The launch will take place at Twisted Olives in the old town. Here are the details:

I hope to see you there!

Thank you for reading. My next post/email will be about journal writing and writing by hand for therapeutic and spiritual purposes.

Mine has, on several occasions. And several times I listened to my mind over my heart so the project didn’t get done, and instead I got swept up by the necessities and distractions of life.

However there was that one time in my life when I really went for it. It took years to complete my project because I had to learn so much and upgrade so many things about myself before the impossible became possible.

This gets to the heart of the matter - so to speak: when you pursue a project of the heart, you become a more refined instrument for the accomplishment of that project and for many other things. It’s a process like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, the sharpening of a sword or the cutting of a diamond.

That is what The Call from Within: Accomplishing Your Meaningful Project is about - now out in Romanian as Chemarea din Interior: Desăvârșirea Țelului Suprem, with a foreword by Prof. Dr. Dumitru Constantin Dulcan.

At the launch we will discuss what happens when you commit to a project of the heart: the broad variety of obstacles that surface on your path, from within yourself and from others, and how to overcome them - as well as the subtle help you receive as you advance.

It will be possible to ask questions and comment both in English and Romanian.

Book launch details:
Bucharest, Romania
Saturday 8 November, 4pm
Bd. Hristo Botev nr 7, second floor

You are welcome to reply to this email (if you are seeing it as an email) or contact me another way. You can also just come. It will be possible to arrive a few minutes earlier to find your favourite armchair or sofa before we start.

Enjoy your weekend, and I hope to see you Saturday.

Robin

If you are a writer then you can very likely recognise encountering friction at least at one of the stages I mentioned above.

Blocks can be devastating. It is due to my promoter’s block that I haven’t had a launch in Bucharest yet although Chemarea din interior was first published last year.

It was launched last year in Iași because it was masterfully organised by Mihaela Tibănescu in Iași and I had the amazing support of Magda Axinte, also from Iași. Still, it was a challenge for me to write and send the email invitation.

This is the first time that I myself organise a launch of one of my books. I didn’t know how to go about it, since previously I focused exclusively on writing and publishing. I didn’t know how to find a venue, but since I work as a psychotherapist, I was put in touch with a place with beautiful therapy offices in the heart of Bucharest. There is a cosy workshop room with comfortable armchairs and sofas and a warm atmosphere. As soon as I saw it, I could see it as the venue of a small, exclusive launch.

It is interesting that now that I am struggling with organising the event myself, I feel much less resistance to writing this invitation. That tells me that I’m making progress and that it is possible to advance incrementally on any stage of the author’s journey.

The room has a maximum capacity of 18 people, and I would like to warmly invite you to be one of the 18.

I will not share this invitation on any social media sites, given how small the location is.

If you decide to come, please write to me and reserve your spot. Please let me know how many people you are bringing, if any.

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing you there!

Robin

This is going to be a very short post. I just would like to let you know about the launch of my course in which each of us will complete a nonfiction book in three months!

My apologies if you already know about it. I'm just rather excited about this course. I foresee three intense months of writing, followed by book launches!

Here is the page of the course, as well as of other upcoming events.

Thank you for reading and see you next time for a longer and more !

I have been giving this a lot of thought lately: How can we, as normal people, contribute to the preservation, and even blooming, of our world? Even if we are not politicians or billionaires? After all, every one of us has an interest in the survival and thriving of ourselves, our family members and friends.

There is an idea that has gained a lot of traction that says that there is nothing we can do to remedy the situation because we have no power. According to this idea, we just have to keep our heads down and hope for the best.

Deep in my soul I believe that this idea is untrue. Every human soul has the agency to move the world more in the direction of love, creativity, truth and beauty.

That is why when I heard Phil Ochs’ saying, that “The true protest is beauty” the first time, it resonated with me on a deep level.

If we think about it, what is the antidote to destruction? It has to be creation. It has to be. The drive to create is what can save the world.

What do you feel driven to create, deep inside?

Write a nonfiction book in 3 months
In this spirit, I will run a nonfiction book writing course from Tuesday, 4 February. In this course, the participants and I will write a nonfiction book in three months, in the language of their choice. The emphasis of the course will be on each of us writing and completing our book. Think of this course as a way to get your book finally done, as well as learning some technique. My vision is that we will all as a minimum have a completed first draft of our book, and that we will each end up with a hardcopy book. The course will run on a weekly basis online every Tuesday, and will end with a weekend camp in May, in the Transylvanian mountains. The purpose of the camp will be to meet each other in person and to hammer out the final pages of our manuscripts and take action on the next steps in the publishing process. Please get in touch with me if you are interested, including if Tuesday is not a good day for you.

Write a short story in a weekend
A new edition of my long-running course on writing a short story. Each participant will write a short story in the course of the long weekend. The course will take place in March at a beautiful cabin in beautiful Voroneț, Romania. On the final day of the camp we will publish an anthology of the stories written during the course. The exact weekend of the camp has not yet been chosen. Please get in touch with me if you are interested in participating.

From Bitter Searching of the Heart
These days as I was thinking of what is going on in the world, I happened to listen to Leonard Cohen’s album Dear Heather. I have known this album since it came out, but this time I was struck by the words of “Villanelle For Our Time”, a poem by Frank Scott, set to music by Leonard Cohen. Here is the short poem:

From bitter searching of the heart,
Quickened with passion and with pain
We rise to play a greater part.
This is the faith from which we start:
Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.
We loved the easy and the smart,
But now, with keener hand and brain,
We rise to play a greater part.

