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the individual has willed (though he did not know it) whatever the Government tells him to do.
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What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence - moral, cultural, social, or intellectual.
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individual differences must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, children... [who are not learning] languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies... Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have... "parity of esteem." ... Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma... by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.
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Incentives to learn and penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented: who are they to overtop their fellows?*
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Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will. That is part of the same movement. Penal taxes, designed for that purpose, are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated.

I haven't read it yet myself, but I bought a book for my mother on the strength of a few reviews, that might be a good one for people here: Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

I knew about the people at Bletchley Park in the UK, but I had no idea there were women doing similar things in the US.

*reminds me of the article small poppies, in which the author saw flowers which towered over others being topped off, leaving a bare stalk, to give the impression, when viewed from a distance, of all flowers growing to a uniform height.

If you want anyone to pay attention to you in meetings, don’t ever preface your opposition to a proposal by saying: “Just to play devil’s advocate . . .” If you disagree with something, just say it and hold your ground until you’re convinced otherwise. There are many such useful ideas in Charlan Nemeth’s “In Defense of Troublemakers,” her study of dissent in life and the workplace. But if this one alone takes hold, it could transform millions of meetings, doing away with all those mushy, consensus-driven hours wasted by people too scared of disagreement or power to speak truth to gibberish. Not only would better decisions get made, but the process of making them would vastly improve.

As Ms. Nemeth demonstrates, peer pressure can be a major motivator in business. Marketers use majority opinion to staggering effect, and recommendations prompt our natural instinct to follow the herd, nonsensically sometimes. (Just think of Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature.) But for management, peer pressure can lead to bad ideas going unchallenged as people fear that disagreement could imperil their jobs.

Ms. Nemeth, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has spent decades studying the effects of groupthink in multiple settings. Her original research was in decision-making by juries—how they went about reaching them and whether their verdicts were correct. What she found was that juries that included dissenters “considered more facts and more ways of viewing those facts.” Consensus, she found, “narrows, while dissent opens, the mind.” In the process of her research, she also discovered how susceptible we all are to majority opinion. Even when we think we aren’t being swayed, we are being subtly yanked by our desire to stand with others rather than alone with our crackpot views.