Everybody is a prophet. If you can see the signs of our times and formulate them in words, you are a prophet. At least, you will be one in 5, 10, 20, 50 years from now when the signs of our times still haven’t changed. Being a prophet does not require future predicting capabilities, in fact you don’t need to predict the future at all, and you would be better off not doing it. Rather, it just requires that the world does not experience some kind of major paradigm shift between now and whatever dreamy time in the future you might be exalted for your brilliance in. This is true because many people cannot cut through the fat of their structured lies. They cannot really discern fiction from truth--not on a factual level (though this is also often the case)--but instead on a lower, perceptive and subjective level.

Perhaps one of the most famous prophets in recent history would be George Orwell, or Eric Blair. While Blair did in fact predict the future in his essay You and the Atom Bomb, according to himself he only did so informed of what had been occurring in the world for over one hundred years by the point that he penned it, and he did not do so without error. Regardless of that, though, very few people remember Blair for his essays, and You and the Atom Bomb is one of the least remembered among them. Instead, Blair is known almost exclusively for his authorship of the novels 1984 and Animal Farm. The latter is seldom spoken of as a bit of prophecy, because it intentionally dictates the history of communism in the USSR in such simple terms—so blatantly specific to that time and place—that it would be difficult to misconstrue it as anything other than a parable of history. The former, however, has been cited as prophetic so many times by this point that simply stating the title alone brings to mind first so many memes of its name being used in vain. Despite being called prophetic over and over, however, very little in the book is actually written as a prediction of the future. The book is written, as your high school literature teacher would tell you, as a bit of guidance through outlining the process by which totalitarianism has historically steeped society in its evils. What the book details are simply things that were happening in his time and place as much they are now in ours.

1984 is not all that Blair gets called a prophet for, however. I have seen the title given to him for his most famous essay, Politics and the English Language. As the name suggests, the essay is on how even the very language we use reflects the signs of our times, a theme which he explored thoroughly through his career. What really boggles the mind, however, is that Blair is blatantly writing about the world in his present time—making little in the way of prediction—yet still gets called a prophet for it. He gets called a prophet because he was right about the English language back then, and the English language has been stagnant for the better part of a century now, not because he accurately predicted where the English language would go in the future. Likewise, in one of his lesser-known essays, Notes on Nationalism, he writes about a form of nationalism present in his time that he called “colour feeling.” When I cited his description of it to a friend and explained the context, they still asserted that Blair was a prophet for this. When I explained further, they continued to cling to the idea that Blair wrote about the signs of our times rather than those of his. This clinging would defy explanation if it weren’t so easily explainable.

Unfortunately, Eric Blair is far from the only person who receives this kind of acclaim, and it’s far from only idiots who give it out. As a non-exhaustive list, I have seen many otherwise intelligent people from all walks of life variously label Karl Marx, Theodore Kaczynski, Martin Luther King Jr., and even some famous people in our present time as being prophets for things they said about what was going on in a now passed time. While it may not be immediately obvious why people do this, they act so irrationally on these matter for very logical reasons.

There exists a prevailing belief in our society that our times are unprecedented, that what we are enduring today is uniquely painful and often exceedingly so. When faced with information that genuinely confronts that concept, rather than confronts a different but similar belief, many people do not accept it. It detracts from ideologies that are simultaneously filled with as large a measure of hope as they are with pain, ideologies that call the signs of our times “late-stage capitalism” or a “Zionist occupied government.” These are beliefs that hinge the upending of a cruel world order that explains the bulk of our problems on the uniquity of its terribleness.

While it may sound as if I only hang out with extremists and that I need to touch grass—and there is some truth to this—the reality is that beliefs like this permeate the whole of our society in greater and lesser forms. While most people don’t accept the need of a violent revolution to kill off the bourgeoisie or the Jews, I have seen most people cite over and over the unprecedented nature of our times and the intolerability of its signs as reasons for some catastrophic level of failure in governments around the world. I have seen most express that there is a truly dire need to do something about this, and most people ideologically fall into one broad vein of this thought or another—even if they disagree with those who take them to extreme lengths—as they have accepted a sanitized form of that incivility that promises similar utopian outcomes. As a result, most people unconsciously order around the facts in this way to reinforce their own vein of beliefs, to unfairly legitimize their own goals for change, and to keep their firm structure of lies intact. Or, to quote the Prophet Eric Blair:

Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality […] Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Eric Blair, Notes on Nationalism, 1945