The lesser loyalties depart
And neither race nor creed remain
From bitter searching of the heart.
Not steering by the venal chart
That tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.
Reshaping narrow law and art
Whose symbols are the millions slain,
From bitter searching of the heart

We rise to play a greater part.

Wishing you a very happy Christmas with peace, love, warmth and health together with your loved ones.

I really like being in contact with like-minded people (as I experienced lately in the writing camp in the Transylvanian mountains), and yet I’m still working with a blockage against reaching out beyond my writer’s cave and getting in touch with other people about my writing. It’s as if I have an unconscious belief that doing such things constitutes self-promotion, which is somehow bad.

I am aware that this belief is counterproductive and that it comes from something instilled in me at a very young age - just like almost all of us have unconscious beliefs that work against us. But I will not give in to it. So here I am writing to you, struggling with my inner demons as I go.

However, the hard grind is only one way of dealing with promoter’s block. Another way that I have found to be effective is to accept that some people are naturally good at doing what I am not that good at. In my case it is promotion and organisation - and to work with them. I saw the effectiveness of this method in the aforementioned writing camp, which was so beautifully organised by Mihaela and Barna.

This is also how the upcoming book launch in Iași has come about, organised by Mihaela Tibănescu. Please come if you are in the Iași area:

I’m very much looking forward to this event where Magda Axinte - well-known psychotherapist, podcast host and collaborator of the illustrious Prof. Dr. Dumitru Constantin Dulcan - will make a speech.

I am also looking forward to the launch in Bucharest. It is partially due to my promoter’s block that it hasn’t taken place yet. But it will.

By the way, it is exactly this topic that the book The Call from Within: Accomplishing Your Meaningful Project / Chemarea din interior. Desăvârșirea Țelului Suprem is about: Overcoming the inner obstacles and accomplishing the project that is most meaningful to you. I speak from experience because I have met and befriended the inner demons / blockages that would have prevented me from accomplishing anything as a writer and in many other areas. These blockages include but are not limited to: blockages against writing consistently enough to complete a manuscript. The frustration of having to re-write the manuscript. The blockages against continuing contact with publishers despite rejections and other frustrations, the discipline to edit and edit again. Now at this point I feel like the Promoter’s Block is the final of these inner blockages that I have to face on my writer’s journey. It’s been good training for the resistance that we all have to face from within ourselves on our journey of life.

Then there is outer resistance - which I also describe in the book. A very mild - but potentially highly disruptive - instance of this was when my Amazon account got closed. I lost access to all my published works. I was unable to view sales, publish, moderate ads or even make purchases. I spent several days trying to get in touch with a human being at Amazon that could help me. However, fortunately it turned out that a short time after I got my message across through the system, my account was reinstated. The message I received was:

Thank you for taking the time to respond and share your feedback.

After further consideration, we have decided to reinstate your Amazon.co.uk account.

So that was a relief! Though I am still not sure exactly why my account was closed in the first place or what to do to avoid it in the future. So I guess the solution is to diversify more so I don’t lose access to my works. I will also publish the anthology from the retreat on a different platform. Every step of the way is a learning experience.

Upcoming writers’ courses
The next course will be a hands-on course in writing a nonfiction book. I want it to take place from late January / early February. I first intended it to start in November, but I heard back from people who had stated their interested that they would have time starting from early next year. Please let me know if you have any interests or preferences because I take these into consideration. The essence of the course is that it will take place over three months, and that we will each write a nonfiction book in that time. There will be a retreat at the end of the course to give us the time and space to complete our manuscripts.

Another retreat will be a repeat of the retreat of short story writing, which took place to great success two months ago in the Transylvanian mountains. It will take place in March, some time after the 8th. We will have a couple of creative writing sessions per day and you will write your stories in between sessions. At the end we will publish our anthology on a variety of ebook platforms.

For both courses, you can write in whichever language you chose.

Please get in touch if any of these courses interest you, and let me know your preferences, especially with regard to dates. I will give further details as the time approaches.

Expanding this blog
On the subject of promoter’s block, I have realised that I long for writing about diverse topics that interest me. At the same time I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. So in the future I plan to write about different things, not just writing. I will figure out how to set up a questionnaire so that you can opt in and out of different topics. Some of the topics I have in mind are:

• the hemispheres of the brain,

• the poetry of William Blake

• the nature of reality

• method in psychotherapy

• C. G. Jung

• Great books I have read

I hope that some of these topics may interest you.

Have a great day and see you in Iași, Bucharest, the Transylvanian mountains and / or in the next post. Wishing you all the best.

Two days ago my eyes opened wide when I saw the above screen as I tried access the account I use to publish my books on Amazon.

This spurred me into action.

Quite apart from the frustration, nervousness and practical need to contact Amazon about this, I find it interesting that this happened now as I have been meaning to write something about the writers’ retreat in the Transylvanian mountains in August/September, which was an amazing experience.

I spent weeks “not finding the time” to write anything – but in reality held back by my phobia against promoting myself – until this happened.

Now I find myself sitting here writing this post. So it seems that sometimes we need some adversity to propel us forward. At least I do.

So, instead of going into the frustrations and technicalities of having my account closed, let me start by telling you about the retreat in August/September (and how it led to my Amazon account being closed).

