Transcription
If you want to picture the future, imagine a boot stamping down on a human face forever. There are few books as famous and infamous as George Orwell's *1984*. It was banned in the US for being communist and in the USSR for being anti-communist. It is a biting critique of everything from authoritarianism to censorship to Plato, and it is one of the most frequently mentioned books by politicians across the globe.
The specter of Orwell's nightmare looms large over public consciousness and will do for many years to come. But for all of this significance, we rarely stop to examine Orwell's novel in depth. What is it that makes the villainous Party so destructive, and what makes living under their brutal regime so unbearable? Well, this is just what we will explore today. We will uncover Orwell's terrifying genius in designing a state that chips away at every layer of the human psyche, slithering through our innermost machinery and turning us into dull, manible slaves. Here, we'll learn how memory is key to personal identity, how power can reshape the definition of truth itself, and why helplessness is so important if you want to become a dictator. Of course, I'll be unable to cover every aspect of *1984* here because it's such a deep novel, so I do encourage you to read it for yourselves. And let's start with a brief recap of the story and world of *1984*, just so we're all on the same page going into our analysis. Spoilers ahead.
**1. *1984*: A Brief Synopsis**
George Orwell's novel opens on a dystopian totalitarian state named Oceania, comprising what used to be the British Empire and the United States. Our protagonist is Winston Smith, an employee and minor member of the Party, which is the government ruling Oceania, headed up by their messianic leader, Big Brother. Oceanian society is split into three strict classes: the Inner Party, who wield pretty much all the power; the Outer Party, about 13% of the population, who live under constant surveillance and carry out orders from above; and the Proles, the remaining 85% of the population, who are sharply policed and are kept ignorant of current affairs but largely left to their own devices, considered too stupid and uninformed to be a threat.
All Outer Party members are kept under watch by telescreens, digital devices that have cameras and microphones attached to them to survey their every move. Winston's job is at the Ministry of Truth, correcting records. Each day, he files into work and alters documents so they reflect what the government wants them to say. Of course, he's unable to admit to anyone else that this is, in fact, his job description. Funnily enough, this was probably partly inspired by Orwell's own experiences making propaganda during World War I, propaganda which included praise of Stalin.
In Oceania, one crime is treated more seriously than any other: thoughtcrime, that is, harboring treasonous ideas that would undermine the Party. There was no clear definition of thoughtcrime, and you could be hauled away by the Thought Police for such varied indiscretions as unsuitable facial expressions or sleep-talking. Winston, for his part, secretly harbors a deep hatred for the Party, and our story begins in earnest when he decides to write down his private thoughts in a secret journal, knowing that if this was ever found out, he was as good as dead.
Over time, Winston becomes acquainted with a young woman named Julia, and they begin an illicit affair. Julia is everything that Winston finds lacking in his own life. She is passionate, naturally rebellious against the Party, and irresistibly attractive to Winston. They slowly fall in love, and Winston rents a private room above a shop where they can meet and share stolen hours together without raising Party suspicions. In Oceania, unions between Party members without explicit permission were strictly forbidden, and sex and relationships in general were disparaged and looked down upon.
Meanwhile, Winston catches a suspicion that one of the members of the Inner Party, O'Brien, harbors similar rebellious sentiments to himself. One day, O'Brien asks Winston to visit him at his address under the pretense of providing him with a new government-issued language guide. Winston goes there, bringing Julia, and O'Brien reveals himself to be a member of the Brotherhood, a secret organization hell-bent on overthrowing Big Brother. They agree to join the rebellion on one condition: that they never be separated.
O'Brien arranges for Winston to be provided with the key text of the Brotherhood, which explains the inner workings of the Party and why it must be overthrown. This work describes numerous aspects of the totalitarian state, including how the country is kept in a perpetual state of war in order to waste resources and have the populace accept terrible hardship, all so they are kept more loyal and dependent on the Party.
Winston is reading this book to Julia in bed when all of a sudden, the Thought Police descend on their hiding spot. The owner of the shop from whom Winston was renting his room is revealed to be a member of the Thought Police all along, as is O'Brien, and both Winston and Julia are whisked away to the Ministry of Love, the ominous house of the Party's twisted justice system.
Winston is brutally tortured again and again by O'Brien, with the aim of breaking his spirit and remaking him in the image of the Party. O'Brien explains that external truth is a delusion held by the insane, since the Party has destroyed any evidence that doesn't parrot their narrative. The only reasonable thing to do is to believe that what they say is true. Any other perspective was woefully out of line with the evidence and reflected a flawed and outdated philosophy. O'Brien also reveals the Party's motives: it wants power for its own sake. In the same way a utilitarian places happiness as the end goal of all action, the Party places power as the supreme good of existence. O'Brien explains that they don't just want power over your behavior; they want power over your mind, and they will not rest until Winston's psyche is reshaped entirely.
Eventually, Winston is tormented to the extent that he truly believes anything O'Brien tells him, even affirming that 2 + 2 = 5 without question. But in his cell, he becomes agitated and, in a nervous fit, cries out for Julia. O'Brien realizes that Winston's heart is still his own, and so he takes him to Room 101 to face his ultimate fear. Winston has a terrible phobia of rats, and O'Brien hooks him up to a machine which will allow rats to eat his face unless he gives in. In his terror, Winston screams that O'Brien should do this to Julia instead, if only it would let him go free. O'Brien knows that at this moment, he has dominated Winston's entire soul, and so he lets him go.
We flash forward to see Winston sitting in a cafe, robbed of all feeling. He met up with Julia, but they both know that they've betrayed one another to the Party, or else they would not have been released, and so now they feel only faint disgust for one another, having nothing left to give his life meaning. Winston fully gives in to the Party ethos and has a quasi-religious experience, proclaiming in ecstasy that he loves Big Brother. It is one of the most depressing stories you could ever read, but it's also perhaps one of the richest in meaning.
