Monk

Goldstein relates how the long-revered egalitarian underpinnings of socialist ideology were being undermined in the twentieth century, and was being transformed into the narrow quest for absolute power, thus becoming a bastardized idea of socialism, and by the middle of the twentieth century, the final revolution was taking shape.

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The middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now, however, the concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not yet in positions of command, but merely hoped to be so before long. In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown. The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand. Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-worship, as it is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious air of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop. As usual, the High were to be turned out by the Middle, who would then become the High; but this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.

-- “1984” by George Orwell

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Let it be noted that this bastardization of socialist thought is central to Orwell’s perspective. He, himself, was a socialist, but the reason why he wrote so harshly of leftist politics and government, as manifested in “1984” and “Animal Farm”, is because he decried what he took to be a perversion of true socialist ideology. In part, he hoped to cure socialism from the totalitarian strains in which it became entangled.

After sporting themselves in bed, Winston goes back to the beginning of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book and begins to read aloud to Julia.

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Chapter 1

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

~~~

“Julia, are you awake?” said Winston.

“Yes, my love, I’m listening. Go on. It’s marvelous.”

He continued reading.

-- “1984” by George Orwell

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That little exchange between Julia and Winston has to be one of the funniest in the book, as no doubt many a reader has a hard time staying up through this dry, textbook prose, but perhaps we will find it more manageable by breaking it up into bite-size pieces. There is quite a bit in it that is rather sharp and tart.

Julia makes it to the love nest.

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She dumped her brown tool bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was more than a week since they have seen one another.

“I’ve got the book,” he said as they disentangled themselves.

“Oh, you’ve got it? Good,” she said without much interest, and almost immediately knelt down beside the oilstove to make the coffee.

They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull up the counterpane. [...] Julia had settled down on her side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He reached out for the book, which was lying on the floor, and sat up against the bedhead.

“We must read it,” he said. “You too. All members of the Brotherhood have to read it.”

“You read it,” she said with her eyes shut. “Read it aloud. That’s the best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go.”

-- “1984” by George Orwell

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They still have a few hours left in the day before they have to leave, and Winston props up the book and begins reading aloud for her. Julia is obviously more practical than intellectual, more sensual than curious

We get to come up for air from Goldstein’s book for a brief spell, and Orwell shares with us a reflective note on reading and the books we tend to favor, pointing out that thinkers and readers tended to fall into an echo chamber long before the Internet, and it perhaps has always been so. Birds of a feather and all of that.

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Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

-- “1984” by George Orwell

"You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that, and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion either. We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has an axe to grind, I feel the intellectual honesty and balanced judgment have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone's thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a 'case' with deliberate suppression of his opponent's point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends…. But is there no one who has both firm opinions and a balanced outlook? Actually there are plenty, but they are powerless. All power is in the hands of paranoiacs."

-- George Orwell

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. [...] The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word “war”, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be more accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. [...] This - although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense - is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.

-- “1984” by George Orwell

This summary paragraph closes chapter three of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book.

Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three superstates is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practiced. Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life - the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-story windows, and the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.

-- “1984” by George Orwell


What makes Orwell’s dystopian world particularly distinctive and even hauntingly claustrophobic is the complete control over thought, and hence reality, that the totalitarian state exercises. We see this most prominently in Winston’s role as a journalist for the Ministry of Truth in which history is constantly and comprehensively rewritten to fit the present dictates of Big Brother. More generally, though, we should appreciate that this total control applies not only to history but to all knowledge, and even to what can possibly be said, as evinced through the development of Newspeak, cutting away the language to a bare minimum to support Party needs and nothing more. We will see the nature of this radical twisting of reality brought out more clearly in the upcoming torture scene.

In today’s installment from Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, we see the basic social infrastructure that makes this kind of thought-control possible. It seems to depend on a strangely maintained stagnancy. First, there is the stability that comes from the supposed inability of any of the three superstates to conquer another, and then there is the forced scarcity that makes technological progress expendable. Cut off from the pressures of competition and material progress, the totalitarian government is able to effect a comprehensive and perfect cocoon around the minds of the citizens.

This is obviously unrealistic. Despite the best efforts of totalitarians, even if they wished to use “1984” as a blueprint, reality is simply too dynamic to be held in check by any government. Nevertheless, one has to respect Orwell’s authorial choices, as he creates a chilling dystopian world that fascinates the imagination, and whatever this vision may lack in reality, it perhaps makes up for in its vivid presentation of what is the ultimate goal of a totalitarian government, the radical reduction of humanity to the needs of the government to maintain its power.

“Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.”

-- George Orwell

The quote comes from an essay titled "Such, Such Were the Joys", which apparently was about his school days, and so might be taken as testimony about school life rather than life in total, but maybe not. It does feel right, anent life in general, except for the use of the word 'deserved', which suggest a moral stamp that may not be appropriate. Shit just happens, or maybe that's just the everlasting loser in me talking.

The article is about Orwell's diary, and we will take down the closing section, in which we see Orwell's apparent disdain for his fellow upperclassmen, with an early invocation of the '99%' slogan.


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In the end, who was George Orwell? With the embellishment stripped bare, the diaries present a nastier, more easily irritated side of the man. From the pages of the Daily Telegraph he would read a letter from a Lady Oxford who complained that the war has forced “most people” to part with their cooks. “Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist,” Orwell wrote. No wonder he chose to live so often with those in poverty—true, he was scouting for material, but he also seemed to have truly preferred their company over the social elites, whom he wished would disappear, not quite acknowledging that such vicious classism nudges him rather closer to Stalin, Mao, and some of his other favorite villains.

In January of 1949 he was admitted to Cranham Sanatorium for tuberculosis, and was still there on April 17, when he wrote about being uncomfortable in the most expensive block of the hospital and hearing the voices of upper-class English visitors:


A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a sort of heaviness and richness combined with a fundamental ill-will—people who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful. No wonder everyone hates us so.


So goes the last entry in Diaries. Orwell died of a massive hemorrhage of the lungs in the early hours of January 21, 1950. On his headstone is inscribed a simple, ineradicable fact: “Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair.”

-- Jimmy So at The Daily Beast

The BBC received a proposal to have a statue of Geoge Orwell on its property, but they reportedly declined on the grounds that he was "too left-wing". Wow, how stupid, not to lay some claim on the great name! Orwell had done some of his journalism at the BBC during World War Two. It is even said that Room 101 in the novel "1984" was inspired by a conference room at the facility. I wonder if that might have had something to do with their negative response, hmmm.

(Source: Anita Singh at The Telegraph)

In today’s installment from Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, we get a sort of cross-cultural study of the three superstates, and I suppose the lesson we should draw is that there just is no escape.

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[T]he conditions of life in all three superstates are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all.

-- “1984” by George Orwell