The walls came tumbling up (then down)

"Liberation"

“What a tool cynicism is to the corrupt, claiming the whole of the creation is broken and fraudulent, and thus we are all excused to indulge in whatever sins we wish—for what’s a little more unfairness, in this unfair world?”

-Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup

I’m still making my way through my little “history of the internet” series, but it’s become increasingly difficult to focus my efforts there while the world churns around us. So I’m going to interrupt myself once again, prompted this time by the rank hypocrisy¹ of “Liberation Day.”

I know that nitpicking about the regime’s language is like complaining about the color of the bullet as it passes through your body, but I really can’t help it. Language is my thing, and in many cases, it serves as the front line past which horrible people march on their way to enacting their wretched policies. I’m not so naive as to believe that their language can be “fixed,” or that doing so would magically reverse the cruelty and destruction enacted (thus far), but at the same time, I still believe that language matters².

When I was talking to someone in my writing group about what I wanted to write about, I explained how it boiled down to my dislike of doublespeak/doublethink, which is perhaps the purest and most toxic embodiment of the irony that’s captured so much of our country. So I decided to pay George Orwell a visit, given how frequently 1984 seems to be invoked these days.

I’m old enough to remember the calendar year itself, as I was in high school at the time. That meant reading Orwell’s novel as part of our English curriculum. I tried to remember that experience, and what I must have thought about it at the time, but I recall so little of high school that I really only have vibes to rely on. When I read a book, I shelve it mentally, and associate it with other texts and ideas that feel sympathetic. My feelings about Orwell have always been to treat it as speculative fiction—I’m neither alone nor especially unique in that regard. It always felt more allegorical than realistic, something so distant from any possible timeline that I might experience, so it didn’t make a deep impression on my high-school self. Little did I know that Orwell’s Oceania would turn into a torment nexus, or that I would myself be working on a book that attempted to diagnose that transformation. But here we are.

The image above comes from a NYT piece on Orwell, which came out just after I’d started my own reread, and one of the points that its author (Matthew Purdy) makes is that Orwell’s ambivalence lends his work to ready appropriation by operatives across the full range of the political spectrum. Without bursting in flames, JD Vance can describe German laws as Orwellian, while it’s hard to turn around these days without bumping into a critique of the current administration that doesn’t make reference to 1984 (including Purdy’s). And rightfully so. They have proven remarkably profligate, indiscriminate, and unprincipled in their weaponization of governmental functions³, as you might expect from a regime whose first executive order was titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government” before proceeding to enumerate all of the ways that the federal government would henceforth be weaponized. If that’s not a perfect example of what it means “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it” (44), I’m not sure what is.

1984 is a longer novel than I’d remembered, and I found myself highlighting terms and passages that resonated with me, so it took longer than I’d planned. One thing that struck me overall, and one of the reasons that the novel is considered dystopian in the first place, is that, at its heart, 1984 is a novel that dramatizes the (Japanese) adage that “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down⁴.” Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, is a fairly effective employee in Oceania’s Ministry of Truth, where he takes news stories and historical texts and rewrites them according the needs of the present:

This process of continuous alteration was applied…to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

Unfortunately for Winston, it’s a job that requires him daily to confront (and participate in) the erasure of history and memory. It’s impossible to do his job effectively without understanding what he’s doing, but that understanding means that he’s constantly putting himself at risk with his superiors. He can’t pretend that there’s no such thing as history when he’s one of the people responsible for erasing it.

The first part of the book teases out this contradiction, narrating the disjunct that Winston experiences, while also setting a dismal (grey, grimy, oily, tattered) scene for us. The world of 1984 is intentionally gray despite regular updates from the Ministry of Plenty that production and quality of life are constantly improving for Oceania’s citizens. Winston’s trip to the cafeteria at his workplace, for instance, includes his “regulation lunch—a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.” Yum.

We’re accustomed to using the adjective “Orwellian” to describe authoritarian government crackdowns (including language and thought policing, the erasure of due process, etc.), but one of the things that struck me about 1984, early on, was how much of this state oppression was driven by technology.

The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely….You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Writing in the 1940s, Orwell certainly could not have imagined a world where we’d carry the telescreens around with us or that privacy violation would become the billion dollar industry that it has. But his novel portrays the misery of life in the panopticon, where any claims to privacy have been ground out of the populace in the name of security, capital, or both.