Post-analysis focuses on the political themes of the novel, and we will, of course, cover those. But I also want to take a more personal approach. I want to show how every aspect of the state of Oceania is tailor-made to break the psychology of its citizens and turn their lives into a living hell, starting with how it distorts one of humanity's most precious abilities. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then consider subscribing to either my email list or my Patreon. The links are in the description.
**2. The Impersistence of Memory**
This might sound like an odd question, but what makes you, you? After all, your body regenerates most of its cells every seven years, yet you remain, in some way, the same person. How can this be so when no physical part of you is the same? Well, one of the most popular philosophical answers is that the continuity of our memories grants us our identity. The philosopher John Locke used to say that it is our interlocking chain of recollection, stretching far back into the past, that ties us to our previous selves. Without it, we would be UNM, floating in a continuous present with no stable personal identity.
So, it is telling that Orwell places so much emphasis on the way the Party undermines the memories of its citizens. Winston is in a constant state of questioning his own recollection of events because of his job at the Ministry of Truth. He is in a uniquely distressing epistemic situation. He knows what has actually happened; he's seen the old, unaltered record of events, but all the evidence of that truth has long been destroyed. So, he can only rely on his own scattered idea of the past.
Much of the first half of the book follows Winston's desperate attempts to find out what life in Oceania was like before the Party's rise to power. He questions one of the elderly Proles about this, but all he can remember are irrelevant details, and even that is hazy. Try as he might, Winston just cannot get an idea of either his history or the history of his society. He has some vague idea of who his mother and sister were before they were disappeared by Big Brother, but that too is a blur. He can't even be certain of what happened a single day in the past because the records of the Party are constantly being altered. Big Brother might deliver a speech, only for its contents to be changed on all official documentation the very next day. It was dangerous to even speak to a colleague about past events because they might say something that contradicted the Party line and be vaporized as a result—that is, arrested, tortured, killed, and wiped from all official records as if they had never existed (unperson).
All of this means that Winston and the rest of the populace live in a state of perpetual confusion. They see reality as if it's through a thick fog. They can't be sure if their memories are correct, or if they're slowly going mad, or, horror of all horrors, that the Party has made a mistake. It is gaslighting on a monumental scale, and it means no one can pin down a consistent idea of what is true.
Aristotle once famously claimed that if a proposition is true, it is true for all time. If "John went shopping on the 11th of March 1996" is true today, then it is true forever; no one can change it. But in the world of *1984*, such an idea is ridiculous. The past alters at the whim of the Party higher-ups, and since there's no one around to contradict them, their narrative wins by default. After all, we normally check what happened in the past by looking at the evidence, but all of the evidence here is centrally controlled. Hence, the Party saying, "Who controls the present controls the past."
But if we take John Locke's theory of identity seriously, then the situation is actually much worse than this. It is not just that Winston cannot make sense of the past; he can't even make sense of himself. His memories have to change along with Party policy. If he talked to someone yesterday who has since been unpersoned, then that recollection can only be maintained on pain of death. In Locke's terminology, he has, to a certain extent, become a different person. Worse still, he is constantly becoming different people each and every day. With each memory encroached upon by Big Brother, he loses a little sliver of his personal identity, sacrificing it at the altar of the state, only to have to do the same thing the next day, crafting new memories to replace the ones that are now criminal.
Of course, like almost everything else in the novel, this confusion is by design of the Party. If the populace can't even decide on the past, then they'll have no idea what to do about the future. They cannot even spot causal relationships in the world. The ability to observe trends, discover weaknesses in the Party apparatus, and assert their own view of reality is completely taken away. One of the famous slogans of the Party is "Ignorance is Strength," but it is more than just that. Their strength comes not just from the ignorance of the population but from their sheer bafflement. As they spin out of control, alienated from themselves and from reality, forced to question the evidence of their own senses against mountains of artificially constructed documents, a hole opens up in their minds. They begin to crave answers, to have any small crumb of certainty in their model of the world, and this is something the Party is all too eager to provide. This is what I take to be the first brick in both the wall of Big Brother's power and the misery of Oceania. The Party presents its subjects with an impossible choice: either submit to the state's view of the past, sacrificing their very identities in the process, or give into a whirlwind of bewilderment that will prevent them from resisting in any case. Here, we see the emergence of a theme that will become central to our analysis: the Party constructs reality so there are truly no good options, but the least bad of the bunch is always to tow their destructive line. But this is only one aspect of the Party's vice-like grip on the minds of its populace, and there is far worse yet to come.
**3. Language and Thought**
If you had never known the word "elephant," how would you talk about them? You might describe them by their properties, but what if I then took away the words for "trunk" or "big, flappy ear" or "gray"? You might still be able to get your thought across, but it would be much, much more difficult. If I continued this process for long enough, it would be almost impossible to come up with sensible ideas about elephants. Our thoughts often follow the same contours that language carves out for them, and what we can speak about has a huge bearing on what we can think about.
The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has applied this insight to emotions, looking at how our concepts of our feelings shape how we then subsequently feel. So, if we have a given idea of "happy" and we ascribe it to ourselves, then that will actually affect our mood, and so on. Arguably, part of the value of things like existential philosophy is giving voice to extreme or difficult emotions we might otherwise be unable to make sense of.
So, it is telling that one of the Party's main aims in *1984* is to limit the language that the inhabitants of Oceania could use so that, in turn, they can limit their thoughts. One way they do this is just by punishing dissident speech by torture and death, but everyone knows about that. I want to talk about the subtler, more insidious way that Big Brother captures the mind. I want to talk about Newspeak.
