Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  1. Ignorance Is Strength

  Among all the Party’s lies there is one great truth: Strength in numbers. To survive a war a nation must be united. Patriotism—blind patriotism—is the single most important source of national power. As a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. What is critical is emotional unity, a people’s tendency to feel alike and act together, at least in moments of supreme crisis. The nation must he bound together by an invisible chain. It must have its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it must close its ranks. The whole nation must swing together and do the same thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf, prepared for swift, unanimous action, in perfect unison.

  War is unique, but the need for unity is not. All great achievements of human civilization are creations of communities. A man with a woman, a child with his parents, a family among neighbors—all are stronger because they are together. Numbers are the strength of the town market. The community is the spirit of the church. Industrialism requires coordinated control. Philosophers, writers, and artists not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. The best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals. For any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about—survival, which is entirely an index to majority opinion. Language itself is a creation of common experience, and beauty of any kind is meaningless until it is shared. Science, the pinnacle of peaceful civilization, exists only in the collective consciousness of a self-disciplined community. The Party is right about this at least: In science, truth is indeed statistical.

  Sanity is not. A man may be alone in holding a great belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic need not greatly trouble him. The horror is that the belief might also be wrong. Like salvation, like charity, like love, sanity survives or perishes inside the individual brain. All scientific truths are statistical. Not all statisticians are truthful.

  And it is on individual sanity that all else depends. The market is no more robust than its individual farmers and craftsmen, the culture no more creative than its solitary artist, the Army no more courageous than the soldier at the front line. Great prose must be written in solitude. Science, above all, depends on solitary observation and the flash of insight within a few cubic centimeters of a single human skull.

  Whom then shall we trust: The individual for his sanity, or the community for its numbers? What shall it be: the Darwinian horrors of unfettered competition, or a dedicated sect of central planners serving as eternal guardians of the weak? A city teeming with police patrols, or a city in which every armed citizen is a police force of one? Autocrats, who govern everything, or Anarchists, who govern nothing? The Communist’s centralism and cutthroat efficiency, or the Anarchist’s liberty and cutthroat equality? The single-minded unity essential to a nation in times of war, or the suicidal herd instinct of the Gadarene swine in times of peace?

  O’Brien wiped his eyes and turned away from the book. It was appalling how Smith’s diary had been found. With all the telescreens, with the whole gigantic array of the network behind them, it had taken the frumpish wife of Blair’s neighbor to spot the book and mention it in all innocence to her half-wit husband. And then, instead of bringing the diary straight to O’Brien, the idiots from his own Ministry had gone out and beaten Blair to a pulp. Granted, it was standard procedure to soften up a thought criminal before an arrest, so that he might then run to friends for help. A whole gang of saboteurs could often be rounded up this way. But there was no use in beating a man so hard he could barely be lifted off the street by a passing whore. With an exasperated grunt O’Brien turned back to the diary.

  Until recently, collectivist oligarchy or something much like it was stronger than any of the alternatives. The successful state was a beehive, a world of rabbits ruled by a handful of stoats. People needed a king to promote stability and act as a sort of keystone. The real power, of course, belonged to unprepossessing men in bowler hats: the creature who rode in a gilded coach behind soldiers in steel breastplates was really a waxwork, a ventriloquist’s dummy. But he was also the voice of the nation, and a nation needed a single voice. Government by Big Brother was not only inevitable but desirable: inequality was the price of civilization. People gained more by anointing a king than they lost by submitting to his will. They were capable of wonderfully coordinated action, but only because they submitted absolutely to the will of their rulers. They lost their freedom, but they gained unity. No other social arrangement was as powerful. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation.

  In the countries that now comprise Oceania, the great autocracies eventually gave way to commercial oligopolies. At first, the new social structures were not very different from the old. Small businesses proliferated but then quickly merged into large ones; and great monopoly companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. The giant corporation became a big brotherhood in itself, a homogeneous community dominated by a single, all-powerful leader, whose commands were followed unquestioningly by obedient drones. The clerks and typists, looking so unpleasantly like ants, streamed over London Bridge at the rush hour every morning, into their steel and concrete nests. They were employed by collectivist commercial autocracies. These organizations inspired their workers with a drumbeat of simple slogans. They demanded uniformity of attire, appearance, habit, locution, and culture. Yet in their time, the great corporations proved stronger than what had come before. They eventually reached their apex in what we now call Eastasia—in the culture known by a Chinese word that translates roughly as “Obliteration of the Self.”

