Orwell suspected that socialism had an innate tilt towards totalitarianism, towards 'the people' (bureaucratic class) using force and coercion to accomplish its aims. In this, he was absolutely correct- eighty years later Greek former finance minister and prominent socialist Yanis Varoufakis (recently debanked for his support of Julian Assange) is trying to imagine a form of socialism in which government force and coercion doesn't play a major role.
Socialism without government force and coercion—seems contradictory to me. I’d be curious to see what he comes up with.
You’re right—I don’t think Orwell glorified socialism (even though he was overly optimistic that an all-powerful government would act in the interest of its people).
It seems to me like his opinion was more along the lines of ‘If the government is going to take over everything anyway, let’s hope it’s at least a socialist one.’
May 29·edited May 29Liked by Melissa Petrie, John Mistretta
Wow, great read Melissa, I was right there with you in every word...even feeling the sympathy for Orwell's perception of the problems and then a kind of frustration of is inability to see possible solutions, other than top-down forced conditions. Which for us Americans many things are covered in the Bill of Rights, that give us freedoms but no guarantees in life. BTW, a little factoid, "Partisan Review received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1950s and 1960s as part of the agency's efforts to shape intellectual opinion during the Cold War." : (
You’re so right about how frustrating Orwell’s view of the problem was—almost like it was simultaneously optimistic and defeatist. He took it as a foregone conclusion that this ‘planned economy’ was coming, yet he somehow thought that human nature was changeable? Very strange.
Interesting about “Partisan Review”! I wonder if that was commonplace at the time (and whether Orwell knew about it—I have my suspicions).
Your welcome, and I believe in this, your project, 100%. About it common place, the CIA are professional pathological liars. I was artist in residence with a think-tank that I discovered had CIA connections, but only after 2 decades. So stupid of me, all I had to do was thoroughly vet the trustees. But after I found out, told them all to fuck off. So, I would guess there would be a mixture of those who knew and those who were blindly excited about being published. Also, I thought of it earlier, I love Gene Roddenberry, especially Star Trek NG and Voyager. He always has difficult problems to solve, sexism, racism, politics, terrorism, conspiracies and he gets it so right. But he never delt with the problem of money or individuality. Everyone has jobs on Enterprise but do arts as hobbies. And apparently he really had to do a lot merchandising to fund everything, which he covers with the Ferengi, but projects disgust at their trading practices (which are done unethically.) I mention this, because like Orwell he didn't figure that part out, freedom and free trade.
Wow, that's crazy! Even though I shouldn't be, I'm always surprised by just how pervasive the CIA is. It must've been tough to walk away after 2 decades!
I'm not all that familiar with Star Trek, but from the way you describe it, it does seem like Roddenberry is an example of someone who got so much right, but still managed to get tripped up by this one problem. I guess having an interest in social and political issues goes hand and hand with idealism, and free trade, which inherently necessitates inequality of outcome, does not inherently appeal to someone who is advocating for a better world.
" ... and free trade, which inherently necessitates inequality of outcome" : ) Well stated. Though complex, I think there are a lot of people who want a better world and inherently believe in freedom (if I understood you right) like Christopher Cook. And I think me too. It is such an interesting paradox, that I have a very strong stance in aesthetics, what I know to be true to human nature and reality, yet I don't believe anyone must accept it, rather I try to use PsyOp to influence their hearts and minds. ; ) : )
I think it’s much healthier (and potentially more persuasive) to let go of the need for others to believe the way you do.
You’re 100% right that there are a lot of people who want a better world and believe in freedom (and Christopher Cook is a great example!)
I guess what I was getting at is that since the argument AGAINST freedom is disguised as altruism, it’s attractive to a lot of well-meaning people (and, ironically, if you ask them, they’d probably say they believed in freedom too, even though their ideas suggest the opposite).
Melissa this is excellent and nothing is 'wrong' but I can offer a bit more context with the European experience. When you say Orwell was naïve about socialism I think it is worth bearing in mind that at that time what socialism amounted to was still in a state of flux. Many on the left thought Germany's economic turnaround after the first world war was a credit to Hitler's command economy and to socialism - this is hotly denied now, but just check out what the intelligentsia on the left said at the time and make your own mind up. George Bernard Shaw is one person whose comments did not age well.
