hitler (2 shared issues)
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- Rawls (2 shared issues)
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- Sniper (2 shared issues)
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- Terra Ignota (2 shared issues)
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- 101st Airborne (1 shared issues)
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- Abercrombie & Fitch (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
This was not the case for the Greeks, not at the beginning, anyway. Personal morality was inseparable from the state’s morality, they were not overlapping, they were the same single thing, but in the opposite way you’re imagining it, not because the State was all powerful but because the state was themselves. Personal morality vs. social standards:L public behavior vs. private thoughts - for at least 50 years it would have been inconceivable to an Athenian that those were different things. I don’t mean they thought whatever the state wanted them to think, that’s as meaningless as saying people think what their brains want them to think. And I do not mean there weren’t bad people; I mean there was no recourse to the psychological position of “I’m not a bad person, I just did a bad thing”. When we say the Athenian democracy required full participation, it should be taken literally. The citizens didn’t just make up their own laws or fight their own wars, they thought the same thought: the state was the highest - not power, not might - but good. The highest good. Think about this. Think about whether you can think about this. Think about whether you have no other way to think about this except to think “O’Brien” - assuming you could even think “O’Brien” and not default to “Hitler”. Yet early Athens was not a surveillance state, it did not need to know - thought admittedly every government will patronizingly embrace its sycophants - it left the accumulation of knowledge and power to the citizens so they could act, as it. This is why that period of history is so unique and so unrepeatable. For the first time and the only time and never since time, knowledge was used for action; the purpose of knowledge was to act; the purpose of earthly knowledge was to be able to act like gods without restraint. Not only for a handful of “great men”, they all thought this, it was the cultural standard. And then the war came, and the plague came, and the plague came again, and the sophists came, and the idea of man’s greatness through obligation became more fantastical than 12 hairless gods on a cold mountaintop wrapped in bedsheets, or on them. What good are gods in heaven if they won’t send my neighbor to hell? For all but a few, math became arithmetic and philosophy became accounting, and getting some power was far less satisfying than depriving the other of theirs. And here we are.
Here’s a crazy theory: the moral transition from other virtues to Justice mirrors the literary transition from utopian fiction to dystopian. In Utopia, people practice virtues like Charity, Industry, and Humanity, excelling at them and making their good world even better. In Dystopia, Justice is all you can hope for. If I were in Terra Ignota, my fondest wish would be to excel in some way the same way Sniper, Apollo Mojave, and the other utopian characters excel, bringing glory to my Hive and giving its already-brilliant shine extra luster. But if I were in 1984, my fondest wish would be to bring O’Brien and the others to justice; to watch them suffer, to undo the wound in the world caused by their scheming.
Inline links: Terra Ignota
“If I were in Terra Ignota, my fondest wish would be to excel in some way the same way Sniper, Apollo Mojave, and the other utopian characters excel, bringing glory to my Hive and giving its already-brilliant shine extra luster. But if I were in 1984, my fondest wish would be to bring O’Brien and the others to justice; to watch them suffer, to undo the wound in the world caused by their scheming.”
To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien?
I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one. I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein’s penmanship. The Wikipedia-Level Story of World War II (and O’Brien’s Counterargument) To understand why O’Brien’s argument is so novel, you need to know the modern-day conventional understanding of the story of World War II. Here is my summary of the conventional narrative of World War II: Germany conquered Poland and France. It tried to bomb the UK into submission/maybe enable an invasion. That effort failed when Germany was defeated in the Battle of Britain, thanks largely to the plucky efforts of British airmen (memorably summarized by Winston Churchill: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”)
The US bombed the Japanese into submission by destroying Japanese cities, ultimately by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By examining where the Axis focused their productive capacities and how the Allies disrupted those capacities, O’Brien challenges virtually every part of that narrative: The Battle of Britain was not a close-run thing. The fact that British fighter planes were flying over their own territory meant their attrition rate of pilots and aircraft were far lower than the Germans’.