The reason that I feel that it is particularly worth writing about this retreat is that it somehow just flowed. I was not the only one to have this experience – the participants and organisers told me the same thing. The retreat was three days long, and in that time we put together and published an anthology of short stories – the anthology that was to lead to my fall from Amazonian grace. But never mind that for now

I still feel gratitude for that awesome retreat. I think it was so great thanks to a combination of factors:

First of all, the participants were all positive people who came to write and to grow as writers.

Then there was the fact that the two organisers, Barna and Mihaela, did such a great job. The way they arranged everything with so much attention to detail helped greatly in laying a positive foundation for the retreat. Barna’s great cooking deserves an especial mention in this context.

I suspect that there was a third, perhaps paradoxical factor: time pressure.

Since the participants were writing their stories in the knowledge that we had only three days to write, format and publish the anthology, there was no time to not be in the flow. The time was spent with creative writing guidance sessions and the participants sitting in the garden beneath the mountains or in the meeting room, working on their stories. And that was basically it, apart from eating, sleeping and one evening of celebration around a bonfire in a field – organized wholly by Mihaela and Barna. This happened as the stories were all (more or less) complete, so we felt that we deserved it.

The closing of my account

Now, what caused the closing of my account? Well, As you can imagine, I was eager to find out. I found an email in my inbox with the following wording:

Hello,

During an internal audit, we found book(s) in your catalog with content that
violates our Terms and Conditions and may disappoint our customers. As a result,
the following books will no longer be available on Amazon:

Writing in the Mountains: Stories from a Writers' Retreat - (ASIN:B0DFVGK9BJ)

Please note that we don’t accept content published in a language that is not
supported by Kindle. Visit our Help pages to see the full list of languages
currently supported: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200673300.

As part of the suppression process, we are withholding your outstanding Kindle
Unlimited (KU) royalties for the book(s) given. Future submission of this type
of content will result in your KDP account being terminated.

It looks like Amazon went ahead and closed my account although there were no further incidents. I suppose this happened due to a technical error or human oversight. I imagine it is common in such a large organization with so many users.

At the retreat in the mountains, I told the participants to write in whichever language they chose. It turns out that Amazon Kindle does not allow Romanian, and since some of the stories were written in Romanian, this led to my account being closed.

However, this will not change the fact that participants can write in their language of choice in my courses.

There are other ways. For instance, we will publish paperbacks. And if your book or story is in Romanian, for instance, we can publish it as an ebook on other platforms, such as iBooks, as well as on Romanian platforms.

I will have the anthology back up again soon, on other platforms than Amazon.

As to my account, I hope I will be able to explain to Amazon that they closed it by mistake, and I hope they will re-open it. For now I have found myself stuck in a loop: I was directed to a page from which I could write to them to ask them to re-open my account, but the page requires me to sign in to my account, however since I don’t have an account, I can’t sign in.

Well, I’ll take things as they come.

Nonfiction book writing course from next month

Anyway, all this talk about the retreat makes me look forward to the next course. This time let’s shake things up and write some nonfiction. More specifically, we will each write a nonfiction book. The course will run for three months, and in that time we will each complete at least the first draft of our nonfiction book.

Just like in the mountain retreat, I will guide you through the process, and the purpose will be to get your writing done, and to publish your work.

This course is appropriate for you especially if you know the subject you want to write about and have been thinking about it for a while, or perhaps even working on it for a while. In this course you will get it done and will at least take the first steps to getting it out there.

The course will commence in the first half of November and will take place in weekly sessions for three months – excluding the Christmas break, when you will have time to ruminate and work on your own until we meet again in January.

If this sounds good to you, please write me an email or contact me in another way to secure your spot. Attendance can take place in Bucharest and / or online.

Have a great time until then. I’ll get back to work getting my Amazon account reopened….

Chemarea din interior, as it is called in Romanian, comes with a foreword by the celebrated Romanian neuroscientist, Professor Dr. Dumitru Constantin Dulcan, who honoured me by picking the book for publication in his series Noua Spiritualitate at the publishing house Școala Ardeleană in Cluj, Transylvania.

The launch will take place in Bucharest. I will let you know the date when I hear from the publisher.

Some of you might remember how in this newsletter last year I alluded to some good news that I expected to be announced soon. It took longer than expected, but I did have an inkling that it might - so I held off on making the announcement.

I have noticed that the accomplishment of meaningful projects generally takes longer than expected.

It is something that I discussed in the section “The Myth of Inspiration” in The Call from Within. I referenced the examples of the myths about Sylvester Stallone hammering out the screenplay for Rocky in 20 hours straight, and how Jack Kerouac supposedly wrote On the Road in 20 days with hundreds of sheets of paper taped together so he wouldn’t have to spend time changing the paper in his typewriter.

In actual fact, however long it took for Sylvester Stallone to write the first draft of Rocky, it took nine substantial rewrites before the studio would accept it, and even though Jack Kerouac did have that extraordinary 20-day spurt of inspiration and productivity, it took him nine years from he started working on the book until he finally got it published.

The Call from Within has been through a similar process. I churned it out in three months in 2016. At that time, it was a cohesive string of obervations about the creative process that I was aching to get off my chest, so it virtually wrote itself. However, I wasn’t at all sure what I had written, or what its purpose was, and I changed the title and cover several times over the years before it reached its current name and form.

The first dicussions about a Romanian version of The Call from Within took place in 2019. From then on, the project took a winding path until now, five years later, I’m able to announce the publication of Chemarea din interior.

The Call from Within starts off with a quote by Seneca that is highly relevant here:

“It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”

Or, in Romanian:

“Pe căi anevoioase se ajunge la stele.”