Orwell regaled against the lack of democracy whether that be on the left or right and in the Spanish Civil War he went to fight the fascists, ended up fighting communists too and was later chased out of the country by the people he was fighting for. The quote you are looking for does sound familiar but I would be surprised if Orwell said it - 'socialism without democracy' would make more sense. Stylistically it is plausible.
I should add that in the UK and many European countries many elements of socialism are just ever present within hybrid capitalist economies. Examples of those elements include universal health care, open access to education and nationalised infrastructure. That all works until a government gets into power who wants to (in the words of Harold Macmillan) 'sell off the family silver' to the private sector.
Many of the nationalised industries that were later privatised in the UK have failed spectacularly and ended up being subsidised by the taxpayer anyway. Remember that these legacy sectors like the railways and rolling stock evolved with the infrastructure as it was built. They were good at what they did before (in the UK) they were sold off cheaply to private investors. I can give other examples if you need them but in essence they all come down to under-valuation (so the market can make a quick buck), lack of regulation and no effective charter for deliverables. There is some nuance here that would be a bit difficult to lay out in a comment but I am happy to clarify.
Going in the other direction when certain sectors are nationalised there is a lot of scope for cost inflation and waste. Government departments are frequently ineffective at managing programmes, particularly from a blank sheet of paper, usually because they don't have a good appreciation of what they want. This is why military spending is difficult to control just about anywhere in the world. First tier contractors tend to write their own scope and charge what they like for what they choose to deliver.
Orwell realised that technology could be used to benefit everybody or only a few. A more familiar example might be the 2007 subprime mortgage crash in the US which rippled around the globe. Banks were being bailed out everywhere with taxpayer money. It was never repaid and in a few short years and even shorter memories, those bankers were paying themselves huge bonuses. Meanwhile people across the US were left paying off negative equity on property they no longer lived in.
What has that got to do with technology? A Collateralised Debt Obligation (CDO) is a financial instrument and a type of technology to trade in debt risk. The major banks and credit rating agencies genuinely believed they were creating wealth out of thin air. These are the type of fuckwits we are dealing with.
I think the opposing perspectives Orwell and Burnham represent are still key today. Orwell realised that the motivation in a free-market economy is profit not liberating people from drudgery. Profit comes from efficiencies that technology can bring often accompanied by reduced labour costs because some people lose their livelihoods and the others are in a demand-side job market. Those savings are typically siphoned off in executive bonuses and shareholder dividends.
I am a great believer and advocate for technology and also free-market economies. But I also realise that in principle, public sector utilities should be able to achieve efficiencies and economies of scale i.e., that enable reinvestment in both national infrastructures and basic public services. How? We innovate.
"However, considering what Orwell was up against, it becomes clear why he might have been drawn to the socialist cause. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he argues against the apparently pervasive idea that poor people were a separate breed of human from rich people, a race separate from the aristocracy that was designed specifically to work. He argues against an apparently deeply-rooted belief that poor people were dirty by choice, and that if they had the means to bathe regularly (which most did not), they’d still choose not to."
I'm sure you'll address this later, but upon my most recent reading of Animal Farm, I wondered how much of hereditarianism Orwell accepted. The different species of animals have very different intellectual capabilities, with the smartest animals being capable of advanced literacy, and the dumbest unable to learn more than a single letter of the alphabet. Obviously, real life is more complicated, as those of us of different classes aren't literally different species, and thus our ability to interbreed combined with regression to the mean ensures there will never be a perfect hereditary aristocracy; but as a fable, the work need not concern itself with exactly mirroring every aspect of real life. The important thing is that the vastly different cognitive capabilities and temperments of the various animals is also a feature of humanity, and if Orwell did not think it so, he had no more reason to depict it than to depict any number of the fantastical things in the story, as it would too obviously compromise the theme of the story to be worth keeping in. If anything, he emphasizes the cognitive differences of the various types of animals more than any other work of xenofiction I can think of, suggesting that he particularly valued its importance to the plot.
I'm glad you mentioned this. I plan on dedicating an entire chapter to Animal Farm later on, and I'll be sure to touch on this topic.
In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell dedicates several pages to addressing and 'debunking' several commonly-held stereotypes that middle and upper-class people held about the lower classes (they smell, that their mannerisms are crude, etc.). His point was that all people are the same, which would suggest that he did not consider class to be an indicator of intelligence.