Newspeak is the official language of Oceania, and its vocabulary is entirely controlled by the Party. In our world, languages can roughly evolve through a process akin to supply and demand. People want to express something, but they cannot quite do it, so a word is crafted that roughly fits what they want to say. Shakespeare wanted to express the idea that something could not be heard, so he coined the term "inaudible" from existing components of the language. People wanted a new word that would give them time to think during breaks in a sentence, so a brand new meaning was constructed for the word "like." We even do this on the fly for certain suffixes, so "adult" can become "adulting," and "self" can become "selfing," and so on. Such organic evolution of language allows us as speakers to slowly push the boundaries of what we can express until perhaps one day, the limits of our language will equal the genuine limitations of our mind.
But Newspeak is different. The Party periodically releases a new Newspeak dictionary with the set of words that are considered acceptable. One member of the Party proudly boasts that it is the only language whose vocabulary gets smaller with each passing year. The reason for this is simple: Newspeak is carefully constructed to prevent you from expressing any thought against the Party. So, if they find a word that can strike against the values of the state or challenge them in any way, then it will be dispensed with. The aim is that one day, everyone will chat, discuss, and indeed think in Newspeak, and as a result, conspiracy against the Party will become completely impossible. The average citizen would not even be able to formulate the phrase "I want to overthrow Big Brother." Instead of letting language flow outwards to the limits of possible thought, the Party is using it like a shrinking cage to trap the growth of our ideas.
Newspeak also involves the careful construction of words that suggest certain forms of behavior are good and others inherently bad. For instance, the Newspeak word for preventing yourself from having a dissident thought is "crimestop." Who could be against crimestop? It's basically telling you it's a good thing by its mere appearance, but in doing so, it incentivizes citizens to keep their minds well-chained up so that they too can be crimestoppers. Another good example is "thoughtcrime." By the very construction of the word, it professes that thoughts can be against the law and constitute criminal behavior. If you use it in a non-ironic way, then you've already bought into the Party's worldview without even realizing it.
When you're reading *1984*, you get the sense that the very idea of opposing Big Brother is becoming gradually inexpressible, and it's not just this that the Party wants to eliminate. One of the Party members in charge of the Newspeak dictionary says that eventually, they should be able to challenge basic human instincts like the drive to have sex. He paints a dark picture where the very fabric of your thoughts and feelings are controlled by the Party, and any imagination or contemplation can only be had within its strict limits.
Existentially, this is also a terrifying prospect because of the high premium placed on authenticity for our fulfillment. It is hardly controversial to say that believing one thing and feeling another can cause someone immense distress. In *Lady Chatterley's Lover*, D.H. Lawrence explores the painful inner conflict that a married woman feels when she both desires to have an affair and also believes she has a sacred duty towards her husband. And most of us know, on a smaller scale, how upsetting it can be for our feelings or desires to be out of step with our beliefs. Simone de Beauvoir argued that it was almost impossible to feel fulfilled and happy in the long term unless we are, in some sense, true to ourselves.
So, the concept of Newspeak is not just politically horrifying; it would also plunge us into an emotional hell. We would walk around with the deep feeling that something was wrong, that we had instinctual thoughts we cannot express, but we would never be able to put these ideas into words or conceptualize them. In the novel, Winston is often upset at how he will never know how many other Party members share his hatred for Big Brother, but if Newspeak catches on, the situation will become even worse. We would be constantly pining after something but be unable to communicate or even formulate it. We often tell toddlers to "use their words" because we understand that the ability to express our emotional needs is vital for our long-term happiness. But if the Party had their way, we would spend our entire lives like toddlers, with holes cut out of our minds and a gaping void in our emotions that we cannot put into words. Maybe we will assume that this is just the human condition, to be subtly empty in a thousand different ways. I think this is perhaps one of the most frightening images in all fiction, and it is Orwell's genius to be able to put it into words. But now that we've looked at thought control, we're going to go one step deeper and ask how the Party would manipulate our feelings.
**4. Punishing Passions**
In Shakespeare's great tragedy *Hamlet*, we get one of the greatest explorations of passion in the whole of the English canon. Hamlet's emotional outbursts and eventual madness make him intensely charismatic, able to influence the people around him through his energy and his intense speeches. At points, we see him soar into ecstasy, only to fall back down into despair the very next moment, and his passion eventually leads to the deaths of almost everyone in the lead cast.
For better or for worse, throughout history, philosophers have viewed such intense feelings as powerful drivers of action, but ones that are incredibly difficult to handle. It might lead us to greatness, but we also might be consumed by it. It is no wonder, then, that the Party will do everything in its power to control and direct the passions of its citizens.
The first major link in this particular psychological chain is the demonization of any sexual impulse. The Party promotes an organization called The Anti-Sex League, which encourages people to take vows of celibacy, and the only kind of relation looked upon favorably by Big Brother is between Party-approved married couples, specifically chosen for their lack of attraction to one another. In the novel, this is explained as a way of redirecting all that passionate energy. Instead of feeling intense desire for one another, it will be repurposed in service to the Party and Oceania.
And it is not just eros; this goes for pretty much all forms of love. Children of Oceania are taught to watch out for any infringement on the Party program by their parents, and as a result, the bond between parent and child is filled with mistrust and suspicion. The loving mother or doting father is always cautious of their tiny watchmen, and the children essentially view their parents as potential traitors to the state, which they value above everything else. Big Brother is like a controlling lover, in constant fear of your attachments to others.
Another reason to demonize love is that if you value someone else above the Party, that means you would betray Big Brother for their sake. This is a clear thoughtcrime. So, just like Plato alluded to, the Party must do everything in their power to discourage passion and private love entirely.
But there is another aspect of this repression that I find fascinating. Since very few people can get rid of this need for human connection entirely, the demonization of these emotions places almost every inhabitant of Oceania in a permanent state of guilt and shame. If they have felt passion for another person, an iota of sexual desire, or even innocent familial love, then they have walked the first steps to committing a thoughtcrime, and thus they now have something to hide. It keeps everyone in a state of underlying, subtle terror, where they know if the Thought Police came knocking at their door, then their secret would be uncovered. And this fear can be a paralyzing force against any anti-Party action. After all, if you know you're guilty, it's good to be on your best behavior.
