It's 1984 All Over Again.
By no stretch of the imagination are we becoming more free. So, what are we becoming?
Following are some excerpts from George Orwell’s “1984”. I recently reread it because, well, it needs to be read frequently. It was written in 1948, and it is Orwell’s projection as to how things might be in 1984. I remember 1984, the year, not the book. The media made a big thing about how 1984 had arrived and it was nothing like the book.
I begged to differ. My whole life, I’ve seen a never-ending march toward totalitarianism in our government. Am I paranoid, or some such? Perhaps not. We have had FDR’s programs of the 1930s. All were for the greater good of mankind, yet resulted in far greater control of our lives and well-being by, well, Big Brother.
We have seen education nationalized, ever since Jimmy Carter set up the Dept of Education in 1979.
With LBJs Great Society programs of the 1960s we have nationalized healthcare. As we all contemplate what has gone wrong with America, remember we are now living in LBJ’s Great Society.
And those are just the highlights.
There is no rational way to refute the truth of “1984”. We are long past the date, but still march steadfastly toward the reality of the book. As you contemplate the book, and you MUST contemplate the book, notice that there is no mention of government. Big Brother is not the symbol of government, but of the Party. Which party? It occurs to me that Republicans will read this and see the totalitarians as Democrats. Democrats will see the totalitarians as Republicans. Both, of course, are right. The totalitarians are the two parties. Not either/or, but both.
Who, then are the proletarians as depicted in “1984“? They are those who have no use for or need of party loyalty, who have no ingrained need to belong. They are their own people. They are not employees of government, nor do they work for organizations that are funded by government. Party members, on the other hand…
Here, then, are some snippets from “1984”. Page numbers refer to the PDF text, the link to which is given below. Contemplate to what extent ‘1984’ still portends our future, or even our present. And contemplate this: Do you identify more as a Party member, or as a proletarian. There will be a test...
(The page numbers shown are from the PDF version linked below)
**************************************************************
P 122
From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.
In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated. A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police.
A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions, but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in any case, an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject. What discontent produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and every Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party.
*****************************************************************
p122
Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat.
***************************************************************
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.
******************************************
P 152
It sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O’Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face. O’Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
’You are ruling over us for our own good,’ he said feebly.’You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore-’
He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.
’That was stupid, Winston, stupid!’ he said. ’You should know better than to say a thing like that.’
He pulled the lever back and continued:
’Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. 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 the 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 would 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. Now do you begin to understand me?’
*****************************************
P 154
‘...Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy, everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have 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, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science.
***********************************************
p169
As they walked back across the grass, she looked directly at him for the first time. It was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. He wondered whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.
’I betrayed you,’ she said baldly.
’I betrayed you,’ he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
’Sometimes,’ she said, ’they threaten you with something, something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ”Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so.” And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.’
’All you care about is yourself,’ he echoed.
’And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer.’
’No,’ he said, ’you don’t feel the same.’
There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered their thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing to sit there in silence: besides, it was too cold to keep still. She said something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.
’We must meet again,’ he said.
’Yes,’ she said, ’we must meet again. ’
*************************************************************
P 172
But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
So, are you a proletarian or a Party member? Is there a third choice?
In the next post, we look at what The Lord of the Flies tells us about ourselves.
Here’s a link: Lord of the Flies