NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

Author: George Orwell
Year: 1984 (1949)
Publisher: Bra Böcker
Language: Swedish (translator Thomas Warburton)

“Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt”, Ludwig Wittgenstein submits in his most famous work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (see my review January 2019). This is usually understood to mean that a person’s perception of the world is constrained by what he or she is able to express (or comprehend) through language. Language on aggregate is ultimately a totality of thoughts. From this follows that by controlling the language one should be able to control thoughts. And by controlling the thoughts of a population one controls its actions.

This premise is at the core of George Orwell’s iconic novel “1984” (“Nineteen Eighty-Four”). The Big Brother-government of the united transcontinental state of Oceania, presumably similar to the other two superpowers in the world, Eastasia and Eurasia, with which Oceania is alternately at war or in an alliance, has gone at great length to monitor and control the actions of the denizens but they have not yet gained complete domination of their thoughts. Granted, the Thought Police have certain tools to pick up on criminal thinking by means of reading body language, facial expressions, perspiration levels, heartbeat, etc but that only offers a reactive response to individual thoughts which, from the government’s perspective, remain annoyingly free, comprehensive, and impenetrable.

By the time we are thrown into the action in the year 1984, the project of replacing the old language with the new, so-called Newspeak, is underway but still has a long way to go. New articles and official correspondence are already written in Newspeak but conversations and thoughts are usually still conducted in Standard English. Also, the efforts to fine-tune and tweak Newspeak has not yet been finalised and is a work in progress. The idea is to drastically simplify the language to ensure that grammar and vocabulary are useful for the most essential communication only.

But contorting a society’s ability to engage in logical thinking requires more layers. It is not enough to merely do away with opposites of what the regime deems “goodthink” in order to incapacitate “crimethink”. People can be further pacified by conflating opposites into ideas that are contradictory to a healthy mind and make them palatable to the mind of an enslaved nation. One of the most prophetic of Orwell’s constructions, and one which is still today available for real-time field study, is this very concept of “doublethink”. Doublethink is basically the ability to accept and find unproblematic two inconsistent and mutually exclusive thoughts at one time. Doublethink is typically an ability acquired by (or imposed on) a population ruled by an autocratic regime which has had the time and resources to systematically break down its subjects’ ability to think rationally and clutter their sense of reason. A typical example of doublethink is the famous Big Brother motto: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

A systematic implementation of doublethink, albeit not as absolute as Orwell envisaged, was enacted in the USSR by the Communist dictatorship where the Soviet public was taught to accept contradictory claims as truth. To the Russian citizen, the USSR was both the most powerful country on earth and a victim at the same time. It was the perfect society that other countries could only aspire to but no one was allowed to leave the country without intense screening and special permission. Two concepts that ought to give rise to reasonable questions were widely accepted as truths. After the fall of the USSR, it was widely expected that doublethink would die out with the old generations but several observers, such as Masha Gessen (see my review February 2021), have shown compelling evidence that doublethink is part of Russian world-view to this day.

On the other side of the Atlantic, there is a less systematic but equally efficient roll-out of doublethink. In a growing community of the confused far-right, it is perfectly logical to demand that Donald Trump is given credit for delivering the life-saving Covid-vaccine in record time and refusing to take the same vaccine claiming that it is a liberal/Colombian/BillGates/enter-your-personal-favourite-flavour-of-the-day conspiracy. Doublethink in all its depressing splendour.

It is well-known that George Orwell was a staunch socialist but more than that, he was a defender of liberal democracy. In today’s era of a polarised public discourse where the intellectually challenged general population seems to get some sort of perverse gratification from bundling Western Democratic Socialism with Stalinism (and effectively Sweden with North Korea), as well as Conservatism with Nazism (no, Boris Johnson is not a Nazi), it is a useful reminder that democracy is a fundamental value independent of property tax, class analysis, and capitalism. Democracy must be the non-negotiable foundation of any functioning political system. Orwell understood this and demonstrated with his life how one can support the ends while condemning the means.   

Alas, as a work of literary art, “1984” is not brilliant. Compared to other dystopias (e.g. “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, reviewed in November 2020, and “Kallocain” by Karin Boye, reviewed in June 2021) I find the language of “1984” barren and the dramaturgy sketchy and incoherent. Indeed, the very Big Brother-motto “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” appears to be erroneously constructed as it breaks with the pattern “Undesirable is desirable” and therefore becomes rumpled, non-intuitive, and nebulous.

The sloth and inconsistency with which Orwell’s characters make their choices, too, on numerous occasions effectively ejected me from Oceania and interrupted the flow of my reading experience. It is baffling to me how a person who has lived all his adult life in a world where anybody could be a government agent, the telly spies on you, children turn in their parents, and people are removed from all written records when they are liquidated can unreservedly trust a person after receiving a simple love note or a barely noticeable look. I can see how that would be enough to convict a person, seeing as the Thought Police will have very little to lose from making an occasional mistake, but an individual taking such risks is just not plausible.