Of course, the Party uses a whole host of methods to secure this control of their citizens' emotions. They have a vast and sophisticated propaganda machine to turn to, but I want to explore the methods of the Thought Police themselves and how they twist some of our most benevolent concepts to their own ends.
When Winston is being tortured, he describes the worst part as not the beatings or the electrocutions, but the questioning by O'Brien. Orwell presents a twisted version of psychoanalysis, where O'Brien repeatedly insists that Winston is sick and that, in fact, the Party is just helping him get better. All the torture, all the abuse—it's actually for his own good. O'Brien rarely calls Winston anything approaching evil or immoral and instead refers to him as if he is simply defective. It is not Winston's fault that he has become so delusional, and this is the only sure way to correct his broken brain.
Have you noticed what the Party has done here? They have morphed the very definition of health to include compliance with Big Brother's regime. In his book, *The Ethical Visions of Psychotherapy*, Kevin Smith argues that our concept of mental health comes laden with certain ethical values. For instance, whereas Aristotle thought that it was the mark of a healthy mind to wish to die for one's community, we might now refer to this as a form of death ideation and understandably wonder what this meant in Oceania. Therapeutic ethics has defined good mental health as supporting the Party. They view this as self-evident, just like we view many of our definitions of health.
But this, in turn, has disturbing implications. It defines out of existence the idea that anything could ever be wrong with Party doctrine, because anyone who questions or rebels against it is not just a dissident, not just evil, but actually mad. And why would we listen to a madman? In a work of dystopian genius, Big Brother has made opposition to himself conceptually impossible. It can't be that someone has been brought to the brink of despair by the way the Party has run Oceania; they must instead have some neurological defect or a twisted psyche. Anything that allows regular, law-abiding citizens to dismiss their pain out of hand and let Big Brother claim that if you find any fault with his brutal regime, the cause for this lies with you.
It is an extreme version of a criticism some philosophers and psychologists have leveled at our conception of mental health today. If someone's life is genuinely terrible, are they depressed? Is it a private problem, or are they simply reacting to a truly awful situation? In his memoir, *The Diving Bell and the Butterfly*, Jean-Dominique Bauby describes the pain and despair he felt after having become almost completely paralyzed, only able to move one of his eyelids. Is this a mental illness, or an understandable reaction to what sounds like unbearable torment?
This framework also allows Big Brother to deal with dissidence while presenting it as a kindness. He is not torturing the innocent; he is curing the sick. He is not blasting people's retinas with propaganda; he is protecting them from dangerous and contagious ideas. He is not a cruel dictator but a loving father who sometimes just has to take a firm hand with his unruly offspring. It's only logical; they're just children.
But this parental dynamic has a further implication, one which reduces every aspect of a person's life to a single, stultifying dimension.
**5. The Abolition of Privacy**
In Dostoevsky's *The House of the Dead*, he gives a semi-fictional account of his time in a Russian prison for conspiring against the Tsarist regime, and he said the hardest part of his experiences there was not the cold or the lack of food or the prison guards. It was instead the fact that he was never alone. The prisoners were cramped together in communal barracks, and Dostoevsky would not have a single moment to himself for four years. Can you imagine that? Not having a solitary second where someone is not watching, judging, or interacting with you? Your entire life in the public sphere, with nothing that you can call nobody else's business?
Well, this describes the existence of almost everyone in *1984*. For any member of the Outer Party, their life is lived under total surveillance. Telescreens keep watch on their every move, while nobody's telescreen would be observed at every time; anyone's could be at any time. There is always the possibility of being examined, and this has the chilling effect of essentially abolishing private life.
Philosophers Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault both talked about the panopticon. This was a prison designed so that one guard could keep watch on any individual prisoner from a central position. The idea that if there is the constant possibility for observation, backed up by the threat of a physical punishment, then we would be forced to act as if there is always an eye on us. We will slowly become our own prison officers, and eventually, we'll be so used to keeping our behavior in check that we won't even need the Thought Police anymore.
A great many ancient Greek philosophers used to talk about the importance of education from a young age so that people became good citizens who would promote virtue in their state, but these same tools of education, indoctrination, and observation can just as easily be used to make someone tow an arbitrary Party line. As we've already mentioned, the Party promotes a culture of handing over your friends, neighbors, or even your family if they're seen to be disobedient, and this only further entrenches the panoptic experience. Now, you don't just have to watch out for telescreens and listening devices; you have to watch out for your own children and your friends too.
Any private opinion is totally subsumed within the political sphere, and this, unsurprisingly, promotes great anxiety amongst the populace. A lesser-appreciated privilege that many of us have in more free and tolerant societies is the ability to play with ideas. You see, teenagers do this a lot; they will take a position, experiment with it, and see if it holds water, and then drop it or maintain it depending on whether it works. Adults do this too, just often less chaotically, and this whole system only functions if the stakes for expressing an incorrect or frowned-upon opinion are, relatively speaking, quite low. As much as "well, that's just my opinion" is a god-awful argument, the fact that it's a sensible statement is a hallmark that we're not living in a totalitarian state.
This ability is something completely denied to the inhabitants of Oceania. Winston mentions that it's dangerous to explore even the ideas that agree with the Party, since in doing so, you demonstrate an independence of thought and an intelligence that could become dangerous were you to ever change your mind. In the middle of the book, one of the academics working on the Newspeak dictionary is unceremoniously vaporized, seemingly for being too zealous in his Party support. The only safe option is to keep your head down and not think under any circumstances, even about things entirely irrelevant to politics. The internal policeman has been fully installed behind the eyes of the citizen, and their mind is now the property of the state.