I am still getting used to the Substack style. I used to start the email with a direct greeting to you, the recipient. However, here it doesn’t work that way. Oh well, Substack has a greater and more focused reach for those interested in writing, so I’m on board.

Today I want to talk to you about a writers’ retreat in the mountains and a book launch in Romania. First the retreat:

Creative Writing Retreat in the Mountains: Take action as a writer

Piatra Craiului, Zârnești, Romania

29 August - 1 September

Price: 1250 RON, including good food and lodging
Discounts for previous Creative Writing participants

As you perhaps remember, I have been mentioning for a while now that I intend to teach a course in writing a novel, and a course in writing a nonfiction book. Well, I plan to start these courses at the end of September. This writers’ retreat in the mountains will be a preparatory camp of four days and three nights, in which you will learn techniques for writing and publishing in your language of choice. Each participant will write two short stories, and will have at least one short story included in the anthology that we will publish at the end of the retreat on Amazon and other platforms. The focus of the retreat will be on taking action and writing and publishing then and there, as well as learning techniques for making this a sustainable practice. This will help prepare you for the longer course in which you will write an entire book.

People who have already participated in my course in writing and self-publishing short stories (whether directly with me or at Fundația Calea Victoriei) will receive a substantial discount if they choose to participate in this retreat.

And now for the second news item:

My book, The Call from Within: Accomplishing Your Meaningful Project, is coming out in Romanian this year, with a foreword by Professor Dr Dumitru Constantin Dulcan.

I do not know the publication date yet, or when the launch will be, but I hope that you will be there! I will announce it when I know the date.

Have a beautiful week!

Robin

I myself have been crippled by it several times as a writer.

That is why the course I used to teach in Writing and Self-publishing Short Stories was so focused on actually getting the writing done so that we published our anthology in the last session of the course.

I wanted to help my students get over the perfectionist thought of “one day I will write the perfect book.”

However, I recently had a relapse.

My last newsletter update was a long time ago. In it, I wrote about the launch of the upcoming course, “Writing a nonfiction book”.

But then, I was hit by doubt:

I was the author of two novels and one nonfiction book, but the nonfiction book was a long time ago, and although I had taught numerous iterations of my creative writing course, that course was about writing a short story; I had never before taught nonfiction writing. How could I be sure that I properly updated on what needed to be done to write and self-publish a nonfiction book in the best way?

So in the last newsletter update I wrote that I would produce a new nonfiction book. That way I could update my experience as well as have two nonfiction books under my belt and feel less like an imposter when I started teaching the course.

In order to make the process quick, I opted to convert the dissertation I wrote when I graduated from the certification course in Jungian psychotherapy. The bulk of the book was written already, so I was sure I would get it done quickly and return triumphantly with a newsletter update to announce my new book and the launch of the course. What could go wrong?

Well, perfectionism struck again. The same perfectionism that had convinced me I needed to have another nonfiction book out before I was ready to teach a nonfiction writing and publishing course. To be fair, it was to a great extent also an encounter with reality: a book is not the same as a dissertation, and it needs to be set out differently and be given added value in order to be appealing and useful to readers.

So now, three months later, I have finally completed the writing and publishing of Ethics and Personality: How Psychological Type Determines Ethical Values.

The above image is actually a snip from the front of the paperback cover, because I have not created an ebook version. I considered that its topic is too narrow to warrant an ebook, and that people who are sufficiently into this topic would probably be ready to buy the paperback.

This book can be especially interesting for people who are into personality types in general and Jungian typology in particular. But also for people who are interested in ethical values and how a person’s number one value is determined.

It is a narrow topic, but writing it has refreshed and updated my knowledge about writing and publishing nonfiction books.

One thing I have learned during this process is how to design my own covers. I used to always hire a cover designer, especially for paperback books that were much harder to design than ebooks.

AI has made this process far simpler, and from now on I will design everything myself. The perfectionist in me is jumping for joy.

After lots of “writer’s torture”, my perfectionist part was triumphant when I hit Publish on Amazon on my birthday (no less), only a few days after being certified as a psychotherapist, and then the book made its first sale the day after going live.

The way of perfectionism seemed vindicated.

However, then at the same time I was hit by misfortune in two other areas of life, and all of a sudden these triumphs didn’t seem all that important.

The lesson I am drawing from this is that if you are a writer then write, publish, get your books out there. Do the best you can and make it as correct as you can, but don’t stand on the threshold of publication giving it too much importance. Get it done and celebrate, knowing that life is beautiful but never “perfect”.

This is why when I launch my courses in Writing a Nonfiction Book and Writing a Novel, if you are interested in writing a book, the emphasis will be on getting that idea of yours into reality so that instead of holding it in your head, you will hold it in your hands.

Subscribe now

In the following, I will detail several ways in which the situation we find ourselves in today is similar to that of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. At the end of the article, I will mention a way that our situation in fact might be worse.

I realise that there’s a current tendency to say that the Nineteen Eighty-Four comparisons have been beaten to death; however, this is partly because many other comparisons have only detailed the more superficial likenesses, which has made it seem to not be as serious as it actually is, and partly because there is a resistance in the human mind against understanding how potentially dangerous it is that we live in times that are increasingly comparable to those of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It is in the nature of this article that I have to present ideas that some people might find offensive. This is not because I enjoy offending people – on the contrary, I really don’t, and I will do my best to limit any offence as much as at all possible – but because I am going deep with the Nineteen Eighty-Four comparisons.

