1984 – Big Brother is Watching…

George Orwell’s 1984 was published in 1949.  In about 1973 I read this dystopian vision as a required ninth grade book.  I was somewhat convinced that this was a prophecy that could still come true.  It felt like the clock was ticking – but I also wondered what would happen to the book after we passed the date?  Would it fall out of favor?  Would people breathe a sigh of relief and move on?  Reading it in 2019, when it is still referenced, I am finding out a lot about my earlier self, the immediate post-war political scene, and something about the way that humans are built – and I’m learning something about our current culture.

By borrowing the book from the reluctant son, I also learned something about him - he read it two years ago as a required book when he was a senior in high school.  Inside, he had created his own depiction of Big Brother, which I have included below.

First, my ninth grade self.  It is interesting what I remember – also, I think, what I didn’t get or couldn’t understand.  They say that Shakespeare is wasted on young people – and sometimes I don’t think I’ll live long enough to get him, and I think I didn’t get one of the two big chunks of this book as a kid.  I don’t think I understood the political aspect – which is weird because I think it is the easier – and more problematic part of the book.  I think that I focused more on the psychological chunk.

Oh, I got it that there were three mega-countries that were always at war with each other.  And that war was a way of maintaining a perpetual state of ennui as well as siphoning off the resources that could have gone to improving the lives of the citizens.  And this part seems quite modern- prescient even.  Aren’t we always at war and doesn’t the arms buildup under republican administrations create deficits that prevent democratic administrations from putting social service programs into place?  But the standard of living that we enjoy is way beyond anything depicted in 1984.

What I didn’t get is that Orwell conceived of the world as having classes of people and that these classes were essentially different groups with essentially different capabilities and motivational systems.  Not sure how I missed this – it’s there in black and white – but the ruling class is really the only group that has feelings and thoughts that are worth managing and confronting.  This class, in turn, was divided in two.  The top tier - 2% of the population - really ran things.  The next tier - 18% or so the population - did their bidding as the white collar workers of the world, making the paper flow that kept things running.  Now I think 1984’s culture is, at least marginally, a meritocracy – people have to pass some kind of aptitude test to make it into the ruling class – where they will be watched and broken down – all while doing meaningless work – some reward for their ability to do well on tests.  But the utter dismissal of the proles – the working class – was a shock to me.

On some level it shouldn’t have been.  The working class has largely been dismissed by the British class system and Orwell is writing about his own Britain as he imagines it into the future.  I think he is also wrestling with the fascination with fascists that led to Russia, Germany, and Italy falling under the sway of totalitarian dictators who were supported by, from his position, unthinking masses.  I think there is a similar concern about the current move towards nationalism that is occurring around the world.  I also think, though, that we do a disservice to people when we dismiss them as a class.  Over time, I think they will reassert themselves and we will discover their humanity.  I would that Orwell had been able to do that, though I think it would have made this book infinitely more complex and we might have lost the central and most compelling part of it – Orwell’s psychology of oppression.  If, for a moment, we dismiss the proles as irrelevant, and see the struggle between the top two classes, with Winston Smith, the hero of the story, belonging to the relatively privileged but outer ring, we may get a better sense of that oppression.

I remember vividly room 101 and I even remembered what it held for Winston.  I was most appalled that it held what he feared – but that thing, as far as I could tell, was not something that he had ever uttered as a fear.  Big Brother – who is embodied in all those people working for state – but especially the ministry of Love – was able to watch the citizens so closely that they knew them – perhaps even better than they knew themselves.  Big Brother could read people's thoughts - including the content of them.

OK, I’m going to jump ahead of myself here, because the watching of Big Brother is the aspect of this book that I think is called to mind when it is referred to in contemporary culture.  Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple have more facts about us – they are able to track us much more closely – than Big Brother could possibly have done.  It was possible to get away from him (and we can get away from our phones for minutes, sometimes even hours at a time).  But today, even more insidiously than being watched for our capitalistic value, the NSA can tap into the same networks and can follow our every move for governmental – Big Brotherly – motives, if we are really of that much interest to them.