In the words of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, "the fascist state interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people." The phrase "the personal is political" was coined by American philosopher Carol Hanisch to describe the ways in which some of the so-called personal problems of women in 20th-century America were caused and exacerbated by wider political factors. At its best, this is a fantastic insight. It tells us that the overworked mother suffering from pervasive despair might not just require therapy but also a change in the material management of child care duties, or the male loneliness epidemic we have today might not just be a matter of men pulling themselves up individually by their bootstraps; it might also require a wider shift in how we view men in our communities. When used benevolently, this can be a wonderfully affirming message about societies pulling together to help out their most vulnerable members, all for one and one for all.
But in *1984*, you have a totalitarian perversion of this idea. Rather than the personal having a political dimension or being affected by political facts, it is instead eaten by the political. In Oceania, the only relevant qualities of a citizen's life are those which relate to the Party, and the suggestion that anything else matters or even exists is seen as subversive and criminal. Orwell repeatedly emphasizes the fact that there are no official laws in Oceania and instead the Thought Police are essentially able to arrest people at their pleasure. But let's examine the significance of this in detail.
If there are laws, that implies that there are limits to the power of the state. If someone can point to legislation outlining what you did wrong, you can also point to it to justify when you're innocent. If you're charged with murder and you can demonstrate that you've never killed anyone, then, in theory, you can be set free. The presence and limitation of codified laws outline where the state's power ends and when your own private power begins. So, in *1984*, the absence of formal law sends a clear signal: everything you do is the state's business, and the idea of ungoverned behavior just doesn't exist. This is part of what allows Big Brother to make thoughts themselves a crime. It also means everyone has to be even more alert to their own behavior, further strengthening that internal watchman we were talking about earlier. They don't just have to avoid committing a well-defined crime but anything that could possibly be seen as a crime under the worst possible interpretation of their thoughts and actions. It is a terrifying image, and it comes with a dire warning: the personal may be political, and we ought to recognize this, but we cannot let this insight lead to the abandonment of the personal entirely.
But something I very rarely hear people talk about when they discuss *1984* is what the Thought Police and the upper echelons of the Party actually get out of their arrangement. What do they have to gain by serving Big Brother? And the answer to this question is both philosophically sophisticated and deeply surprising.
**6. The Deathless Drive**
The American anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker speaks of an instinctive human drive known as death denial. This is a complex concept, and Becker has a whole book explaining it, but for our purposes, it basically does what it says on the tin: it is our inability to accept our own mortal lives and how we try to escape them in numerous ways. Specifically, Becker looks at the many ways that humans have tried to make themselves symbolically immortal. For instance, he would say that the wish of Napoleon or Julius Caesar to make their mark on history is at least partly an attempt to become so grand that a smidgen of them would remain when their physical form had passed on. Similarly, Freud spoke of our religious instinct and how it soothed our death anxiety by presenting a greater structure that we could become one with after we're dead.
And the character of O'Brien is a wonderful example of how this drive can grant us the potential to do great evil in our pursuit of a slice of the immortal. It's not often that O'Brien gets a thorough treatment in analyses of *1984* beyond his role as a villain and as Winston's torturer, but I think that that is a shame. He is one of the only members of the Thought Police we get a proper look at, and he's also part of the Inner Party, one of the 2% that live in relative luxury and power while the rest of us fight for scraps. And in his conversations with Winston at the Ministry of Love, we get to see what his motivations for serving Big Brother truly are and how his twisted philosophy functions.
O'Brien starts from deceptively plausible premises: people alone are weak and fragile, but together we can become stronger. But O'Brien twists this quite life-affirming aspect of the human condition into something deeply disturbing. He notices that while an individual person can die, an organization or collective can live on without them. The body of O'Brien will one day wither away into dust, but the Party, the Thought Police, the Ministry of Love—these will all be still there. They are greater than any one person, more permanent, more real.
Descartes might say, one of Plato's fundamental philosophical ideas for years was that of the Forms. These were eternal, metaphysical objects that were instantiated in our world. So, while we have individual physical horses, Plato abstracts from that the metaphysical idea of a horse, with each actual horse being a dim reflection of that. If any physical horse were to die, this metaphysical horse form would still remain. We still use a version of this concept in our working ideas about mathematics. Whether I have three sticks or three bricks or three blocks named Nick, I still have the number three. If I burnt the sticks, the idea of three would live on without them. And O'Brien seems to think the same about the Party. If he refuses to entertain any thoughts against Big Brother, if he simply becomes a reflection and instantiation of the Party and nothing more, then in a sense, he can no longer die. All of his essential properties will live on without him. He has conquered death at the cost of his own soul.
And O'Brien here is performing an exaggerated example of quite an everyday maneuver. We may not subsume our entire identities into a group, but most of us feel this pull to be a part of something greater than ourselves. The human wish to belong is immensely powerful, and it can drive us to do terrible things. In his book *Ordinary Men*, Christopher Browning describes the horrific actions carried out by a German police battalion in occupied Poland during World War II, and one of the things Browning focuses on is how the members of this murderous crew outsourced their sense of morality to the state or to a commander that is something they perceived as higher, higher than themselves. There is this undercurrent of deindividuation taken to unbearable ends, and O'Brien is willingly participating in just the same sort of process. He tortures Winston mercilessly, and maybe one of the reasons he can justify this to himself is that it's not properly him doing it; he is just a manifestation of the Party's will, an amoral functioning of ruthless tyranny. His is not to reason why.
And perhaps the most disturbing thing about O'Brien is that this same capacity to subsume our individuality into a wider whole, justifying actions we would normally consider evil in the process, has been repeatedly observed in perfectly normal people, from historical examples like the one we just talked about to the initially flawed but since reliably replicated Milgram experiments. We too have something inside us that yearns to abdicate our individual responsibility to another. In some situations, this is a great thing; a society of truly individual thinkers seems like it would lack cohesion. But O'Brien serves as a stark reminder of what we can become if we totally give up our individuality to a group or authority.
