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On the novel 1984 (1949) and the essays “Politics and the English Language” (1946) and “Notes on Nationalism” (1945).
What's the relation between language and totalitarianism? In 1984, Orwell presents us with a society where the ruling powers have mastered the art of retaining power, and one element of this involves "Newspeak," where the vocabulary is purposely limited to the point where subversive sentiments can't be expressed. And if you can't say it, you can't really think it either, so the "thought crime" that begins the protagonist's journey of despair would be impossible.
We get some context from the two essays: "Politics and the English Language" tells us that when we parrot metaphors and other phrases given to us ready-made by those in power (or anyone else), we cease to authentically think. "Notes on Nationalism" describes the difference between patriotism, i.e., authentic pride in your locality, and nationalism, which should really be called factionalism, which involves putting all your efforts (à la Beauvoir's "serious man") in the service of country or party or whatever.
In 1984, citizens are expected to surrender their individuality to the party (i.e., the state), and the full foursome is here to talk about exactly how that's supposed to work in the story and who counts as a citizen ("outer party") vs. a prole (whom those in power starve of the means to revolt but don't bother to indoctrinate on an individual level). So, was this Orwell's version of Marx's theory of history, i.e., through some kind of Darwinism of ideas, factions that exhibit these kinds of defensive mechanisms will inevitably rise to the top (note that this happens to all three of the world's empires in the story, though each of them had different starting ideologies)? Or was he engaging in satire, or just warning us of where certain tendencies of his day's socialism might lead if left unchecked? (Note that he was a dedicated socialist himself.) Or is this just a thought experiment to show what kind of organization one would need to ensure continuous power?
What Orwell describes is extreme: Purposefully and constantly revised history to reflect current party priorities, constant surveillance and even entrapment to "educate" citizens to love the state (which in the case of our protagonist breaks him to the point of his being essentially useless to the state's efforts), the necessity of "double-think" that involves citizens both purposely lying to themselves and then forgetting that they have done so, and finally, the overt avowal by the rulers (the "inner party") that they pursue power purely for power's sake, not for the sake of some good apart from power. Given this extremity, could the depicted society possibly plot out a realistic trajectory from our current one, or even amount to a particularly illuminating thought experiment?
Orwell has thankfully helped inoculate against disingenuous political speech, such as calling the Republicans' current plan "The American Health Care Act" when it is in fact designed to undermine care for many (I pick this example only for its recency; there are many others available of various partisan varieties). Does lying by our government in this way, or trying to restrict speech to only "acceptable" modes, or working up fear of an external, mostly illusory threat to keep the citizens in line… Do these measures represent a slippery slope to totalitarianism, to anything like the world that Orwell describes? Or is calling such things "Orwellian" really just a cliché of exactly the sort that Orwell himself would object to?
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Orwell picture by Wan F. Chang-Hamachi.
I’m glad Wes brought up “Homage to Catalonia”; that book provides quite a bit of insight as to how Orwell’s idealism (used in the least philosophical sense) was crushed throughout his involvement in the Spanish Civil War (largely due to influence exerted by the Soviet controlled Comintern). I mean the man largely survived execution only because he was shot through the throat on the front lines before the ‘POUM’ was falsely implicated. I don’t know how many have seen this poster scapegoating the militia that Orwell was a part of around that time: https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/explorefurther/digital/scw/more/simpletimeline2/sa12-12-006.jpg?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/trumps-war-on-independent-analysis/519468/
Enjoyed it thoroughly, but wasn’t this originally supposed to be a Huxley + Orwell episode, as Seth briefly mentioned? I was sort of looking forward to that, so here’s hoping you guys can make it to Brave New World at some point.
If you guys do another fiction book, I would also love to hear a discussion of Brave New World or Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here.
Great discussion. You misspoke a little bit in the intro, though. This is not a society without privacy. The telescreens do not watch everyone; in fact, they don’t watch the vast majority of citizens in their homes. The telescreens are only used to monitor the middle class bureaucrats who actually do the day-to-day work of running the government. Proles are free to do and say what they like in their homes, because the regime is confident they will not cook up plans to topple the government (as one of you noted later in the discussion, they don’t care about the proles). The most trouble they could theoretically cause would be to riot in public, and the police will get them if they do that. Winston Smith frequently gazes upon them with frustration that they don’t rise up, because he sees that they could have the power to topple the government if they just had the desire. This kind of apathy or even reactionary attitude among the lower classes is something that was definitely observed in the French Revolution. It was intellectuals who brought the franchise to the masses, and the masses shrugged and engaged in some of the most pathetically low voting turnout imaginable.
