Discussion Group Report

George Orwell in his classic book, 1984 , depicted a world in which humans had given up their liberties to become the minions of an all-powerful elite. The story suggests that people tend to have an inability to resist tyranny. They have an inclination to give up liberty to obtain security and happiness. The media of 1984 are broadcast technology imagined as totally in the service of the state, and no different from the media of Saddam Hussein's Iraq or of today's North Korea.

As the control of the media in our own country is coming more and more under the control of fewer and fewer people because of a loosening of regulations that help guarantee freedom of the press, are we becoming more and more a controlled society?

William Gibson ["The Road to Oceania," N.Y. Times , June 25, 2003] does not think we are heading toward Orwell's fictional state of Oceania. He says that "driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency," one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information.

"Certain goals of the American government's Total (now Terrorist) Information Awareness initiative may eventually be realized simply by evolution of the global information system...It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret."

Some say that Orwell failed to predict the future correctly, but their assertions miss the main point. Orwell, says Gibson, did not fail in any way, but, rather, succeeded. 1984 remains one of the quickest and most succinct routes to the core realities of 1948. (The book was written in 1948 but in the title the final digits of that year were inverted) If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don't mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present. "We've missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems."

Gwynne Dyer, a London-based independent journalist, says the totalitarians never achieved the kind of thought control Orwell and the rest of us feared. ["Orwell Would Be Happily Surprised Our World Hasn't Become Orwellian," The Salt Lake Tribune , June 30, 2003] He tells of an incident when he and some other visitors drove past a derelict Orthodox church in Belgorod, Russia in 1982. "There was no church there," the local Party guide insisted as they watched it recede through the rear window. When they suggested he drive around the block for another look, he flatly refused. "Orwellian," they said-and then realized by his embarrassment that he knew exactly what they meant. He was used to making the people around him swallow bare-faced lies. But they didn't actually believe the lies, and neither did he. Sixty-five years of ruthless censorship and totalitarian rule had not even managed to keep lower level provincial party officials from knowing what "Orwellian" meant.

By the mid-1980s most people were getting ready to dump the dictators. A technique for bringing them down without spilling buckets of blood spread by example from the Philippines in 1986 to Thailand, South Korea, Bangladesh and Burma in 1987-88, and then to Tiananmen Square in the heart of Communist China in 1989. Not all of these nonviolent revolutions succeeded, but the example was so powerful and the technique so promising that in 1989 the citizens of European countries picked it up and ran with it. Then came the nonviolent revolutions to end apartheid in South Africa in 1994, the overthrow of Suharto in Indonesia in 1998 and the fall of Milosevich in Serbia in 2000. And the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

"1989-91," asserts Dyer, "was when the balance of power in the world changed. From then on, totalitarianism was on the defensive and a majority of the world's people (for the first time in history) lived in democratic countries.

"The discrediting of the totalitarian dream and the democratization of a large part of the world were genuine gains for the human race. Coping with too much wealth and leisure is a problem too, no doubt, but a different and lesser one...Frankly on this one I am with George W. Bush: 'Freedom is a powerful incentive. I believe that some day freedom will prevail everywhere because freedom is a powerful drive.'

"What Bush overlooks, however, is that all the people who overthrew their oppressors in recent decades did it for themselves. It is doubtful that powerful countries with suspect motives can successfully export democracy to others by force and the attempt of the Bush White House to do just that could yet bring a certain aspect of 1984 back to life. Not the politics of it, of course that is now gone in most of the world-but the geopolitics."

Walter Cronkite described 1984 as "an anguished lament and a warning that we may not be strong enough nor wise enough nor moral enough to cope with the kind of power we have learned to amass...We recognize, however dimly, that greater efficiency, ease, and security may come at a substantial price in freedom, that law and order can be a doublethink version of oppression, that individual liberties surrendered for whatever good reason are freedom lost." "Doublethink" is a word coined by Orwell, which means, "a simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas," as in the above incident regarding the church in Belgorod.

Erich Fromm describes Orwell's book as "the expression of a mood, and it is a warning. The mood it expresses is that of near despair about the future of man, and the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their human qualities, will become soulless automatons, and will not even be aware of it." He cites two other writers, who like Orwell, describe negative utopias, the Russian Zamyatin in his book We and Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World, and says these books and Orwell's express the mood of powerlessness and hopelessness of modern man. All three authors, says Fromm, imply "that the new form of managerial industrialism...is conducive to an era of dehumanization and complete alienation, in which men are transformed into things and become appendices to the process of production and consumption...it is a danger inherent in the modern mode of production and organization, and relatively independent of the various ideologies."

Yet Orwell, he says, has hope for the human race, a desperate hope. He wants to warn and awaken us. Fromm advises, "The hope can be realized only by recognizing the danger with which all men are confronted today, the danger of a society of automatons who will have lost every trace of individuality, of love, of critical thought, and yet will not be aware of it because of 'doublethink.' It would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too."

In Orwell's book Winston is being tortured by O'Brien, a worker for the Ministry of Love. Winston was sure he knew the terrible thing O'Brien was about to tell him-that the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves; that the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness; and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. 'You believe,' Winston said, 'that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore-'O'Brien pulled back the lever of the torture machine to make a pang of pain shoot through Winston's body. 'That was stupid, Winston, stupid! Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power...We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwittingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'"