This might offend because Nineteen Eighty-Four is to a great extent about a certain set of totalitarian mind viruses that Orwell was warning against. Perhaps the deepest reason why the times we live in are reminiscent of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that those very same totalitarian mind viruses have lodged themselves within our culture and within our minds. Now, as I proceed to expose those mind viruses, they will begin to defend themselves. The way that these mind viruses defend themselves is by labelling whomever is calling them out.

I therefore find it relevant to offer a disclaimer:

I do not in any way condone the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I believe that invasion should never have happened, and I want it to stop right now. This article is not about Russia or Ukraine, but about the psychology of what is happening here in the West and how it relates to the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Furthermore, I realise that Russia is not exactly a model of democracy, however I am not Russian and I know almost nothing about Russia. I therefore find it appropriate to focus on what is going on here, in the West, especially since it is here that Nineteen Eighty-Four is set. I am not too interested in politics, but I will seek to faithfully follow the comparisons between Nineteen Eighty-Four and the present day wherever they may take me.

(I will continue to sprinkle little disclaimers throughout this article, because the aforementioned mind viruses don’t have any memory to speak of – it’s rather that they hear certain words and get triggered.)

However before we get into the comparisons, let’s talk about the novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in itself. Some of you have probably read it, and some haven’t. It is therefore appropriate to provide an overview of the world as it is presented in the novel.

I have just re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four and have once again been struck by this work of visionary fiction. When I read it the first time, what I found most striking was how much it emphasises control over the perception of reality. Before reading it, I knew it was about a totalitarian state, so I expected to find far more emphasis on the brutality of the repression. Brutality is present in great measure, to be sure; however Orwell reserves the most especial attention to the way that the citizens’ ability to process reality is sabotaged and perverted so that the Party gets to decide what is true, even when what it decides goes against reality itself. This is absolutely central to the novel, and as we will see in the second part of this article, it is central to the way in which we are seeing the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four manifest itself today.

So, let’s have a look at the setting of the novel.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, lives in London, in the superstate of Oceania. Oceania is one of the three superstates of the world and encompasses the Americas, part of Africa and Australasia. The two other superstates are Eurasia and Eastasia, whose names are quite self-explanatory.

Oceania is ruled by Big Brother and “The Party”, under the ideology of “Ingsoc” – short for English Socialism. It is a totalitarian state where it is a crime even to think thoughts that are not in line with whatever narrative the Party is currently promoting. The two other superstates are governed by comparable systems.

The superstates are constantly at war with one another, in shifting alliances. At the time of the novel, World War III has already taken place (in the 1950s), and it included the use of nuclear weapons. So the superstates are aware that nuclear weapons are a threat to their very existence. They therefore wage war with far less potent weapons, and the wars take place not on the territory of the superstates themselves, but in the “contested area” of the world. The stated purpose of the wars is to overthrow the other superstates, but in reality the superstates are using war as a device to keep down their own populations so that their people will not have the ability to carry out a revolution or demand reform.

Hate
Hate is a very important element of the Party’s brainwashing. This is because turbulent emotions can bury rational thought. Every evening, party members have to show up for the Two-Minute Hate, where film is rolled depicting dissidents and the marching hordes of the current enemy. Furthermore, there is the festival of Hate Week, where the masses gather for an entire week of hate, with events including public executions of enemy soldiers and dissidents. The public enemy number one of Oceania is Emmanuel Goldstein, who is depicted in front of the marching armies of Eurasia as he espouses his thought crimes on screen: the criminal ideas of peace with Eurasia and Freedom of Speech.

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to revise past newspaper articles so that they harmonise with whatever the Party is saying at the present moment. One of the biggest tasks he and his ministerial colleagues get is upon the sudden announcement that Oceania’s enemy is in fact Eastasia and has always been Eastasia. There is no mention of a peace with Eurasia or a declaration of war against Eastasia, because now the narrative is that Eastasia has always been Oceania’s enemy. Winston and his colleagues at the Ministry of Truth then revise all newspaper articles, propaganda posters and other material in the archives so that they feature Eastasia as the eternal enemy and Eurasia as the ally of Oceania, rather than the other way round. The key is that they change the past so that now Eastasia is the enemy and has always been the enemy of Oceania.

Apart from the Ministry of Truth, Oceania has three other ministries: the Ministry of Love, the Ministry of Plenty and the Ministry of Peace.

The Ministry of Truth is, as we have seen, in charge of propaganda and spreading lies.

The Ministry of Love arrests, tortures and executes dissidents. The infamous Thought Police is an organ under the Ministry of Love, and is charged with the detection, arrest, torture and execution of thought criminals.

The Ministry of Plenty rations the scarce products. Scarcity is purposefully maintained in order to keep the population weak.

The Ministry of Peace is in charge of war.

The ministries have names that are the exact opposite of what they really represent. This is part of the Party’s perversion of reality in order to suppress the citizens’ ability to make sense of what is going on.

The three slogans of the Party are: “WAR IS PEACE”, “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”.

WAR IS PEACE represent the way in which wars with limited scope keep a sort of balance that prevents a wider conflict from erupting. This happens, for instance, by keeping the citizens’ hate focused on the opposing superstate and the dissidents that are said to propagate its lies, or by keeping them focused on surviving the constant shortages.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY is about how the citizens should subordinate ourselves to the Party, because the Party knows what is best for them.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH means that as long as people believe anything the Party communicates to them, the government remains strong.

Like almost everyone else, Winston owns a telescreen. This is a sort of television that includes a camera and microphone, so that the viewer can be observed. It is possible to turn down the volume, but it is not possible to ever switch off the telescreen.