In sixth grade, I had gone on a trip to Washington with the School Patrol, a now antiquated group of kids that were nominated by their teachers to protect other kids on the walk to school by holding flags out into the road to stop oncoming traffic while they crossed.  As a reward for this unpaid before and after school work, we took a train to D.C. and toured multiple sites – including the F.B.I. building.  The feds wanted to finger print us.  I refused to be finger printed.  What if I wanted to commit a crime some day?

I think that modern surveillance (not to mention DNA evidence) is likely having a huge impact on criminal convictions and therefore on criminal behavior.  If home video systems become ubiquitous, what will happen to the rate of robberies?  Alibis are hard to create when your phone puts you at the scene of the crime and a security camera has a picture of you as well.  And the criminal world of 1984 has nothing to do with burglaries or even murders.  It has to do with thoughtcrime.  Thinking things that aren’t allowed.  And that these crimes can be observed and so must be guarded against so that we become incredibly unfree in our actions - we must do the best we can to hide what we are thinking and feeling - is what is truly terrifying about 1984.

If I was terrified that I would not have the freedom to commit a crime some day, how much worse must it have been to think that my thoughts could be crimes?  Now, this has gone on for a long time, of course.  The Christian tradition has focused on sins of “thought, word and deed” and we certainly feel guilty for craven thoughts that we have.  But there is a sense of inevitability to them.  We will sin, and we will repent.  In 1984, we will cease to have these thoughts entirely - they are too dangerous and repentance is not acceptable - the only thing that is acceptable is believing what we don't believe.

I know that I did not get that this book suggests that we could be shaped, or bent, or warped into having only thoughts that were approved of – and that we could be changed from being essentially recalcitrant to pliable extensions of the state’s wish and, indeed, need to be served.  I didn’t understand that this was what Big Brother expected and what Winston – our hero who, despite all the danger – who dared to do what was forbidden - ultimately caved to.

There are two tools that Orwell proposed could facilitate this.  The first tool was torture.  This is a clumsy and complicated tool – complicated in ways that I will explain in a moment.  The second tool is language.  If you can control language, Orwell implicitly maintains, you can control thought.  Until language is perfected, however, which will take a while – and I think he leaves open the possibility that it might never happen - torture is the tool that is available to you.

The State (Big Brother) wants your allegiance.  The greatest thoughtcrime that you can commit, then, is to love anything other than the state.  On the periphery in the plot are the ways in which the state destroys the bonds between parents and children – primarily by making the children the agents of the state who are even more keenly able to discover the ways that the parents – including by loving the children – betray the state – and the state - and even the parents - support the kids turning their parents over when this happens.

I think this is a weak link in the argument.  I think that Orwell doesn’t get the attachment between a parent and a child – and vice versa.  I find myself wondering if he, like our own John Bowlby who wrote about children’s attachment, was packed off to boarding school at six years of age (A quick search reveals that he didn’t go to boarding school until he was nine – and that his one child was adopted and never very close to his father, especially after Orwell’s wife died early in the child’s life – after which the child was raised by Orwell’s sister.  More surprisingly, Orwell spent a great deal of time researching, living with, and writing about the proletariat – especially the miners of England.  How could he dismiss them as a class?  But we have left that topic…).

More convincingly, Orwell writes about romantic love as a threat to the state.  Winston’s love for Julia, which is a vividly described romantic interlude (he is officially married to a woman he hasn’t seen in years) ends when they are discovered by the thought police.  Throughout the period of being tortured by the thought police, he does not betray his love for Julia, despite truly horrific conditions that change his appearance and standing as a human being.  It is his experience in room 101 that breaks him of this attachment and leads him to become a docile lover of Big Brother.

This horrifying aspect of the book is something that I don’t remember.  I don’t know if, as Freud might suggest, I have repressed it because it was so traumatic, but my gut feeling is that I just didn’t get it.  I think I was overwhelmed by the time I got to that point in the book and I was more enthralled by the mechanics of room 101 and the ability of the police to infer what one’s greatest fear was so that I completely missed the central point – that in the face of our greatest fear we are willing to sell ourselves out and become a shell of who we were - to become subjects of the state instead of individuals with our own subjectivity.