Of course, whether he was in favor of or against hereditary aristocracy is an entirely different matter, as it might still be an effective form of government even if it excludes the vast majority of intelligent people from public service (if you're interested, I touch on the subject briefly here, albeit not in very much depth: https://thinkingman.substack.com/p/noblesse-oblige).
However, I don't think Orwell was in favor of aristocratic rule (he was a proponent of 'democratic socialism,' after all, and often condemned the ruling aristocracy as out-of-touch and ineffectual).
I've always interpreted the animals' differing intelligence in Animal Farm to be a statement on how different classes have access to different information (something Orwell addresses in 1984 as well). Lower classes had neither the resources nor the time to think deeply about political issues, and their depiction in Animal Farm was probably an illustration of their typical habits of thought, rather than a condemnation of their intellectual capabilities.
That being said, it could also be an observation of how 'the masses' are, in fact, unintelligent (even if intelligence is distributed evenly across socioeconomic lines, lower classes make up the vast majority of people, and thus the vast majority of unintelligent people). I'm not sure if this is true (I can't back the statement up with any evidence from Orwell's writing at this point), but if true, it brings up some really strange questions about how Orwell reconciled this fact with his preference for democracy (or how ANYONE does, for that matter—could this be an example of Orwell's own 'doublethink,' i.e. holding two contradictory beliefs in one's head simultaneously?). The question of whether democracy is objectively 'good' is beyond the scope of this project, though, and frankly, I haven't fully settled upon an answer.
Animal Farm is a strange book. Taken as a standalone work, it seems to mean something entirely different than it does when you take Orwell's entire bibliography into account.
I hope this addressed your point—I may have gone on a little bit of a tangent. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this.
What you're leaving can often define, but blind you, as to where you're going.
A number of my friends (Five, when I think about it.) grew up, spent their early years, in Hitler's Germany. All of them, when I knew them in NYC or Alaska, considered themselves communists or strongly socialists. I suspect mostly because, as they saw it, communism was the opposite of fascism (Hitler's boys killed all the local communists whenever they could so they must be the good guys!) .
Perhaps Orwell's direction was effected, selected to a certain extent, by some such.
Wow—they must have an interesting perspective. I think you're absolutely right, or at least, that's what it seems based off of Orwell's writing.
It's only hindsight that has revealed these to be two sides of the same coin (and, of course, there are still people today who haven't recognized this).
I don't know what your normal attitude on accent marks is, but I'd urge you to use "exposé" no matter what for paragraph four, given the comical alternate meaning of the word otherwise.
If you listen to the AI 🤖 computer people that all make that same promise … this new technology will make everyone equal… I can’t believe they used that same line back then 🤯
This is excellent deep dive into the Huxley’s and their cronies...
They are not who we think they are...
[SF170] The Huxley’s Brave New World Order Ep7 “An UnNatural Selection” [30/03/24]
RECORD DETAILS
Released: 170
Total Runtime:02:29.30
"If we look back over the last 250 years and view it through a critical lens, we can see somewhere in the mid-1800s that a academic Re-Set took place. Theories took root that are now taught as fact, when the truth is entirely the opposite. The Huxley Dynasty were front and centre along with the Darwin’s, & the Galton’s, and other academic familes, and many more scholars of the time. These families then carried these new dogmas and passed them onto their future generations that ingrained themselves into positions of academic power. In this episode we look at the academic nepotism in the Huxley family and we enter into their world and the important positions they took up in the coming cultural shift of the 20th Century, as well as some of the ideologies they invented literally from thin air; like flying dinosaurs."
Interesting! I’ve known vaguely that there’s more to Huxley than meets the eye, and have been meaning to look into this for a while. The academic reset stuff is definitely intriguing. Thanks for sharing this!
Orwell suspected that socialism had an innate tilt towards totalitarianism, towards 'the people' (bureaucratic class) using force and coercion to accomplish its aims. In this, he was absolutely correct- eighty years later Greek former finance minister and prominent socialist Yanis Varoufakis (recently debanked for his support of Julian Assange) is trying to imagine a form of socialism in which government force and coercion doesn't play a major role.
I wouldn't hold my breath.
