This is a thoroughly depressing novel, by George Orwell, who also wrote Animal Farm. Orwell wrote these works in the 1940s upon watching the growth of Soviet communism and observing the enthusians for socialism in the UK. 1984 has entered the public lexicon and remains an extremely relevant work, perhaps more relevant than in Orwell’s time. I first read it as a very young man and I doubt I appreciated its deeper meaning and the prescience of its message as much as I do know upon this re-reading with the passage of 40 years. It is a relatively short novel and I cannot encourage you strongly enough to read, and to encourage everyone you know to read, it. Nothing better illuminates or explains the mindset of totalitarians, of which there are many in our country and around the world. Because totalitarians live only for power over other humans, they tend to be very good at obtaining that power. The book should be mandatory reading for every high school and college student, indeed for every adult.
The basic plot is probably familiar to you–the main character Winston lives in a dystopian world with constant war between three primary nations and constant surveillance of citizens’ actions. He resides in Oceania, an amalgam of the UK and the Americas, which is run by the Party. He eventually falls afoul of the Thought Police and undergoes a program, mostly torture, to, as the Captain in Cool Hand Luke says, “get your mind right”. While Orwell was prescient, even he failed to understand the level of technology to monitor people today, and the willingness of entire countries to use that technology. China is the worst example, with its social credit scoring, and complete suppression of any actions, words or thoughts contrary to the official dogma or in any manner threatening to the authorities. Russia, North Korea, Iran and a number of other countries are not far behind. And we see the Thought Police in action in many Western countries, including of course the US.
Orwell was fascinated with the use of language, and the ability to twist its meaning. The Party lives by the slogans “War is Peace”, “Ignorance is Strength” and “Freedom is Slavery”. The Party is engaged in a process of completely changing the language. We see echoes of this today in the Dem party’s effort to create euphemisms around and “frame” issues. That party has an entire unit devoted to this effort; as did the Party in 1984. Thus we get absurdities such as “gender-affirming care”, which involves the mutilation of children and denying the reality of how they were born, or “equity” which means taking money, jobs, and anything else by force from one group which is disfavored and giving it to another favored group.
Orwell was also fascinated with memory and history and the ability in a totalitarian society to rewrite history constantly and to tell individuals that their memory of anything different was faulty; that reality was whatever the Party said it was and an individual must adapt their “memory” to the Party’s version of history. Sound at all like the indoctrination we observe in many public schools and universities in the US? There are a number of versions of the novel; I want to draw attention to some specific passages, but the page numbers may not be the same as the edition you read, so I will attempt to describe the scene or portion of the plot where these occur. My version is the official Orwell Estate 75th anniversary edition, a red cover paperback.
The first quote is in book one on page 13 in my edition, describing the daily Two Minutes Hate. “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary, A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” Sound familiar–like Goode and Pretti and the other ICE protestors and rioters, like Antifa, like the typical far-left extremist rage? Orwell is making a key point here, human crowds are dangerous, whatever emotion is whipped up is contagious and can be directed at anything or any person or group. I think there is an evolutionary and a biochemical basis for this–there is some advantage to being able to motivate a group to extreme and rapid action with no regard for consequences if tribal warfare is frequent, which it was early in primate and human development. And I believe there are biochemicals that can be transmitted via air from human to human that facilitate this process. There is some research to support this notion of aerial biochemical exchange between humans.
The next quote comes from the same book, page 20 in my edition and what is described is the most chilling aspect of totalitarianism to me. “Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected to it…..All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the state, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought criminals. It was normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.” Again, we have seen this repeatedly, before and after the book was written, the abuse of vulnerable, innocent, susceptible children to become instruments of the state–the communists, the Nazis, current China, current Iran, the Palestinians–all do exactly the same thing. They teach children hate and to be nothing but a weapon for state use. And again, the radical left in the US has had a multi-decade effort in the US to achieve the same weaponization of children, first in the Universities, to corrupt the educations teaching the teachers and the other professionals, and then in the K-12 schools. Many of our schools are nothing but indoctrination factories for the whacked extreme left ideology in all its perverse permutations. All designed to create future voters who will put the whackos in charge, and to be activists who violently carry out the agenda for change. And you can be sure that once the whackos are in charge, they will never give up power, at least not peacefully. It is this indoctrination of children that must be reversed.