We get remarkably vivid descriptions of O'Brien throughout the novel, and particular focus is given on his heavy, older-looking face. Orwell has chosen to deliberately describe him in terms of his mortality. I think this is partly to remind us that he is, after all, just a man, one with immense power within the Party and certainly over Winston, but one that will still eventually die. And despite all his attempts to grasp at immortality, one day he will be no more, just a footnote in the history of the Party. Whereas Caesar wanted to escape death through significance, O'Brien has tried the very same thing through insignificance. As he put it, "The individual is only a cell; the weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism."
Viewed through this lens, O'Brien becomes almost pathetic: a sad man desperately and vainly attempting to escape the one human certainty. This is a deeply uninspiring inverse of Becker's idea that a fear of death can create heroism within us. But this portrayal of O'Brien as distinctly human also links him back to us in much smaller ways. It is always available for us to make the same bargain: to sacrifice our ability to think for ourselves, to protest or rebel, and slot in fully with some greater whole. Many people, including myself, have spoken about the danger of nihilism, the state of finding no meaning in life whatsoever. But this is a wonderful counterpoint to that fear. Here, we face a warning about fully giving up our fallible, individual, uniquely human parts in service to some higher power, some greater meaning. We live with the stories of great heroes who have given their lives for their beliefs: Christian saints, martyrs, innocent political prisoners, and noble soldiers of justice. But O'Brien has used this same self-sacrifice in service to something truly horrific. And I don't know about you, but I think that's worthy of some reflection. He is cruel, he is evil, he is our worst nightmare, and he is human. But now, we must return to the world of Winston and take a look at what happens to him in the final stages of his interrogation, after the state has totally broken his mind.
**7. Empty Joy or Painful Truth**
A famous thought experiment in ethical philosophy is called the pleasure machine, or the experience machine, which sounds much dodgier than it is. It was formulated by Robert Nozick and it presents the reader with a hypothetical situation and a profound choice. Imagine that I had a machine that would simulate a new reality for you, one that was essentially a wish-fulfillment version of this world. You would experience only pleasurable sensations, exist in a heavenly state, you could live out your entire life there and pass away peacefully, never having to leave the machine. I would wipe your memory before you were plugged in, so you wouldn't even know that it wasn't real. Picture that you could be anything you want to be: a multi-billionaire, a religious leader, a benevolent dictator of a grateful and suppliant populace. You could be loved, desired, praised, feared, and anything in between. Of course, none of it would exist except in the simulation, but would that really matter? Nozick asks us if we would willingly enter the pleasure machine. Would we want blind happiness, or do we prefer to live in a world that is imperfect and sometimes painful, but is undeniably real?
Nozick implied that the answer most people would give to this was no. But I personally think the situation might be a bit more complicated than that. Sure, I wouldn't want to be plugged into the pleasure machine, but I have a reasonably comfortable life. I've got the standard human social worries and a painful chronic illness, but my life is far from a living hell. If you were to lock me in a basement and torture me for a few weeks and tell me that this would be my life forevermore, then I might reconsider my decision. If the pleasure machine is still available, I would probably opt in.
During his stay in the Ministry of Truth, Winston is essentially in a much less pleasant version of Nozick's dilemma. He can live with a minimal amount of contentment, a slightly cushy promotion, and a perfectly average existence in this new world, provided that he wholeheartedly accepts a lie: that the Party defines what is true. Thus, Winston is presented with one of the most painful choices in fiction. From a principled standpoint, we want Winston to refuse to play ball with the Party. We want him to have the strength to spit in O'Brien's face, continue to bear the torture and the questioning, and become a symbol for the... It would not bring Big Brother 1 mm closer to defeat. Why not give in? It seems like the only way to make the best of a bad situation.
This psychological struggle within Winston's mind takes up the whole final third of the novel, and at first, this decision might seem puzzling. One of the dominant questions in the book thus far has been what Winston will ultimately do to resist Big Brother. Will he topple the regime? Will he join the rebellious Brotherhood and start a revolution amongst the Proles? When he is arrested, the answer to these questions becomes clear: no. But a deeper, personal one remains: who will win the fight for Winston's mind? And this becomes a conflict not just between Winston and the Party, but between Winston's ideals and a rational form of pragmatism.
Most of us have these two elements in our decision-making in some way. There is what we would do in a morally ideal world, and what is morally speaking expedient to do in this one. This is not the same as a conflict between a moral system and simple self-interest, but it is where our ideals about morality rub up against the messy business of the actual world. For instance, do we join an organization that we think is evil with the hope of reforming it from the inside? On the one hand, in an ideal world, we would not, and if we become part of this organization, we will certainly be contributing towards its immoral aims. But on the other hand, we might be able to prevent the organization from doing even more harm if we were to rise through its ranks, and if we didn't do it, someone else would just take our place anyway. Do we stick to our principles and keep our soul clean at the cost of a world that might actually be worse? Or do we get our own hands dirty in the hope that we can make the best of a bad situation?
Winston's predicament cuts to the heart of this conflict. His principles tell him to commit to truth and love no matter what. This is the non-consequentialist portion of his ethical system, the part of his moral compass that is concerned with what his eternal duties are and wants him to hold fast to his ideals in every situation. We could call this his inner Kant. It does not want him to break under the stress of torture because if everyone able to stick to their guns in the face of the Party, then there might be some hope of overthrowing them. Similarly, they don't want to renounce Winston's personal love for Julia because he gave his word to her that he would never betray her.