Socialism without government force and coercion—seems contradictory to me. I’d be curious to see what he comes up with.
You’re right—I don’t think Orwell glorified socialism (even though he was overly optimistic that an all-powerful government would act in the interest of its people).
It seems to me like his opinion was more along the lines of ‘If the government is going to take over everything anyway, let’s hope it’s at least a socialist one.’
Wow, great read Melissa, I was right there with you in every word...even feeling the sympathy for Orwell's perception of the problems and then a kind of frustration of is inability to see possible solutions, other than top-down forced conditions. Which for us Americans many things are covered in the Bill of Rights, that give us freedoms but no guarantees in life. BTW, a little factoid, "Partisan Review received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1950s and 1960s as part of the agency's efforts to shape intellectual opinion during the Cold War." : (
You’re so right about how frustrating Orwell’s view of the problem was—almost like it was simultaneously optimistic and defeatist. He took it as a foregone conclusion that this ‘planned economy’ was coming, yet he somehow thought that human nature was changeable? Very strange.
Interesting about “Partisan Review”! I wonder if that was commonplace at the time (and whether Orwell knew about it—I have my suspicions).
Thanks so much for reading and reposting! :)
Your welcome, and I believe in this, your project, 100%. About it common place, the CIA are professional pathological liars. I was artist in residence with a think-tank that I discovered had CIA connections, but only after 2 decades. So stupid of me, all I had to do was thoroughly vet the trustees. But after I found out, told them all to fuck off. So, I would guess there would be a mixture of those who knew and those who were blindly excited about being published. Also, I thought of it earlier, I love Gene Roddenberry, especially Star Trek NG and Voyager. He always has difficult problems to solve, sexism, racism, politics, terrorism, conspiracies and he gets it so right. But he never delt with the problem of money or individuality. Everyone has jobs on Enterprise but do arts as hobbies. And apparently he really had to do a lot merchandising to fund everything, which he covers with the Ferengi, but projects disgust at their trading practices (which are done unethically.) I mention this, because like Orwell he didn't figure that part out, freedom and free trade.
Wow, that's crazy! Even though I shouldn't be, I'm always surprised by just how pervasive the CIA is. It must've been tough to walk away after 2 decades!
I'm not all that familiar with Star Trek, but from the way you describe it, it does seem like Roddenberry is an example of someone who got so much right, but still managed to get tripped up by this one problem. I guess having an interest in social and political issues goes hand and hand with idealism, and free trade, which inherently necessitates inequality of outcome, does not inherently appeal to someone who is advocating for a better world.
" ... and free trade, which inherently necessitates inequality of outcome" : ) Well stated. Though complex, I think there are a lot of people who want a better world and inherently believe in freedom (if I understood you right) like Christopher Cook. And I think me too. It is such an interesting paradox, that I have a very strong stance in aesthetics, what I know to be true to human nature and reality, yet I don't believe anyone must accept it, rather I try to use PsyOp to influence their hearts and minds. ; ) : )
I think it’s much healthier (and potentially more persuasive) to let go of the need for others to believe the way you do.
You’re 100% right that there are a lot of people who want a better world and believe in freedom (and Christopher Cook is a great example!)
I guess what I was getting at is that since the argument AGAINST freedom is disguised as altruism, it’s attractive to a lot of well-meaning people (and, ironically, if you ask them, they’d probably say they believed in freedom too, even though their ideas suggest the opposite).
Ah Melissa, I love the way you think.
Melissa this is excellent and nothing is 'wrong' but I can offer a bit more context with the European experience. When you say Orwell was naïve about socialism I think it is worth bearing in mind that at that time what socialism amounted to was still in a state of flux. Many on the left thought Germany's economic turnaround after the first world war was a credit to Hitler's command economy and to socialism - this is hotly denied now, but just check out what the intelligentsia on the left said at the time and make your own mind up. George Bernard Shaw is one person whose comments did not age well.
Orwell regaled against the lack of democracy whether that be on the left or right and in the Spanish Civil War he went to fight the fascists, ended up fighting communists too and was later chased out of the country by the people he was fighting for. The quote you are looking for does sound familiar but I would be surprised if Orwell said it - 'socialism without democracy' would make more sense. Stylistically it is plausible.
