Lessons from Orwell's 1984

This afternoon I finished reading George Orwell's 1984, a novel that describes a negative utopia, a police state that controls everything: your day-to-day life, history, the laws of science, everything right down to your own thoughts. It is a horribly depressing read, and by the end it's tempting to dismiss the whole thing as being impossible of ever happening, if only to rid yourself of the image of the dark future it depicts.

And it seems so easy to dismiss on first glance. "Wow, living in a police state sucks. Right then. Democracy and freedom all the way, huzzah!" and call it a day. In the afterword, however, Erich Fromm takes special pains to point out to the reader (the reader that has bothered to look at the afterword anyway) that Orwell's nightmare scenario of a Big Brother-esque government can just as easily happen in a Western-style democracy as it can in a communist or fascist state.

Today the message of Orwell's 1984 is more prevalent than ever because in some ways you can already see aspects of his novel in today's society (or more accurately, in America).

In the book Big Brother has total control over information. If they tell you something happened there's no way to disprove it. The main character of the story, Winston Smith, has trouble dealing with this concept. His country of Oceania is at war with Eurasia and, according to the government, always has been. Smith knows however that as recently as four years ago Oceania was at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia. There are no records of this except for his personal memory. Anything that says otherwise (old speeches, newspaper archives, books, etc.) have either been destroyed or altered by the Ministry of Truth, which Smith himself works for. He has no way of proving that Oceania was ever at war with anyone but Eurasia. Big Brother says it's true. The rest of the population believes it's true. All written records in existence say it's true. Who's to say it's not true?

This introduces the idea of doublethink, the mentality of simultaneously believing and denying the truth of something. Stephen Colbert coined another word for it: Wikiality.

In this clip of The Colbert Report Colbert explains how anything that a majority of people agree on is considered truth on Wikipedia. In theory Wikipedia works much in the same way as the Ministry of Truth, except instead of a totalitarian system in which information is handed down from a higher authority as being true it's mutually decided on by a popular majority. That's Fromm's point in the afterword of 1984: both democracies and totalitarian governments can produce the same result of elaborately fabricated lies.

The Wikipedia-Ministry of Truth comparison only works in theory of course. Wikipedia has a team of editors and administrators that work to stamp out anything that's not true on its pages. Colbert asks his viewers to change the page on African elephants to say the population has tripled over the last six months, but within hours after his broadcast the Wikipedia page on elephants was locked to prevent any editing. The reason given by the administrators was that people were trying to "hack" the page.

With mindful intervention the Wikipedia staff can prevent most things that are obviously false from making it to Wikipedia entries (or else quickly correct them). But the point is valid: if everyone else accepts something as true, who's to say it's not?

The example Colbert provides of a 14% increase in Americans over the course of eighteen months believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction after the Bush administration hinted that he did over and over again in every possible speech, interview, and news broadcast is sobering. The same was true of the insinuations the Bush administration made that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.

The fact is the population of African elephants has not tripled in the last six months and Saddam Hussein did not have anything to do with 9/11. But if a majority of people believe it, who's to say it's not true? As Colbert says, "If you go against what the majority of people perceive to be reality, you're the one who's crazy." The same way Winston Smith was crazy.

Some of the self-contradictions that Big Brother makes in 1984 seem absurd. How can a government completely deny something that it previously stated as being true?

But if there's one thing The Daily Show likes to point out, it's how often members of the Bush administration contradict themselves. Here's a clip revealing a contradiction made by Washington Press Secretary Tony Snow:

In one clip, Tony Snow says that the firing of U.S. attorneys was based on performance. In the other, he states that he has never said that. In that very instance, Tony Snow was using doublethink.

Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning to future generations about the dangers of an all-powerful government. We should be mindful that he was talking about the democracies as well as the dictatorships.