  The old autocracies all thrived because they solved a single, critical problem: how to unite and coordinate many people across time and space. The only really effective systems of memory and communication existed within a single human skull, or in small hermetic councils with access to central repositories of vital records; communication among larger, more dispersed groups was too slow and unreliable. So mankind turned to kings, oligarchs, or plutocratic captains of industry, and lodged all important thought in a single dominant city or palace, a single citadel, a single executive suite, often a single human brain. All superfluous communication was avoided because it was just too inefficient. The masses were not to question, negotiate, or respond; they were to follow orders. Industrialism meant oligarchical collectivism. The only practical alternatives were slave-state socialism and slave-state fascism, which were in fact identical.

  The slave state remains the essence of Party rule. The slavery is not physical, of course—machines now do most of the menial work—the slavery is of the mind. What is required of the individual is utter submission, escape from his own identity, and complete submergence in the Party. The individual’s ignorance is the Party’s strength. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

  O’Brien’s thoughts turned back to the engineer in the pub.

  “ ’Cos the screens worked,” the man had said. What could he possibly have meant? At first, O’Brien hesitated even to crystallize the thought in his own mind. He began reading again.

  The Party’s pursuit of ignorance began in schools, which were staffed by loyal Party drones. We inculcated in our children a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world without good or evil, where the rules were such that it is actually not possible to keep them. We taught history as a series of unrelated and unintelligible facts. Our universities studied the oral traditions of lesbian headhunters in New Guinea, not the great classics on human freedom. Whatever students did—whether they laughed or sniveled or went into frenzies of gratitude for small favors—their only true feeling was hatred.

  At all levels, our educational system neglected mathematics and did not teach science in any form. Empirical thought was opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. For Party purposes the earth was the center of t
he universe. The Party conceded that to navigate the ocean it was often convenient to assume that the earth went round the sun, but Party mathematicians and astronomers were quite capable of producing a dual system of astronomy. Outside our steadily shrinking scientific communities, all talk of science disappeared.

  By cutting off memory, the Party halted the accumulation of knowledge. By cutting off communication, the Party prevented its spread. To that end, the Party limited travel, outlawed private meetings, suppressed love, and condemned sex. Instead, it filled the air with official sights and sounds: mass rallies, posters, lectures, and the ceaseless jabber from the telescreens, so as to crowd out every competing private thought or communication.

  To crown it all, the Party had Newspeak. Newspeak served Party purposes perfectly By stripping the English language of its subtle texture and richness, the Party deprived people of their power to think and communicate. By controlling language and all ancillary means of communication, the Party controlled the ends.

  But now there is the telescreen.

  O’Brien looked up from the book. He found himself thinking again that he knew what was coming next: a sort of anarchistic Utopia, another tired exhibition of machine worship in its most vulgar, ignorant, and half-baked form. The individual will be set free from the sordid necessity of living for others. There will be no want and no insecurity, no drudgery, no disease, no ugliness, no wastage of the human spirit in futile enmities and rivalries. There will be no disorder, no loose ends, no wildernesses, no wild animals, no weeds, no poverty, no pain—and so on and so forth. The telescreened world will be above all things an ordered world, an efficient world. Telescreens to save work, telescreens to save thought, telescreens to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organization, more telescreens.

  It would never happen. The people at the Ministry, even idiots like Burgess, still knew how to make the network serve the Party’s will. The proles weren’t interested in telescreens. With a steady diet of indifferent food, sex, and violence, the proles wanted nothing more. Only the elite of the Inner Party understood the pursuit of power. Telescreens offered power only to those with the will to use it.

  O’Brien rose stiffly from his chair, dragged his vast bulk to the side table, and poured a glass of wine. Almost as an afterthought, he made his way over to the telescreen. “COMM-TWO-OFFICE,” he growled. And a few seconds later: “Cooper—double the guard around the Ministry.” He walked slowly back to his chair, sat down heavily, and turned back to the diary.

  But now there is the telescreen. When Orwell proposed the new machine the Party was ecstatic. Private life could now come to an end. For the first time in history, it would be possible to enforce not only complete obedience to the will of the State but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects. The tele-ocratic Ministry would be the Party’s new citadel and palace, its center of power. The telescreen would forge Party unity as no instrument of governance had ever forged unity before.

  But the Party was wrong about the telescreen. What fools you were! You, the technological determinists, you who maintained that technology was destiny, that machines made history, that all politics and economics revolved around the means of production! The Party, which believed in machines above all else, completely failed to understand the most revolutionary machine of all. The masters of doublethink neglected to doublethink the machine itself.

  The important medium of communication is no longer Oldspeak or Newspeak—it is Viewspeak, the telescreen. While you denuded the language of its adjectives and verbs, of its texture and color, Orwell filled the tunnels with a new power of expression richer than ever before imagined. While you destroyed hundreds of words, Orwell created millions of pictures.