I should add that in the UK and many European countries many elements of socialism are just ever present within hybrid capitalist economies. Examples of those elements include universal health care, open access to education and nationalised infrastructure. That all works until a government gets into power who wants to (in the words of Harold Macmillan) 'sell off the family silver' to the private sector.
Many of the nationalised industries that were later privatised in the UK have failed spectacularly and ended up being subsidised by the taxpayer anyway. Remember that these legacy sectors like the railways and rolling stock evolved with the infrastructure as it was built. They were good at what they did before (in the UK) they were sold off cheaply to private investors. I can give other examples if you need them but in essence they all come down to under-valuation (so the market can make a quick buck), lack of regulation and no effective charter for deliverables. There is some nuance here that would be a bit difficult to lay out in a comment but I am happy to clarify.
Going in the other direction when certain sectors are nationalised there is a lot of scope for cost inflation and waste. Government departments are frequently ineffective at managing programmes, particularly from a blank sheet of paper, usually because they don't have a good appreciation of what they want. This is why military spending is difficult to control just about anywhere in the world. First tier contractors tend to write their own scope and charge what they like for what they choose to deliver.
Orwell realised that technology could be used to benefit everybody or only a few. A more familiar example might be the 2007 subprime mortgage crash in the US which rippled around the globe. Banks were being bailed out everywhere with taxpayer money. It was never repaid and in a few short years and even shorter memories, those bankers were paying themselves huge bonuses. Meanwhile people across the US were left paying off negative equity on property they no longer lived in.
What has that got to do with technology? A Collateralised Debt Obligation (CDO) is a financial instrument and a type of technology to trade in debt risk. The major banks and credit rating agencies genuinely believed they were creating wealth out of thin air. These are the type of fuckwits we are dealing with.
I think the opposing perspectives Orwell and Burnham represent are still key today. Orwell realised that the motivation in a free-market economy is profit not liberating people from drudgery. Profit comes from efficiencies that technology can bring often accompanied by reduced labour costs because some people lose their livelihoods and the others are in a demand-side job market. Those savings are typically siphoned off in executive bonuses and shareholder dividends.
I am a great believer and advocate for technology and also free-market economies. But I also realise that in principle, public sector utilities should be able to achieve efficiencies and economies of scale i.e., that enable reinvestment in both national infrastructures and basic public services. How? We innovate.
"However, considering what Orwell was up against, it becomes clear why he might have been drawn to the socialist cause. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he argues against the apparently pervasive idea that poor people were a separate breed of human from rich people, a race separate from the aristocracy that was designed specifically to work. He argues against an apparently deeply-rooted belief that poor people were dirty by choice, and that if they had the means to bathe regularly (which most did not), they’d still choose not to."
I'm sure you'll address this later, but upon my most recent reading of Animal Farm, I wondered how much of hereditarianism Orwell accepted. The different species of animals have very different intellectual capabilities, with the smartest animals being capable of advanced literacy, and the dumbest unable to learn more than a single letter of the alphabet. Obviously, real life is more complicated, as those of us of different classes aren't literally different species, and thus our ability to interbreed combined with regression to the mean ensures there will never be a perfect hereditary aristocracy; but as a fable, the work need not concern itself with exactly mirroring every aspect of real life. The important thing is that the vastly different cognitive capabilities and temperments of the various animals is also a feature of humanity, and if Orwell did not think it so, he had no more reason to depict it than to depict any number of the fantastical things in the story, as it would too obviously compromise the theme of the story to be worth keeping in. If anything, he emphasizes the cognitive differences of the various types of animals more than any other work of xenofiction I can think of, suggesting that he particularly valued its importance to the plot.
Could that explain his heterodoxy as well?
I'm glad you mentioned this. I plan on dedicating an entire chapter to Animal Farm later on, and I'll be sure to touch on this topic.
In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell dedicates several pages to addressing and 'debunking' several commonly-held stereotypes that middle and upper-class people held about the lower classes (they smell, that their mannerisms are crude, etc.). His point was that all people are the same, which would suggest that he did not consider class to be an indicator of intelligence.
Of course, whether he was in favor of or against hereditary aristocracy is an entirely different matter, as it might still be an effective form of government even if it excludes the vast majority of intelligent people from public service (if you're interested, I touch on the subject briefly here, albeit not in very much depth: https://thinkingman.substack.com/p/noblesse-oblige).