The telescreen thus serves the dual purpose of spouting Party propaganda at all times and keeping its owner under surveillance. This is where the phrase comes from that has become well-known in popular culture: “Big Brother is watching you.” Indeed, there is a word in Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, that denotes not having the prescribed facial expression, for instance as a reaction to Party propaganda seen on the telescreen. This word is facecrime, which is an indication that the person is indulging in crimethink, another Newspeak word. Winston has therefore trained himself to always wear the facial expression of “quiet optimism” when in front of the telescreen. This is very important to do, in order to avoid arrest by the Thought Police.

Now let us turn to a comparison with our own world.

One way of doing this is by looking at some Newspeak words and examining how they pertain to the present day. This is important because Newspeak is one of the Party’s main tools in its assault on reality, and thus its assault on the ability of citizens to make sense of what is going on. So let’s have a look at some Newspeak words:

Blackwhite: This means that a good citizen would believe that something black was white and vice versa, if told so by the Party. This is related to the concept that “two plus two equals five”. Winston wonders if the Party one day will declare that two plus two equals five, and whether the resulting belief in this lie will make it true.

I hesitate to say the following, but this is something that we find in “woke” ideology, which upholds the right of the individual to identify as something that contradicts his or her own biology. This can be to identify as the opposite sex (or something in-between) or to identify as a different ethnicity. Now, I realise that most people who subscribe to this ideology do so from the best intentions: mostly out of compassion and from a wish to allow each individual the right to self-determination. I believe in the same things: compassion and the individual’s right to self-determination. However, as a writer it is my job to investigate what is going on beneath the level of accepted truth; and as I do so, it is hard not to draw comparisons with this Newspeak concept. Orwell points out that when we insist that people are required to believe statements that conflict with physical reality, we find ourselves in dangerous, totalitarian territory. In fact, this assault on reality is so fundamental to totalitarianism that Winston writes in his secret diary:

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four. If that is granted, then all else follows.”

This is not as far removed from the situation we find ourselves in today. In fact, what brought Jordan Peterson to prominence was that he spoke out against the Canadian Bill C-16, which has since become the law “An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code”, which makes it a criminal offence to not use a person’s preferred pronouns when talking to or about that person.

Peterson was not protesting against transgender people but was warning about the fact that this is the first case within English Common Law that a law makes certain speech obligatory: it doesn’t merely forbid the use of certain speech but actually tells you what you have to say, on pain of punishment. This is a slippery slope towards extreme totalitarianism. Furthermore, the law enshrines the claim that gender is socially constructed – a claim that is disproven by science.

Telescreen – This device, mentioned above, is perhaps the most obvious likeness between our times and those of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The viewer of the telescreen can never be sure when someone is watching and listening to him or her at the other end. We have a camera and microphone both on our laptops and our smartphones. We often show ourselves to others in Zoom and other applications, in more or less private situations, such as in our living rooms or even bedrooms. And even when we’re not consciously using the camera or microphone in our devices, there are many individuals and organisations that have the capability to turn them on without our knowing. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is not possible to ever switch off the telescreen. In our world it is possible to switch off our smartphone, but in many cases it keeps running in the background regardless, and anyway we have become so addicted to our smartphone that we hardly ever want to switch it off.

Vapourised – This is when a person is made to disappear and the records are altered so it’s as if he had never existed. Fortunately, this does not currently happen to citizens in the West. However, purely on the subject of controlling information, it is a little bit reminiscent of cancelling, when a person is de-platformed and can no longer broadcast his or her opinions. He or she disappears from the public square, just like that.

Malreported – When the news reports a fact which the government later decides is untrue, because the government’s narrative has changed and all news has to harmonise with the current narrative. Today we would call such inconvenient facts “misinformation”. As mentioned, it is Winston’s job to “rectify” such news items that have been “malreported”, to make it look like they were in accordance with the current narrative all along. This is despite the fact that those news stories were obviously written to harmonise with the narrative of the time when they were written. The practice of rectification is in accordance with the Party’s doctrine of The mutability of the past.

One example of this from our current day is the way Western media outlets, such as the BBC, The Guardian, DW and Time, were producing documentaries about the “far-right” and even “Nazi” militias of Ukraine until one year ago, and now seek to bury such assertions. For instance, the BBC switched off comments on its documentaries about what it claimed were “Nazis” on YouTube (BBC Newsnight, 2014: Neo-Nazi threat in new Ukraine: NEWSNIGHT and BBC Newsnight, 2018: Ukraine: On patrol with the far-right National Militia, even putting the latter one behind an extra check of “This video may be inappropriate for some users”, meaning that you have to sign in and press an extra button to view the video, which reduces the video’s exposure). The BBC has since produced a video about how the assertions about Nazi militias in Ukraine are “Russian propaganda”. (What untruths is Russia spreading about Nazis in Ukraine?). Please note that I am not making claims about there being or not being Nazi militias in Ukraine, but merely remarking on the way Western media is “rectifying” its previous assertions, just like the Ministry of Truth does in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The fact that the video documentaries have not actually been deleted (yet), is one of the signs that things are not as bad as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This means it is still at least in principle possible to reverse the situation.

