Happy Friday. I am hoping that you are heading to a restful and fulfilling weekend. I have a lot of irons in the fire myself, not to mention that we are in Covid quarantine which actually may help me keep working on my projects. I got my first wall framed up last night and I am hoping to frame up the second one today or at least this weekend.

Section 2 marks a distinct change in the book. We move from the setup and into the story. Winston gets a surprise interaction of a very non-permissible nature. He is going to meet a mysterious woman on a very different premise than he anticipated.

Jumping into the concepts of the chapter, I would say that they are fairly simple and sort of intuitive. It doesn’t take a lot of digging or interpretation of the chapter to dig these out.

Risk versus reward: For whatever reason, we as humans all have desires. Sometimes the desire is so tempting that it consumes your thoughts. The prudent person would weigh the cost benefit of the decision and assess the risk. In this black and white world of 1984, there is a lot more gray than might meet the eye.

Another way of putting it is that rules are known and clear, but the enforcement or ability to enforce them are not as straight forward. That leaves a crack for the thought to skirt the rules and that is the risk reward calculation in this scenario. Some people of course just do things anyway. I guess that they don’t have the ability to comprehend the penalties for the risks.

Always use discretion: One of the reasons the characters are able to operate in the gray is that there is not as much technology and infrastructure in place as there is today. The ability of a few to monitor the many is limited by the capability of the age. Of course, just like ‘Newspeak’ it is very difficult to know the truth.

In this type of environment, it is best to always act as if you are always monitored. It is a little more difficult to treat people and relationships that way. A constant state of unknown/fear/suspicion can have an effect on the psyche. It is not really a world that I want to be a part of, but that is the state of affairs here.

End Your Programming Routine: My approach to analyzing 1984 lends to making this application fairly easy. You should do the best you can to always make a risk versus reward analysis in new, big or difficult decisions. I think often people don’t really realize the situation until it is too late and a little thing becomes something large. Likewise, I think it is always prudent to use discretion. I guess that is the kind of guy that I am.