My interpretation was that Julia is a fellow victim rather than a confederate. As you noted, the great tragedy at the end of the book is that they are both able to meet with each other now–the state doesn’t even care–and they basically feel nothing except contempt, because they know that each of them betrayed the other when faced with their special form of torture. His calling out that they should torture Julia rather than him does not carry the same gut-wrenching power if we don’t feel that by the same token, she did love him, yet correspondingly wished for him to be tortured instead of her. It is a very dark, although probably accurate, vision of humanity: that we are not gallantly going to sacrifice ourselves for those we love. (I don’t know if Orwell had children, but I would be more skeptical if he had portrayed a parent, especially a mother, wishing for her children to be tortured in her place.)
One might wonder what the purpose of O’Brien’s seven years of manipulation was, since as you said, at the beginning Winston was very timid and seemed unlikely to go against the party. But it did determine that if others recruited him he would be open to it. Once determining that, they tortured even that much out of him, so that he would now not be a fruitful target for a would-be revolutionary cell. It’s almost like when firefighters burn a section of land to keep a forest fire from spreading. There’s no fertile soil for revolution, not even if someone tries their best to entice him.
And although I also agree with you that what O’Brien did was not the test that admits outer party members into the inner party, I do think it was a kind of test–that if he had resisted the entrapment from the beginning, he would have been able to continue with his old job and would never have gotten tortured or anything.
P.S. I love Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”! I wish you had talked about that a little more.
Hi, I thought this was a really Interesting discussion.
One thing your closing comments about ‘the place where there is no darkness’ reminded me of is actually Psalm 139*, in which many have noted the ambivalence of the psalmist to God’s omniscience and the human desire to keep some part of themselves ‘unknown’. Which led me to wonder whether 1984, as well as all the political allegory could be also an anti-religious tale (given ‘roman catholicism’ is one of the ‘nationalisms’ he rails against in his ‘notes’), ‘Big Brother’, who demands dominion over not just human action, but human soul as well, is a tyrannical deity who will be satisfied by nothing less than the ‘conversion’ (He loved Big Brother) of Smith we see at the end.
*”You have searched me, LORD, and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.
…”
Excellent point. That phrase sure did sound Biblical to me!
I’ve been researching Operation Barbarossa lately, and it’s made me realize that Stalinism actually was exactly like the use of totalitarian power Seth is describing early in the podcast.
Shortly after the invasion really took hold and the reality of the situation was believed, Stalin threw a fit and exclaimed that he gave up. He vanished to his vacation home, and went off the grid – didn’t answer phone calls or anything. Some senior officials eventually showed up at the house, Stalin apparently wondering if they were there to kill him – but instead they begged him to return and lead the country. He solemnly accepted.
At first glance it looks like he had a nervous breakdown, but I’ve heard it suggested that Beria and the NKVD were closely monitoring everyone’s behaviour during his period of absence. During this time Stavka and other top government offices made no important decisions, and nobody stepped out and took action, or attempted to replace Stalin. According to this theory, this was just a continuation of the party purges. Had everyone learned their lesson? Would anyone take this to be a special case, and “betray” Stalin by trying to save the country?
The level of narcissism this would imply is incomprehensible, but it sounds plausible for Stalin. I mean, at that time the Red Army is being crushed, generals who were given orders not to return fire on the Germans are being executed for failing to protect the country, and the German army is penetrating deep into the country. People are suffering and the nation is teetering on the edge of collapse. Yet Stalin uses this as an opportunity to perform another test, to ensure total obedience from a staff he has expertly terrorized (he even had his loyal secretary’s wife murdered as they left Moscow; she was in prison for “treason”, and Stalin had the prisons “purged” when they initially left the capital. He literally told him that “he could find another wife”).
I had definitely not understood the nature of the anti-Stalinist critique before I learned this – I thought it was all gulags and sort of crude violence…but Stalin was much more sadistic and paranoiac than I had thought, to the point that 1984 doesn’t seem hyperbolic at all.
Antony Beevor even posits that Stalin took so long to believe Barbarossa was happening because he was so sure that anyone who had traveled had been “turned” and was a Trotskyist or was doing the bidding of the British. To the extent that he actually disbelieved his own foreign ministers and spies, who had sent transcripts from captured German phrasebooks (which contained ominous sentences in Russian such as “Surrender” or “Where are the soldiers?”)
This ”grim power dynamic” in which citizens betray themselves and are reformed by unavoidable thought crime and subsequent reformation is exactly the tactic of the catholic church and boot camps. No?