Orwell and Hoffer as seers

It is concerning that two old classics seem increasingly pertinent. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.

This is brought to mind by some of the observations in the opening passages of Big Brother Is Watching You: Is America at Risk of Becoming Orwell’s Nightmare? by Stephen Rhode.

Orwell marshals an array of literary techniques in service of his unconcealed political views. While the political messages at times jump off the page, in other sections of the novel, often overlooked, are long sensual passages devoted to the torrid but short-lived romance between 39-year-old Winston Smith and 26-year-old Julia. His sexual yearnings, suffocated in a failed marriage, are contrasted with her sense of sexual freedom. Their encounters, first in a remote forest and then in their love nest above Mr. Charrington’s shop, breath with the intimacy and delight that is so painfully absent from the rest of their dreary and regimented lives, and by extension the lives of everyone else in Oceania. Orwell shares their joyful relationship in their secret haven to remind readers what has been lost in the rest of this suffocating conformist society. He vividly brings to life the essential thing that the Party and Big Brother have systematically eliminated: privacy. This representation of blissful privacy is the baseline against which readers measure the pervasive control and sweeping surveillance imposed by the Party.

Early in the novel, Orwell writes: “Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.” War “had been literally continuous though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.” At present, in 1984, Oceania is at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia, but Winston possesses the “furtive knowledge” (because his “memory was not satisfactorily under control”) that only four years earlier Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. “The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”

Winston is frightened when Julia, typically indifferent to such things, considers it unimportant whether Oceania is at war with Eastasia or Eurasia. “‘Who cares?’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.’”

Later in the story, Winston (and everyone else) is required to participate in Hate Week, complete with “processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs.” Julia’s works at the Fiction Department, where her unit has been taken off the production of novels to rush out a series of “atrocity pamphlets.” The streets are lined with posters everywhere showing the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier with an expressionless Mongolian face. But, without notice, on the sixth day of Hate Week, it is abruptly announced that Oceania is not at war with Eurasia, it is at war with Eastasia and Eurasia is an ally.

Orwell is clear: regardless of shifting enemies, the Party perpetuates a permanent state of war in order to maintain complete control over society. Winston surreptitiously obtains a copy of “the book” entitled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, written by Emmanuel Goldstein, originally the architect of Ingsoc, the prevailing philosophy of Oceania, but now declared an enemy of the state. Winston devours the book in a desperate attempt to understand what is happening, and readers will see chilling parallels to our present circumstances. Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, the world’s “three superstates” are “permanently at war,” Goldstein writes in the book within the book, and they have been for the past 25 years: “war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries.” Acts such as the slaughter of children and reprisals against prisoners are looked upon as normal, “and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.” War now involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, causes comparatively few casualties, and takes place on vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average person can only guess at.

The first essential ingredient in permanent war is that “it is impossible for it to be decisive.” And that is intentional, using up the products of “the machine” without “raising the general standard of living.” If the machine was used not for war, but to eliminate human inequality, then “hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.” But an all-around increase in wealth would threaten “the hierarchical society.” “If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.”

We are already in a position where the notion of privacy is imperiled. We know that people, institutions and government can, and frequently do, intrude unknown into our lives - into our emails, our phone conversations, our movements, our homes. We cannot assume that anything we say or do is not unmonitored by someone. We want to believe in privacy but we simultaneously recognize how threatened it is. We are already there.

What about the constant state of war. Think about it. At a national level, independent of what the military might be assigned to do, we have the

War on Poverty
War on Drugs
War on Terrorism
War on Cancer
War on Crime
etc.

And those are simply the wars the are nationally declared and which most would support. Every advocacy group thinks and claims that there is some sort of war on their particular interest, independent of evidence and facts. Major claimed wars include wars on: Women, Police, African Americans, 1%, Christmas, Christians, Religious Freedom, Capitalism, Gun Rights, Coal, Unions, Whistleblowers, Transparency, etc.

All these wars, national and advocate-based, share the trait that “it is impossible for it to be decisive.” In fifty years, have we declared any of these wars to have been won?

The combination of real wars, of government declared wars (on poverty etc.) and enjoined wars by advocacy groups generate an environment where we are presented by the media to ourselves as always and ever at war on many fronts. The reality is that despite all these calls to war, we are better off, safer, things are cleaner, etc. than ever. It is almost as if the system is desperately attempting to justify its own existence by creating the appearance of conflict when there actually is little or none.

Orwell was a seer.