"Orwellian"...I do not think it means what you think it means. [View all]

[True Blue Door]

Warning: A pompous, long-winded, rambling exposition on abstract literary themes follows.

Pop quiz: What is the single most prominent cautionary theme in George Orwell's "1984"?

If you consume pop culture, news media, and have had a political conversation in the past few decades, you might easily say "The danger of a surveillance state." After all, you only ever hear the word "Orwellian" used to describe surveillance. In which case you would be totally, hopelessly wrong.

Saying that "1984" is a warning about surveillance would be like saying that "Dune" is a warning about sand: It's just part of the background setting, not the core concept of the literature. In fact, Orwell makes it painfully obvious what his novel is about: The corruption of language in service to power, particularly the direct inversion of meanings, perceptions, and thoughts under the coercion of fear.

Calling a pacifist political protester a "terrorist" is Orwellian. Using networked cameras to spy on them and collect information in a thousand different ways is just dickish and sinister, perhaps "Kafkaesque." And the former is a lot more dangerous and monstrous than the latter because it attacks the very foundations of human morality - basic respect for the truth and for the independent existence of reality beyond power.

The novel's antagonist, O'Brien, describes this in a long and demonic diatribe explaining that there is no truth or morality outside the will of power, and power is merely the capacity and will to destroy and inflict pain. By this thinking he can "magically" make 2 + 2 = 5 by inspiring such terror in his torture victims that they sincerely believe whatever they're told, even if it's a logical contradiction.

This concept of Orwell's - his definition of power as resting fundamentally in conscious Absolute Lies and Satanic moral inversions - is still so radical that it's not actually surprising that culture even today hasn't managed to digest it, and instead focuses on superficial trivia in the book. One might even see something unconsciously malevolent in the evasion, since it's heavily promoted in politics that "Orwellian" has something to do with surveillance rather than being about lies and torture. And the deflection is illustrated in the relative intensity of activism opposed to the NSA vs. things like police violence, racial profiling, torturous prisons, etc. etc. It's a distortion of priorities and understanding of where the everyday assaults on freedom come from.

Of course an Orwellian state uses pervasive surveillance, but the explicit technology is pretty much irrelevant: The Byzantine Empire was an Orwellian state a thousand years before the existence of any surveillance technology more advanced than networks of paid informants. The science of human degradation was taken to absurd extremes in many eras of this kingdom, even by Dark Age standards - torture was considered an exalted profession that could "correct" internal flaws in belief, not merely be used as a punishment or method of extracting information. Meanwhile, Britain - panopticon of thoroughly networked cameras and a totally unaccountable police state behind them - is, to all accounts, still a relatively pleasant and free place to live, just beset with crooks in uniforms lurking in the bushes as it were.

We can somewhat just hand-wave the distinction as the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism - one being the petty, ordinary police state tactics of pervasive surveillance and arbitrary enforcement, and the other being rooted in Orwellianism as described (or what the book calls "doublethink" - oscillating between mutually exclusive views of reality depending on which is convenient to power at any given moment). One can easily crop up through entropy and institutional decay (it's always easier to just increase the numerical density of information than to increase the intelligence with which information is processed), but the other requires sustained, malicious effort by a radical and hate-driven political agenda.

That was something I first noticed about George W. Bush when he came to (read: seized) power - he inverted the plain meanings of words. I don't just mean he abused them or used them in corrupt ways - I mean he used them to mean their perfect opposites. The same was with Rupert Murdoch's media empire behind him, most obviously Fox News. In "1984," the motto of the totalitarian state is "War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom. Ignorance is Strength."

This was literally the ideological basis of Bush's extra-legal shadow state, pieces of which continue under more rationalized and (speciously) legalistic terms. But in the Bush era itself, there were no laws - he (or more often Cheney) spoke, and the instruments of power obeyed, and anyone in the government who didn't obey and couldn't be fired was simply ignored and/or savaged in the monolithic media.

Which isn't to say there were no limits to the power of that "constitutional interregnum state" 2001-2009, but all limits were practical in nature rather than based on laws or human moral principles: If they couldn't force people to obey something, most often they just didn't try. But if they could, no written law, international treaty, or post-WW2 human rights principle written in stone would stop them, and they would rub it in the faces of the world, O'Brien-style, that they wielded this power and no one could stop them. They took clear pleasure in the telling of bald-faced lies that no one subordinate to their media organs would dare challenge, just to wallow in the impunity of it. Most of us recall that sneering loon who gleefully ridiculed the weakness of Democrats for our "reality-based politics" - a concept they all made clear they considered nonsensical and beneath contempt. That was Orwellian.

The old bully refrain of "Quit hittin' yerself" is Orwellian. The Putin regime taking perverse, Lynchian pleasure in making up the most preposterous stories imaginable for its naked crimes is Orwellian (thousands of Russian soldiers in tanks took a vacation into Eastern Ukraine and accidentally massacred Ukrainian troops and civilians, took over their territory, and are holding that territory for, uh, environmental reasons, har-har). The Kremlin's position that every scrap of land on Earth with a single Russian speaker on it is sovereign Russian territory because Dear Leader says so, but people who fight back and elect leaders who don't do what the Kremlin says are "fascists"...Orwellian.

It's just a word, but it's a word with a powerful concept that arms freedom-loving people who understand it to resist tyrants who otherwise seem to wield magical mind-control powers over both their followers and enemies. An Orwellian person hijacks and mimics the system of communication that binds human beings together, uses it to divide, sow fear and dissension among their enemies, sabotage and sap the will to oppose them, and make their followers into zombies (or at least turn mindless jerks who are already zombies into a well-organized horde thereof). And an Orwellian state doesn't merely lie because it's convenient (that's pretty much all states) - it lies because the individuals in power are clinically psychotic and take personal pleasure in the act of lying, and do so even when it's counterproductive to their agenda.

Plus, you know, reading comprehension...it's annoying when people abuse literature.