Josh First's Blog

1932, 451, 1984, and now 722

Numbers are an important part of advanced human cultures. Numbers are how we calculate things. Numbers give substance to the things that advanced cultures measure and value, like raw materials or produced widgets or dollars in your bank account. While numbers are often thought of as mere “math” and thus relegated to the world of nerdy geekdom, in many ways, a particular fixed number can come to symbolize or represent certain ideas or cultural markers, too.

One fixed number that has become common parlance in some political discussions, on both the intellectual left and the violent left, is “88.” Apparently, the number eight followed by another number eight can mean, to some people, the eighth letter of the English alphabet, H, followed by another H. In an apparent crypto secret language, this is supposed to mean “Heil Hitler.”

The number 1932 is the year that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published. Huxley watched the rise of the racialist Nazi German state, coupled with the rise of modern science, and foresaw how such a diabolical mating could produce truly evil offspring. Like selecting which child with what genes to preserve alive, and which to kill off. To the point where the government (in the book) was allocating certain outcomes of intellectual and physical capacity to every human born under the government’s control. Most people (in the book) were designated as low intelligence physical workers, and had their embryo so tweaked while in utero, and a lucky few embryos were left alone to develop normally and live up to their full potential.

Brave New World is rightfully an important book because of its warning against too much government power, and against the use of science to artificially manipulate human outcomes from the embryo stage on through the end of life. For a book written almost a hundred years ago, it sure seems prescient! Human DNA, freaky and immoral experiments, coercive governments everywhere… our own 2026 does not seem too far removed from the bad world that Huxley foresaw in 1932.

The movie THX1138 is loosely based on Brave New World, as are many other futuristic, dystopian movies. Most of them have robots controlling human populations with extreme violence, many of them involve humans trying to escape their walled environment.

Another number that is used a lot in all kinds of political discussions is 1984, which is the title of a book by George Orwell. Published in 1949, after the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe and the mask came off of the homicidal Russian socialists, the book 1984 refers to the then-far-off year of 1984, in which Orwell foresees the possibility of a “dystopian” state, where totalitarian government has its boot forever on the human face.

Dystopian is the opposite of utopian. Utopia being the promised land euphoric state of socialist bliss and abundance and easy living harmony absolutely danggummit guaranteed by all socialist dictators and genocidal mass murderers, like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, a few others. And it was the 1945 fall of Adolf Hitler’s racialist socialist thousand year utopia, coupled with the 1947 un-masked USSR socialist project’s oppressive dictatorship, that led Orwell to pen his warning to all who might follow in those same footsteps in the future.

So, the number 1984 has come to mean dystopian, totalitarian government, cruelty, mass surveillance, no individual rights. In a nutshell, socialism.

Another iconic number is 451, the number in the title of Ray Bradbury’s book about the temperature at which paper (books) burn. In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury foresees a society where books are burned by the government, to prevent humans from accessing true knowledge. This is done to keep humans ignorant of truth and fact, to deprive them of access to knowledge, to make them dependent upon the government for all information. And in Bradbury’s book, if you have books, you had better hide them. Because the police will come and put you in jail, and burn all of your books.

Bradbury got a good dose of his fears from the famous Nazi book burnings in the 1930s and 1940s. Those were themselves based on the massive book burnings held by the Church in the 1300s through the 1700s across Europe. Because information control is everything…and ideas about individual freedom and individual rights can never be tolerated by a totalitarian government.

Given the past bout of official censorship that our planet did not enjoy over the 2020-2022 covid19 plandemic, it is impossible to argue with Bradbury’s fears. But that was merely about digital access and digital information. Literally today, we have Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, digitizing rare books, and then shredding them and destroying them.

Now why would someone desire to make digital copies of books, but then destroy the actual physical book? Is it because they want to be the sole arbiter and source of what those original books actually said? What if the digital versions are edited or deleted or monkeyed with? Unless you have the actual physical book copy in your hands, you would have to rely on the digital version being presented to you.

Finally, I would like to introduce a new number to our list of politco-cultural numbers discussion: 722.

The number 722 is the important page number in my edition of the 1965 book Dune, that majestic and iconic sci-fi thriller that has spawned a bunch of movies (the 1984 version of Dune is the best, ironically, if we are talking about symbolic numbers).

On page 722 of my edition of Dune, readers are exposed to a purportedly dangerous and radical idea, at least in the current parlance of our brave new world of socialist academia and its attached totalitarian political functionaries: The human gender binary.

“Paul said: There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed…..These things are so ancient within us, Paul said, that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies. We’re shaped by such forces. You can say to yourself Yes, I see how such a thing may be. But when you look inward and confront the raw force of your own life unshielded, you see your peril. You see that this could overwhelm you. The greatest peril to the Giver is the force that takes. The greatest peril to the Taker is the force that gives. It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.”

It is interesting to see that the number twelve be shaped so strongly by the Taker today, when the other eleven were all Givers. For today the jury in the Lindsey Clancy trial was unable to come to a unanimous verdict. Lindsey Clancy admits to having strangled her three children to death. The jury was simply charged with finding her guilty of murder, or not. Accounts of those present in the court room say that the eleven women on the jury were openly in support of a Not Guilty verdict, and that the one man on the jury seemed to be the lone voice wanting her to be held accountable for murdering her children, with her hands, in their home.

You know, all these futuristic dystopian books that predicted an upside down world, where government has absolute control through censorship and violence against the population, and where basic truths are no longer accepted by those in power, these predictions or warnings all seem to have come to fruition in the Lindsey Clancy trial outcome today.

For almost a whole generation, school teachers and academics, and now elected officials, tell us the un-truth that humans are not binary. They say that there is no woman or man, that the gender lines are blurred and false, and that we each have our “own truth” that may deviate from the measurable and demonstrable truth that we can see, calculate, scientifically map.

We Americans are at profound risk right now. We have a culture where a woman can strangle her own small children, and not only be surrounded by adoring groupies dressed in pink, but where a jury of women, of motherhood and Givers, cannot find this murderous witch Guilty of the crime of murder. Of innocent, vulnerable little children, by their mommy.

This cultural shift away from basic justice might be a result of all the abortion-on-demand-up-until-age-ten stuff that has been pushed, or all the “my truth says I should murder you because I don’t like your politics” stuff that has been pushed. The whole “By any means necessary” socialist chanting stuff. The idea that wrong is right, and murder is justified if you feel OK with it that one time, because her gender is, at that moment, your biggest identity marker.

Moral relativism run amok. The natural outcome of moral relativism.

The number 722 and all that it stands for is going to be attacked, demonized, and Dune will become relegated to the heap of books to be burned, for stating the obvious, the scientifically proven, the basic binary of life on our planet. Get yourself a copy of Dune and hide it away in your attic, for future generations of prospective readers, along with copies of 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451. To know the truth, and how to arrive at right and not wrong decisions.

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