  You idiots! You fantasized that with boundless power to communicate, you could somehow end all communication. You dreamed that if the Party could watch, listen, and connect with everyone all the time, no one else would be able to watch, listen, or connect at all. But the telescreen Orwell designed was not imprinted with your faith in oligarchical collectivism. It couldn’t have been; it wouldn’t have worked if it had.

  The Party understood that telescreens could connect the Ministries to the people. But it failed to grasp that telescreens could equally well connect people to each other, to form new communities, new alliances, new collaborations of every kind outside the Ministry The telescreen contains the power to forge a new kind of brotherhood, an equal dignity among people who choose freely to collaborate among themselves.

  With the telescreen in hand, mankind has finally solved the age-old problem of human isolation. We have reached a time when thought can be free, and when men can be different from one another and yet still not live alone. The tenet is wrong which says that a man is the quotient of one million divided by one million. The telescreen creates an altogether new kind of arithmetic based on multiplication: on the joining of a million individuals to form a new entity which, no longer an amorphous mass, will develop an individuality of its own, a consciousness increased a millionfold, in unlimited yet self-contained space. Strength no longer requires ignorance. For the first time in history, it is possible to have brotherhood without Big Brother.

  O’Brien felt a cold sweat start out on his backbone. For a moment he was afraid—afraid that something was about to break. For some wild reason, his fear at that instant was that it would be his own spine. With a sense of growing panic he turned to the next page of the diary.

  Party texts recognized four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows another strong and discontented group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself. This is why the Party’s paramount mission is to suppress the growth of liberalism and skepticism in its own ranks. This is why we have the Thought Police. But in a telescreened world, the Party is doomed.

  You can still be conquered from outside. You have easily averted slow demographic changes in our society, but alien cultures no longer invade by land or sea—they invade through the ether. You have persuaded yourselves that your natural defenses are too formidable, that Eurasia will be forever protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. But land masses and oceans are irrelevant; the images on a telescreen can circle the globe in one-seventh of a second. Fecundity is irrelevant; telescreen signals can reach any number of people. What is relevant now is not the power of a Party but the power of the ideas that unite a nation. With the telescreen, no Party state is safe from attack by a new way of thinking.

  The second danger is graver still. So long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, the masses may remain unaware that they are oppressed. But the telescreen, like a telescope, exposes what otherwise would not be seen. Before the telescope, people might believe that Mars, like Earth, had artificial canals, or that every celestial body revolved around our planet, but after the telescope they could not. A telescreen is a gigantic telescope that allows men to see other men. It supplies standards of comparison. And like a telescope, it builds memory. A telescope peers into the past, even into man’s own past, when light that left the earth a million years ago is bent back on its own path by a massive object in the great nebula in Orion. Like Orion, the telescreen creates memory by dispersing and reflecting information. It builds collective memory

  And it compels us to learn. With the telescreen, the masses will discover that the lottery is a fraud, and understand that members of the Inner Party live vastly better than they do. With the telescreen, oppression will inevitably have political consequences, because discontent can now become articulate.

  The third threat to Party rule is that a strong and discontented group will arise from the lower ranks of the bureaucrats, s
cientists, technicians, trade union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. The Party has made these groups the targets of all its indoctrination, all its relentless propaganda. But with the telescreen, political alliances can be as fluid and changeable as pictures in a glass bottle. Now the voice and visage of any rebellious member of the Outer Party can travel as far and wide as Big Brother himself.

  The last threat to the Party comes from within. The strength of the Party is determined ultimately by its mental attitude. The Party dies when its members lose their self-confidence and willingness to govern. Today, the Party’s confidence depends on the telescreen, the machine that allows you to see all, hear all, and reach everywhere. But your confidence will not last; sooner or later you will recognize that the masters of doublethink cannot also be the masters of telescreens. Orwell’s network cannot be maintained by people committed to mental cheating. You may assert that black is white, but no act of antiscientific will can make a color picture materialize on a screen. You may deny the existence of objective reality, but you cannot master reality without facing it squarely every hour of the day.

  The essence of Party rule is doublethink, the linking together of opposites. The essence of the telescreen is the linking together of identities: one telescreen displays exactly what another views, and does so with perfect fidelity. If telescreens function at all, they function truthfully. Science itself depends on singlethink—pure, rigorous, incorruptible. Science is singlethink. Without singlethinkers, there will be no telescreen. With singlethinkers, there will be no Party.

  Today, the Party no longer reads books. But sooner or later you will read this one. Your self-confidence will evaporate. The outside powers will not need to invade. The proles will not need to revolt. The new groups from within will not need to grow strong. Once you recognize you have lost control of communication in your society, the Party will collapse in an instant.