On the other hand, you have the consequentialist, utilitarian side of Winston, and I don't mean that as an insult. This part recognizes that sticking to his principles just isn't accomplishing anything practical. As we've already said, he cannot hope to do any damage to Big Brother now. To the outside world, he has ceased to exist, and he can only be brought back to life at the consent of O'Brien. He can't do any wider...
good anymore, and why shouldn't he grant himself a small morsel of happiness, since a wish for anything more has now become impossible? If his suffering is now pointless, why can't he bring it to an end?
On the other hand, if everyone behaved in this manner, then the party would certainly never topple. Unless people cease to make the best of a bad situation and dreamed of something more, Big Brother's reign would last forever. In his lecture, "Interpreting Jean Paul Sartre's Essay 'Existentialism is a Humanism'," American philosopher Richard Roy puts forward the idea that moral dilemmas are, to a large extent, genuinely intractable. Take the trolley problem: where you have the chance to kill one person to save five. Do you pull the lever? It is easy to say yes, but could you really live with yourself having caused a person's demise? Could you watch five people die, knowing that you could have saved them? When the chips are down, either option seems almost unlivable. So, Winston's dilemma brings into stark relief the difficulty of making moral choices, especially when the penalties for those choices in either direction are unspeakably harsh. It is all very well telling people to be brave in the face of adversity, but if their resistance isn't achieving anything, isn't the best thing for them to do to just give in? They can go back to living in a pale imitation of "Nock's pleasure machine," obtaining a tiny bit of happiness in exchange for their principles. On the other hand, could they live with themselves afterwards? It is an impossible choice, and that is what makes it so compelling.
Of course, Winston does eventually betray Julia and falls perfectly in line with the party. In the final lines of the novel, we see Winston sitting in a coffee shop while a report from the front lines blares on a telescreen. Winston is roused by the victory of the brave Oceanic troops and what they have accomplished. He is filled with a sense of ecstasy and pride. He imagines he is with crowds of ordinary citizens cheering on their brave soldiers. But then his mind shifts, and he is back at the Ministry of Love. But now he no longer views it as a place of torture, but instead one that helped him win the final victory over his own mind. He realizes that all it had been doing is teaching him how to be happy and content in this world. He starts to recognize what happened to him as a kindness, freeing him from the cruel trappings of his own ideals that kept him so miserable for so long. Finally, as tears of joy run down his face, he declares that he loves Big Brother. Winston has made his choice, and can we really blame him?
But there is one feeling that truly pervades 1984, and it's one that we're all sadly familiar with: helplessness and hopelessness. A friend of mine, who's a psychotherapist, once described helplessness as the most dangerous human emotion. They were almost certainly being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but there is a harsh glint of reality behind their words. It turns "this is a crap situation" into "this is a crap situation, and I can't do anything about it." It transforms what would be temporary misery into an eternity of waste to wade through with no end in sight, at least no end that you can bring about.
Czech author Franz Kafka is a master at creating this atmosphere of helplessness. In *The Trial*, he famously presents a world so absurd the protagonist can't even make sense of it, yet he is totally at its mercy. He slowly loses his mind and falls into despair because he doesn't know when his trial is going to end, or how to fight it, or even how the court system works. We now have the term "Kafkaesque" to respond to these dizzying situations. But where Kafka presents an almost spiritual form of helplessness, where logic itself seems to break down, the form Orwell focuses on is depressingly down-to-earth.
One of the most troubling things about the world of 1984 is the disempowerment of its people. The majority of the population, which form the Proles, are kept too poor, destitute, and misinformed to ever have the power or will to change things. The Outer Party knows enough that some of them might develop the willingness to rebel, but that is where the Thought Police and the surveillance state come into play. It is not even clear how much power the average Inner Party member has. We know they are entitled to certain privileges, like servants and the ability to turn their telescreens off, but we also know that certain members of the Inner Party have been purged in the past. Presumably, Big Brother himself has the ability to change things, but we don't even know if he exists, except as an abstract idea. The only power anyone has is the ability to look at the class beneath them with a form of vague contempt. So, O'Brien views the Outer Party as stupid and potentially treacherous. Most of the Outer Party consider the Proles as barely human, and the Proles don't even have the luxury of noticing their own powerlessness.
And this means there is not just helplessness for the people of Oceania, but hopelessness as well. Not only can they not affect change, but it's not coming from anywhere else either. There is no great liberatory force coming to save the day, nor is there the possibility of a revolt among the Proles or the Inner Party members. As O'Brien famously puts it, and as I quoted at the beginning of this video, "If you want to picture the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." This line refers not only to the inevitability of the party's victory but also the thrill they experience as a result. The sweet taste of triumph as it exerts ever-expanding control over those under its rule.
But who is actually the beneficiary of this so-called thrill? O'Brien hints that it is open to anyone who buys into the idea of Big Brother. But is this really true? Isn't it instead that there'll eventually be no victories left to be won? The party has near total control, and the people have no chance for a better life. And it's not clear that this situation will end up being good for Big Brother or the Inner Party members either. O'Brien yearns for the day when Newspeak is the language of thought, and so no sedition can even be contemplated. But then, even the party will be deprived of hope. They will have nowhere left to extend their power. The idea of progress, even progress in an evil direction, will become impossible. Hope itself will become the final victim of Big Brother's reign.
And there is good reason to think that even the Inner Party should fear this day. Philosophers Claudia Bluer and Titus Stall have argued that the feeling of hope is an integral part of what makes a fulfilling life. This is because it provides us with our practical identities, that is, our organizing reasons for action. So, if I hope to one day be a good father, then that sets certain boundaries for my actions now. It means I have to set up my life so it will eventually be a calm and happy environment for a developing child. For Bluer and Stall, hope is an emotion of existential import. It is part of the tapestry that makes our life seem meaningful. And furthermore, it seems that hope can only flourish at the intersection of desire and uncertainty. We can't hope for what we already have, and we can't hope for something that is certain to come our way. But we also can't hope for something impossible. I can't hope that I'll be able to fly tomorrow because it's a scenario that I cannot honestly entertain.
