Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [1015]

‘But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals – mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.’ … ‘Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.’ — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 1015

Note

Winston’s empirical objection (fossils) is met with the brazen claim that the evidence was ‘invented’ — a devastating demonstration of how totalitarian epistemology deletes inconvenient reality through the question ‘have you ever seen them?’ Dialectical collapse of the empirical worldview.