However, I don't think Orwell was in favor of aristocratic rule (he was a proponent of 'democratic socialism,' after all, and often condemned the ruling aristocracy as out-of-touch and ineffectual).
I've always interpreted the animals' differing intelligence in Animal Farm to be a statement on how different classes have access to different information (something Orwell addresses in 1984 as well). Lower classes had neither the resources nor the time to think deeply about political issues, and their depiction in Animal Farm was probably an illustration of their typical habits of thought, rather than a condemnation of their intellectual capabilities.
That being said, it could also be an observation of how 'the masses' are, in fact, unintelligent (even if intelligence is distributed evenly across socioeconomic lines, lower classes make up the vast majority of people, and thus the vast majority of unintelligent people). I'm not sure if this is true (I can't back the statement up with any evidence from Orwell's writing at this point), but if true, it brings up some really strange questions about how Orwell reconciled this fact with his preference for democracy (or how ANYONE does, for that matter—could this be an example of Orwell's own 'doublethink,' i.e. holding two contradictory beliefs in one's head simultaneously?). The question of whether democracy is objectively 'good' is beyond the scope of this project, though, and frankly, I haven't fully settled upon an answer.
Animal Farm is a strange book. Taken as a standalone work, it seems to mean something entirely different than it does when you take Orwell's entire bibliography into account.
I hope this addressed your point—I may have gone on a little bit of a tangent. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this.
What you're leaving can often define, but blind you, as to where you're going.
A number of my friends (Five, when I think about it.) grew up, spent their early years, in Hitler's Germany. All of them, when I knew them in NYC or Alaska, considered themselves communists or strongly socialists. I suspect mostly because, as they saw it, communism was the opposite of fascism (Hitler's boys killed all the local communists whenever they could so they must be the good guys!) .
Perhaps Orwell's direction was effected, selected to a certain extent, by some such.
Wow—they must have an interesting perspective. I think you're absolutely right, or at least, that's what it seems based off of Orwell's writing.
It's only hindsight that has revealed these to be two sides of the same coin (and, of course, there are still people today who haven't recognized this).
Nice column. Amazing how observant he was, and individualized; how easy it is to fall into group-think, as we see happening everywhere these days!
Absolutely—I think the reason Orwell's work has so much 'staying power' is because he wasn't afraid to piss people off.
Thanks, Darren! :)
Welcome. This is a nicely done piece.
"The Road to Wigan Pier" Thank you for this analysis. It's always been my fav. Orwell.
I don't know what your normal attitude on accent marks is, but I'd urge you to use "exposé" no matter what for paragraph four, given the comical alternate meaning of the word otherwise.
Haha, I had no idea the accent mark was even missing. Thanks!
If you listen to the AI 🤖 computer people that all make that same promise … this new technology will make everyone equal… I can’t believe they used that same line back then 🤯
Gotta love a man (or woman) who can admit when they got stuff wrong 🙏
100 years or so later and we all fighting about exact same things 🤪🤪
This is excellent deep dive into the Huxley’s and their cronies...
They are not who we think they are...
[SF170] The Huxley’s Brave New World Order Ep7 “An UnNatural Selection” [30/03/24]
RECORD DETAILS
Released: 170
Total Runtime:02:29.30
"If we look back over the last 250 years and view it through a critical lens, we can see somewhere in the mid-1800s that a academic Re-Set took place. Theories took root that are now taught as fact, when the truth is entirely the opposite. The Huxley Dynasty were front and centre along with the Darwin’s, & the Galton’s, and other academic familes, and many more scholars of the time. These families then carried these new dogmas and passed them onto their future generations that ingrained themselves into positions of academic power. In this episode we look at the academic nepotism in the Huxley family and we enter into their world and the important positions they took up in the coming cultural shift of the 20th Century, as well as some of the ideologies they invented literally from thin air; like flying dinosaurs."
https://sheepfarm.co.uk/music/the-huxleys-brave-new-world-order-ep7-an-unnatural-selection-30-03-24/
Interesting! I’ve known vaguely that there’s more to Huxley than meets the eye, and have been meaning to look into this for a while. The academic reset stuff is definitely intriguing. Thanks for sharing this!