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Winston chafes at the world that the Party has wrought, and Part II of the book narrates his relationships with Julia, as well as Mr. Charrington and later O’Brien, the latter two whose job it is to draw out folks like Winston (and later disappear, torture, and break them—in the Ministry of Love, of course). A healthy chunk of Part II is taken up with Winston’s reading of parts of “Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” which confirms Winston’s beliefs about the deep flaws and logical inconsistencies at the heart of Oceania. And shortly after he pauses in his reading, he and Julia are taken by the Thought Police. Part III details his stay and eventual release from the Ministry of Love, where we are treated to O’Brien’s MirrorWorld account of the Goldstein manuscript, the uncensored expression of the Party’s perspective.

I mentioned above that Purdy talked about Orwell’s ambivalence. In 1984, Oceania grows out of IngSoc or English Socialism, but totalitarianism in Orwell’s time had its apologists across the left-right spectrum, and he also notes “monopoly and bureaucracy” as the enemies of intellectual liberty. One of the things that became clear to me as I read the book was that, for Orwell, the kind of totalitarianism he’s warning of isn’t restricted to left or right as we understand them today. While I personally believe that many on the right treat 1984 more as playbook than warning, it’s a mistake to imagine that the tendencies it reveals are restricted to one party or segment of the political spectrum. And that comes across in that final portion of the book, where O’Brien explains to Winston how the Party operates.

‘The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.’ [O’Brien] paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’

Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.

‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.’

I could run a long list of our current regime’s decisions and executive orders here, most of which are not about achieving particular political ends at all. They’re about power, plain and simple, and the pain, humiliation, and cruelty is quite literally the point. Whether it’s gutting organizations that support medical research, provide food safety, protect the environment, preserve the culture, fight global (and national) hunger and poverty, provide disaster relief, or subsidize health care, the thrashing chaos of the current administration has no goal outside of making others suffer. (And far too much of our political discourse over the past decade has decayed to the point of saying this quiet part out loud.) When I was first planning this post, and reading Orwell’s book, I thought seriously about writing it as an extended summary densely linking to the vast number of executive orders from the past three months that seem Oceanic in origin.

By the time I reached the end, though, I felt like the problem was actually bigger than a single regime (no matter how repugnant I find it). The horror of 1984, which too many of us have forgotten, is captured by O’Brien later on in that same scene:

‘But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.’

One way of understanding our “present political chaos” is that we’re a nation of “human faces” who have ceded our power, culture, and economy over to a handful of boots. Instead of objecting to the dynamic itself, a disturbing number of us seem to hold out hope that we ourselves can become the boot, the people doing the stamping. That’s not how we’d necessarily put it—we’ve got a lot of culture, from superhero movies to the influence lottery to the valorization of billionaires to artificial intelligence fantasies to dreams of passive income, that provide all sorts of rationalizations. But they all boil down to the same, sad fact that we’ve Stockholmed ourselves into that “picture” that Orwell was trying to warn us about nearly 80 years ago now. And we’ve made it (impossibly?) difficult to get ourselves free of it.

This isn’t the happiest place to end this long-overdue installment, but it captures my own arc pretty accurately. I traveled back to Orwell to find evidence of (or at least resonances with) how badly things are going right now, and returned with the conviction that what we really need is a better picture of the future than the one O’Brien offers to us. Coincidentally, I was reading a high-profile example of that genre while I was visiting Orwell, so I’ll probably talk about that next. (And sooner rather than later.)

1. There is, of course, far more to these “tariffs” than describing their announcement as some sort of national holiday. Writing for the American Prospect, David Dayen explains that they’re not tariffs but rather sanctions; Paul Krugman describes the entire process as malignant stupidity; Noah Smith characterizes them as an act of intentional self-harm. Hamilton Nolan’s explanation is also worth reading: ultimately, this is less about Liberation Day and more about how we’ve allowed our country to arrive at the point where this was even conceivable, where we’ve handed our entire country over to a single person’s pathologies.

2. For what it’s worth, Orwell frames his essay on “Politics and the English Language” with the same argument: “one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”

3. They announced that same week that they were going after Christopher Krebs, a 1st-term Trump appointee who had the temerity to suggest that the 2020 election wasn’t rigged. There’s a dark irony in prefacing this memo with “The Federal Government has a constitutional duty and a moral responsibility to respect and promote the free speech rights of Americans.” See also Miles Taylor.

4. 出る釘は打たれる/deru kugi wa utareru