Doublethink: The affirmation of two mutually contradicting views. For instance, in the current situation a person can rejoice that the Russian military is so weak that it is unable even to capture a city 30 kilometres from its border, and yet at the same time insist that we need to beef up our military and make Sweden and Finland members of NATO, because Russia is about to conquer all of Europe. Or we can insist that it’s never OK to express hate towards a certain ethnic group, and at the same time feel that if you’re not expressing hate towards Russians, there’s something wrong with you. This is exemplified by Meta, which has a strict anti-hate-speech policy on its platforms Facebook and Instagram, but has made an exception for hate speech against Russians, which is now allowed with some conditions.

Again, I’m not defending any action taken by the Russian state but only describing what is going on here in the West, in the light of the predictions of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Goodthink – this is a politically orthodox thought, as defined by the Party. This is comparable to political correctness, only in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of course, we’re not merely talking about expression; this takes it one step further, into the person’s mind, meaning that the person only ever thinks thoughts that have been approved by the Party.

Crimethink – This is the opposite of goodthink: holding any thought that is not allowed. This is similar to today when any verbalised independent attempt at trying to work out what is really happening can get you labelled as a Russian apologist, even if you have nothing to do with Russia.

Duckspeak – This is unthinking, vocal support of political orthodoxies. It’s when someone just rattles off correct terminology without much meaning, or when you say something as you honestly try to make sense of the current situation, and someone you otherwise have a good relationship with tells you without even thinking about whom they’re talking to, that your thoughts are “Russian disinformation”.

It is not far-fetched to draw parallels between the three superstates of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the West, Russia and China. When the novel begins, Oceania is at war with Eurasia. The wars between the superstates are always fought in the “contested areas” of the planet, and not in the superstates themselves. The parallel with our current situation should be obvious: there is hardly any area more contested between NATO and Russia than Ukraine.

Again, I do not in any way condone the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This article is not about Russia or Ukraine, but about the psychology of what is happening here in the West, and how it relates to the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Let’s have a look at how the three slogans of the Party are relevant today:

WAR IS PEACE is exemplified in the meme that the more weapons we send to Ukraine, the quicker there will be peace, and the more civilians will be saved from the effects of weapons of war. Now, I’m not a military expert but as a writer I do have some experience looking at things from different perspectives. And I must say that the concept of weapons creating peace sounds dubious to me.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY is the idea that it is only through subordinating your thought to the current narrative that we will triumph and freedom will once again prevail. This means that it is best not to think independently about what’s going on, but simply accept whatever the changing narrative dictates.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH means that if we as citizens don’t try to make sense of the current situation but instead unthinkingly accept the often self-contradictory assertions of our media and government, we make our side of the information war stronger.

Hate
How does the glorification of Hate in Nineteen Eighty-Four resemble our current time? We don’t need to organise such events as the Two-Minute Hate or Hate Week, because we have the News and social media, where we can absorb and contribute to a constant stream of hate.

As we have seen, the public enemy number one of Oceania is Emmanuel Goldstein, who is depicted in front of the marching armies of Eurasia as he espouses his thought crimes: Peace with Eurasia and Freedom of Speech. This relates to our current time because anyone who suggests negotiation with Russia is more or less seen as a traitor, while Freedom of Speech is the biggest enemy of political correctness, and any speech on this topic that is not duckspeak is labelled “Russian disinformation”.

The best image of Emmanuel Goldstein at the moment of writing is probably Noam Chomsky. This is because he considered the situation and came to his own conclusion, independent of the emotionality of Hate. In an interview he presented his three-pronged argument:

1) Every war ends in one of two ways: either one side completely destroys the other or the two sides reach peace through negotiation.
2) Ukraine can win the conventional war on its own territory, but it cannot destroy the Russian state; however Russia has the capability to destroy Ukraine.
3) Therefore, if we want what is best for Ukraine, we should negotiate with the Russians.

This argument made Chomsky the subject of a torrent of hate from both the Right and the mainstream Left. As if that wasn’t enough, he went on to say in the interview that only “one Western statesman of stature” had so far argued for this correct solution of negotiation with Russia, and that statesman was Donald Trump. This assertion earned him a further storm of hate from many of his fellow socialists, as well as everyone else who hates Donald Trump.

In the interview, Chomsky immediately goes on to call Trump “maybe the most dangerous person in history”. No one could plausibly argue that Chomsky is a fan of Donald Trump. However rational thought seems to have been swept away by Hate: Chomsky’s thought crime is that he believes that Trump is right about something.

The reality is that the fact that Chomsky, who reviles Trump, is able to concede that Trump is right about one thing, demonstrates that Chomsky is focusing on finding a rational solution to the issue at hand rather than hating the people he has been told to hate. This sort of rational thinking is a thought crime in the current climate, because rationality is supposed to give way to hate; in fact Hate is a very useful tool in preventing people from actually thinking.

And no, I am neither a Socialist nor a Trumpist. My point is that we need to avoid being blinded by Hatred of certain people and instead focus on finding a rational solution.

War
War is a central element in the suppression of the population in Nineteen Eighty-Four. As Winston’s lover, Julia, says:

“It’s always one bloody war after the other, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.”

War is made to look as if it is waged against another superstate; however in reality it is waged against the population, because it keeps the population in a state of hate, fear, and perpetual hunger because the war hits the supply chain. We are beginning to see supply chain issues in our present situation, especially when it comes to gas and food. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the level of war and weapons production is calculated in order to keep the population in a state of scarcity. However in our time it is probably more dependent on the share price of arms manufacturers.

Nuclear weapons
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, nuclear weapons have already been used previously, and the superstates have decided not to use them any more, because they could lead to the destruction of the states themselves. Instead, they fight each other with less potent weapons. They always make sure that the stability of the superstates themselves are not threatened by the wars, but only bomb each other just enough to keep their populations down. It’s as if the superstates carefully coordinate their actions so that they can each stay in power.