For Winston, and any other internally rebellious members of the party, they no longer have hope because the prospect of Big Brother's removal is as remote as me flying, if not more so. But the Inner Party will soon be deprived of hope as well. As O'Brien said, its ultimate goal is power, but it is nearing omnipotence. What will they do when they have finally accomplished their goal and not a single thought crime is committed in the whole of Oceania? Well, for starters, O'Brien's reason for being will go down the drain. Without thought crimes, who needs a Thought Police? And what will the Inner Party members have to hope for anymore? Their entire purpose is to extend the influence of Big Brother. They've done that, so now what? Then the party is like the dog that has caught their own tail and can no longer take pleasure or meaning in chasing it. They too are deprived of hope, and their minds will wither on the vine just as much as the Outer Party or the Proles. They'll just have a more comfortable chair to decay in.
This is the ultimate contradiction at the heart of Big Brother's Lovecraftian organization. Its very reason for being is amassing more and more power, but power is now reaching its limits, and in its continual success, it is signing its own death warrant. Not a physical death, for if there was a chance the state could actually be defeated, then the party would have a reason to carry on. But it will face an existential one. The Inner Party will no longer have any meaning to their lives, and hopelessness will come knocking at their door the very minute it is finished at everyone else's. Perhaps this is the reason the Inner Party places such emphasis on the hatred of thought criminals and political dissidents. Because deep down, these shadowy figures at the levers of the state know that without these brave, contemptible, freethinking souls, they would have no more reason to be. They depend on their doomed rebels just as much as they want to destroy them. And the day the final independent thought is eliminated is the day nihilism will infect Big Brother himself.
A quote often apocryphally attributed to either Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx, but probably said by neither, is "the last capitalist we hang shall be the one that sold us the Rope." But in 1984, we get a spin on this idea: the last political dissident the party hangs will leave only an empty noose, tailor-made for Big Brother's soul. The party may hate Winston, they may want to torture him and break him, and they will ultimately succeed in doing so. But they also don't want to face what, for them, is the most depressing fact of all: they need Winston. Winston's existence lets them know that there are still more places yet to conquer, more minds yet to destroy, and they can all breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the stench of their existential crisis has been covered by another rotting corpse. The final tragic figure of 1984 is not Winston, or Julia, or O'Brien. It is Big Brother himself.
And now I want to leave you with one final thought: nine. What's the point of 1984? There is an inevitable question that raises its head when we read a book like 1984, and that is, what is dystopian fiction for? Obviously, there is no one right answer to this question, but most people's instinctive response is something like: it is a warning. 1984 is a cautionary tale about what a totalitarian government can become, and through its representation, and sometimes exaggeration, of the properties of both the USSR and the Nazi regime, it alerts us to how a nation can degenerate unless its people are willing and able to keep a close eye on it. After all, Orwell once wrote that "every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it."
As a result, most people focus solely on the overtly political aspects of the book, and there's certainly a lot of value in this. The last thing we want to do is to strip Orwell of his political dimensions. But when we only focus on this, we miss a more complex aspect of Orwell's brilliance, where he uncovers and dissects a recipe for human misery, both at the state level and at the personal. By reflecting on what the party has taken away from the inhabitants of Oceania, we can gain a deeper insight into what truly matters to us: the freedom to be unobserved, the sovereignty over what goes on between the walls of our skull, the ability to forge connection with others, to craft our own linguistic expression, and to have a clear, agreed-upon definition of truth that will not change day to day. Dystopian fiction can remind us of everything we take for granted and put us on high alert against anything that would threaten these pillars of our joy.
At the beginning of Plato's *Republic*, the character of Socrates argues that in order to see what makes a virtuous person, it is helpful to ask what makes a virtuous state, so that we can examine these purported virtues on a larger scale. And 1984 can almost help us do the reverse of this. You may come away from the novel with political zeal and a sharp vigilance against authoritarianism, but you might also discover where you have unwittingly become your own Big Brother. Where do we self-censor, not out of love or politeness, but out of fear? Where do we chain up our emotions, not because we are following our own values, but because we fear societal shaming? Do we ever give ourselves a break from the all-seeing eye of our inner inquisitor? Where do we feel the tendril limbs of hopelessness ensnare our minds?
In a similar vein, Aristotle used to say that the virtues of the state and the virtues of a citizen are inexorably linked. If the state is well-run, then the people have a greater shot at fulfillment, and if the people are virtuous, then the state has a greater chance of flourishing. For him, the business of becoming a better person went hand-in-hand with protecting the virtues of a society and weeding out its vices. And this is reflected in Orwell's novel. The free fall of the state into tyranny goes hand-in-hand with the increasing complacency, fear, and malleability of its citizens. Because the horrors of 1984 are not just political, not just philosophical, not just existential, but all three. These themes are so closely intertwined, it is easy to miss many of them. But this only recognizes the messy business of being a human.
So, if there is one call to action in this video, it is to go and read 1984 for yourself. It is a work that holds a rightful place of prominence in our collective consciousness, and you'll almost certainly discover more about what you value, both in the political sphere and in your private life. The thought that we might one day be surrounded by the wreckage of all we held dear, helpless and hopeless in the face of an overwhelming force that none can now stand to resist, with only the choice between nihilism and submission – that is the existential horror of 1984, and it reminds us that nothing we value is by necessity permanent or automatic. It could all be taken away in a moment. This might happen unwillingly, like for Winston, or with our express consent, like O'Brien. Either way, our mind, body, and soul will be laid waste for another's petty pursuit of limitless power. A sobering message, to be sure, but one we could all stand to hear now and again.
Thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a wonderful day.