There is another section about the use of language to mold people’s awareness and consciousness of reality. Orwell becomes almost philosophical about this at times and he was certainly aware of the philosophical debate about the nature of reality and whether it was “objective” in some way beyond a human’s “subjective” perception of reality. What the Party aimed to do was to convince people that what it told them was reality, was reality and they needed to train their minds to accept that, no matter what they subjectively believed they experienced. And with the indoctrination of children, within a couple of generations, there would be no one who really had a contrary perspective to that the Party wanted them to accept.
This aspect is best explained in Book 3, the third part, page 222 in my version, where Winston is objecting that he knows what he remembers, that his memory cannot be controlled or changed. The Party leader who is getting Winston’s mind right says: “On the contrary, he said, you have not controlled it (his memory). That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.”
Hard to imagine a more frightening, a more perverse explication of destroying a person’s individuality, his very thoughts and memory. And a perfect example of the abuse of language. Sane? Lunatic? And of course, a collective entity such as the Party has no “mind”, only its individual human leaders do and it is their version of reality that is foisted upon the entirety of those under their control.
And this brings us to the crux of the matter, the why of the Party and its actions. Winston thought perhaps it was because they believed humanity to be too weak to know what was best for it. The Party leader scoffs at this, he explains that this is about power, nothing but power: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings woud be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
He goes on: “The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan ‘Freedom is Slavery’. Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is Freedom. Alone-free-the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can excape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body–but, above all, over the mind.” He goes on to describe the assertion of power as involving inflicting pain and suffering; without these how can you be sure you have molded the subject’s mind. Those in power want a world of fear, treachery and torment; a world based on hate. The Party will “cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth.”
Does this not sound familiar to our own time? Do we not see the examples around the world of such governments currently in power? Have there not always been people with this totalitarian mindset in our country and are they not actually ascendant in current times? Are there not those who seek to make the state all-powerful and to inflict humiliation and suffering upon their opponents? Those who seek to remove children from their parents’ influence and substitute the state?
In several aspects I disagree with Orwell–those who seek power most certainly are interested in wealth, luxury, a long life, the sexual and other exploitation of others. Their happiness is the exercise of power over others; of taking for themselves everything of value. There is no dictatorship or totalitarian ruler who has not done this. Today, look at Putin, at one point allegedly the world’s richest man, ruling over a kleptocracy in which he is the chief kelptocrat; look at Xi, look at Iran’s Ayotallahs, amassing immense wealth, as has Maduro in Venezuela and the Castros in Cuba. And power is rarely held by a collective; the very urge to power that Orwell describes leads to distrust and infighting among any collective totalitarian group. Lenin killed Trotsky, Mao wiped out his co-leaders, the Ayatollahs don’t tolerate dissent.
But in general I agree completely with his explanation of these totalitarian movements. It always is about nothing but power, however much the leaders of the movements may delude themselves otherwise. It is this conclusion that led me long ago to adopt a theory regarding history that it is shaped by bad men seeking power. And that to end this descent to totalitarian hell, we must have methods of identifying such persons and removing them from any possibility of obtaining power. How much better would the world be if Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Kims in North Korea, the Ayatollahs, Putin, had been identified as a threat and isolated from society before they could amass power? And why have democratic societies which attempt to respect individuality been so slow to destroy incipient totalitarian rulers? Why did we stand by to watch Hitler, the Communists in Russia, Mao in China, take power?
And in our own country, do we not need to create institutions that cannot be captured by totalitarians, who would then seek to change the country so that they never lost power; is this not exactly what the current Dem party says it will do if it returns to power? You think it can’t happen here; it can and it is.