This is where our situation may be more dangerous than that of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Perhaps what Orwell did not see was the danger of top politicians actually believing their own propaganda. For instance, the Wall Street Journal recently published an opinion piece entitled “The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War”, and there are even two US senators that have said we might have to use nuclear weapons against Russia. (Source: interview with Colonel and Senator Richard Black (video link with time code). This is something that would lead to a nuclear holocaust where more or less no one in the NATO countries or Russia would survive, and a large part of the rest of the world would die too. This is a risk that was treated with the utmost care during the Cold War, however now in this atmosphere of Hate and irrationality, it is blown off as a ridiculous joke whenever the Russians warn of the risk, and at the same time it is sometimes suggested as a viable course of action by our own politicians. This exercise in doublethink is perhaps the most dangerous threat that our planet faces today.

In a vicious twist, both the US and Russian governments have doomsday planes, which will keep the US and Russian leadership safe in the event of a nuclear war. This means that the people with the power to trigger a nuclear war are also the people who have the least skin in the game.

I believe that, as citizens of democracies, we have a duty to keep our democracies democratic. It seems that our Western values of democracy, freedom of speech and rule of law can get swept aside if we don’t stay vigilant and defend them. Unfortunately, we have not been defending and upholding them sufficiently in recent years – otherwise our society would not look so much like the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell predicted that this could happen, perhaps originally because he saw what happened in the Communism and Stalinism of the Soviet Union. However it is telling that he named the ideology of the Party “Ingsoc” or “English Socialism”. To me, this signifies that we should look out for danger not in a far-away land but at home.

In his 1941 essay, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, Orwell presents English Socialism as an ideal, in contrast with both Marxism and the Labour Party. So it seems significant that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, “Ingsoc” is the ideology of the totalitarian state.

This suggests that Orwell changed his mind about the viability of his own idea of English Socialism, and that he is telling us to be vigilant towards the convictions not only of our own land but also of our own minds.

How can we stop the degradation of our society towards totalitarianism? I think the clues are in the novel itself. It’s worth looking at what the Party holds sacred, and oppose those very things.

It is crucial for the Party to be able to dictate its citizens’ reality and to sabotage their ability to independently make sense of what is going on. We may therefore conclude that in order to uphold our democracy it is crucial to think independently.

In order to do that, freedom of speech is vital, because expressing our independent thoughts in a free and respectful discussion with people who disagree with us is the most viable way to discover which of our thoughts are solid and which don’t hold water.

Another thing that the Party holds dear is Hate. We must resist Hate, not by censoring others but by thinking independently rather than hating collectively.

I’m emotionally exhausted, and yet I feel myself brimming with far more energy than I have for many years.  

Yesterday I finished the first module of the second year of the training in Somatic Experiencing, which is the system of trauma therapy developed by Peter Levine.

The transition from the first to the second year was brutal.

I think this is because the first year of the training was focused on the essential skills of taking it slow and establishing good rapport with the client while making sure that he or she does not slip into a reliving of a traumatic experience that would be too much to handle at that specific time. The second year, on the other hand, starts out with education about the different categories of trauma.

I was surprised by how intensely and how quickly the training impacted me and my colleagues.

You would have thought that learning about the categories of something would mostly be a dry, academic exercise. However it turned out to be anything but.

To summarise the theory very broadly, we learned about three main categories:

1. Global High-Intensity Activation. This is trauma brought on by events that activated the entire system. Such events can be pre or perinatal trauma, surgical procedures, anaesthesia, high fever, asphyxiation, choking or drowning.  

2. High-Impact Trauma. This is trauma brought on by falling, accidents or lesions to the head and/or spine.

3. Inescapable Attack. This is trauma brought on among other things by being attacked by animals, being blocked from escaping from a certain place or situation, or sexual assault or molestation.

Then we went on to talking about the signs and symptoms of the various types of trauma. Some signs are intuitive, such as: not being able to stay awake can be a sign of trauma brought on by anaesthesia.

Others are less obvious, such as: A client who has bad spatial orientation and gets lost easily, even if she has been to the same place several times, or who has a problem with balance, for instance doesn’t wear high heels because she knows she will fall if she does. Such a person suffers from high-impact trauma. This person will move very slowly, or on the contrary move very fast and seek out adrenaline rushes and/or try to get into new accidents.  

I was shocked as I recognised signs of many more types of trauma than I had expected, both in myself and in friends, family members and acquaintances.

Furthermore, when we started the practical exercises, working with a new category of trauma each day, the emotional reactions I saw both in myself and in many of my colleagues were a testimony to how exceedingly affected our society as a whole is by trauma.

Although there were times during the workshop when I was very emotionally activated, and although I am still feeling the effects, it never got to be too much, never passed the point where it became more than I could handle. And I observed the same thing in my colleagues as well. Somatic Experiencing is a school that places a great deal of emphasis on taking it slow. And I found that that emphasis was justified in this very challenging workshop.

However as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I’m finding myself not only emotionally exhausted but also, paradoxically, energised.

I’ve thought about this, and my conclusion is that it’s not that I have more energy inside me per se, but rather that my energy is flowing better and is more available to me. I watched a video with the great trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk. He said, “Trauma is about your body getting stuck in a state of sensations that are basically intolerable.” I think it is this stuckness that started to loosen up thanks to the exercises and the knowledge, allowing the energy to flow more freely.