Perhaps I didn’t get it because, on some very deep level, I didn’t buy it.  I don’t buy it now.  That’s not to say that this wouldn’t happen – and that I wouldn’t sell out what is most dear to me to avoid that which I fear the most (and if you think I’m going to tell you what my biggest fear is, you have another think coming!).  But I think that I want to deny that can be destroyed in this way.  Ultimately I think we are more likely to be coerced, as Winston was, and, indeed, the entire population was, into a surface compliance with the culture.

Part of the implicit concern that Orwell expresses about the potential to keep the population under control is expressed in the relationship between Winston and his torturer – O’Brien.  O’Brien is one of the inner circle – one of the 2%.  Winston catches his eye and realizes – knows in his bones – that O’Brien is committing thoughtcrimes.  On the one hand, and this is never discussed, O’Brien could be advertising that - pretending that he is a thoughtcriminal - to catch those who are committing thoughtcrimes.  But I think O’Brien, who might be masquerading as one committing thoughtcrimes, actually is a thoughtcriminal – and must of necessity be one in his work as a torturer.  He has to understand the minds of those he catches and tortures and he has to think like them in order to torture those thoughts out of them.  The state both is and is not solid in its denial of the reality of the world.

Winston’s day job is to rewrite history on a daily basis as the facts of the present dictate changes to what has occurred before.  If the ministry of plenty has forecast something that doesn’t come to pass, the history of what was forecast has to be rewritten.  O’Brien knows – in fact he educates Winston – in the history of what has happened.  Through torture he teaches Winston doublethink – to both know and not know something at the same time and to choose to believe in that which didn’t happen.  To willfully repress, if you will.

This is a complex and inefficient system of controlling people’s minds.  It is also fraught with difficulty.  The O’Briens of the world have to be kept happy lest they swing to the dark side, a side that they are constantly in contact with.  The long term plan is to subject the people through changing language.  If there aren’t words to express ideas and feelings, those ideas and feelings can’t exist is the underlying logic of this process.

Orwell loves words.  He uses words in this book that I had never heard.  He describes Winston, when he steals out of London to be with Julia in the countryside, as etiolated – a word that is used to describe asparagus and celery when they are kept from sunlight and become unnaturally white.  And he creates words – thoughtcrime is one, but doublespeak, another, is accepted by my spellchecker as an English language word. 

Psychoanalysis is essentially a linguistic undertaking.  It is reliant on the ways in which the associations between ideas - but frequently between words - betrays layers of meaning - helping the Big Brother analyst help the analysand appreciate that he or she has engaged in a pun that has meaning.  To simplify language would be to take away an essential tool that is useful when people are collaboratively engaged in understanding the complicated workings of one's own mind.

The language Orwell, the lover of language, crafts is one that removes excess words.  There should be only one word where there are now two, or three or four.  And these words should not allow for the exquisite ability to – and here’s the question – articulate our thoughts and feelings – to put them into words – as opposed to our words producing our thoughts and feelings.  I think that Orwell imagines the latter – but I think, in fact, that we may not be able to realize fine differences and shades of meaning in thoughts and feelings until we can name them – but I don’t that prevents us from being able to distinguish, for instance, between teal and turquoise.  If we only had blue, we would still perceive a difference – and we would use adjectives – something that the language of totalitarianism would limit.  But I think that we are hardwired to make these distinctions and therefore, I hope, to overthrow the limits that totalitarianism would impose on us.  I think we have created language to express our feelings - not that language has evolved as our feelings have (though, actually, likely both have happened).

I think Orwell is in agreement with my reservation about his system.  Even though the ciphers are working on the twelfth edition of the dictionary, the language is not in broad use, even among those in the inner circle.  I think that Orwell realizes – as much as he wants to warn us – that what he is proposing is a violent suppression of the human condition.  In the afterward to the reluctant son's edition, written by Erich Fromm, who has written a great deal about our ambivalent relationship to freedom, Fromm makes the point that we feel freedom to be a burden and can be pulled towards the relief of being free from freedom, as it were.  He is applying what he, as an analyst realizes – that people, when asked to freely associate, resist that.  We want to know what to say – and perhaps even more fundamentally what to think and what to feel.  When we are not told this, we feel unease.  Orwell presents a vision of a world in which we are deprived of that unease – and it is replaced by terror.  Better the devil you know….

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.