If “1984” had been written by a Swedish writer and “Kallocain” published in Britain or the US, I am quite sure that “Kallocain” would have been the benchmark dystopian novel of the global literary canon. In fact, sacrilegious as it may sound, I honestly do not think that today “1984” would have been published at all without comprehensive editing and significant improvements.

This is not to say that Orwell’s is not an important book. On the contrary, Orwell would have been astonished at how current his novel still is more than 70 years after it first appeared and he would, most likely, be appalled by the complacency of today’s general public in the face of the rising authoritarianism in the Western hemisphere. His warning is as topical to European politics in 2021 as it was in 1949.

If not more.

 

DISCOURSE ON VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE

Author: Étienne de la Boétie
Year: 2017 (1577)
Publisher: Ersatz
Language: Swedish (translator Ervin Rosenberg)

We have all heard of Niccolo Machiavelli and “The Prince”. We know it as the monolith in philosophical literature in which the Florentine diplomat delves into the murky depths of power; how to obtain it and how to maintain it. Less famous, and as history has shown, infinitely less influential, is the French lawyer and poet Étienne de la Boétie. De la Boétie was also interested in power but approached the topic from the opposite direction. In his essay “Avhandling om frivillig underkastelse” (”Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”) he attempts to bring clarity to why a community, a city, or indeed an entire nation not only allows a single person to dominate and even enslave them, but moreover, encourage him or her to do so.

“For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him”*

For it is most certainly true, that human history is but a series of temporally interconnected states of affairs where the few subjugate the many. Historical events taught in schools are nothing but episodes where a small élite either seize or abuse the power over one or another population. Monuments are raised, poems are written, and myths are retold by the oppressed in celebration of their oppressors. How is this possible?

Unquestionably, there seem to be certain processes within a community that shrewd pretenders to power can exploit in order to propel themselves to the top of the hierarchy or, indeed, thrust a new order onto said community. Machiavelli’s book deals with these processes and the manipulative techniques a ruler might want to employ to manage them to his or her advantage. De la Boétie in no way questions the existence of such processes or denies the efficiency of various power techniques, but moreover challenges the mere necessity of these processes. His remedy is as simple as it is provocative.

“Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself.”*

Perhaps this is a mirror of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s famous statement “Nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est.” To a free man, threats are impotent.

De la Boétie argues that humans are naturally predisposed to obeying their parents as children but equally prone to rebelling against them in adolescence. In the same way, a refusal to submit to all other authorities is just as natural to him, and yet all of us who rebelled against our guardians as teenagers remain servile to the government throughout our adult lives. We are so preoccupied with the illusion of owning whatever measly earthly possessions we convince ourselves that we have amassed, that we fail to see that we do not even own ourselves in the first place.

Étienne de la Boétie is one of a great many philosophers, some of whom have achieved far greater fame than he, who have wrestled with the concept of freedom and slavery. Thomas Hobbes polemised that autocracy was inevitable, as the only alternative would be chaos. One can either be free in a chaotic and hostile world, or subjugated in an organised and safe one. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was decidedly more optimistic. Although he recognised that humans are systemically enslaved (“L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers”) he made great intellectual efforts to unify order and liberty by means of a so called “social contract” through which society as a whole would guarantee the citizen collective safety and individual freedom at the same time. John Stuart Mill, in his “On Liberty” (reviewed on this blog in December 2019) argues that the role of the government can only be legitimate in so far as it protects the liberties of society. Additionally, he argued, that the greatest threat to individual freedom was not the government or state, but the self-controlling structures of society itself.

Still, I would venture to argue that Jean-Paul Sartre came the closest to answering de la Boétie’s principle question. While de la Boétie argues that all you have to do to stop being oppressed is to stop obeying, Sartre claims that all you need to do is to stop thinking that you are not free. The illusion of slavery, “mauvais fois” in Sartre’s terminology, is a self-fulfilling prophecy which serves only to shackle us with invisible chains. He even argues that humans are “condemned to freedom” and that this is something we generally detest. By being completely free, we are also made directly responsible for our actions. No one to blame. No fingers to point. It is thus easy to imagine mankind, horrified by the crushing responsibility of freedom, rush into the shade of a tyrant who mercifully lifts freedom, and consequently responsibility, from its grateful shoulders.

400 years before Sartre, de la Boétie already promoted a form of anarchy. Essentially, “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” is a call to civil disobedience. He is adamant about revolutions being unnecessary where simple passivity suffices. At the core of the argument is anarchism.

De la Boétie lists three types of ruler.
1. The ruler by election
2. The ruler by force
3. The ruler by inheritance
Of these three, he suggests that the former is the most tolerable, but at the same time he postulates that even that type of ruler will do whatever they need to make themselves absolute and that will in the end make them even more ruthless than any of the other two.

Put in a modern perspective, this leads us to a couple of interesting observations. There is certainly no shortage of anarchists in modern day Europe. They often argue that all governments of all kinds need to be abolished. We can find them to the far left where the state is perceived as nothing but a watchdog for the capital and elite, and to the right where the war-cry “Taxation is theft” is nothing but a catchphrase for anarchy.

This is where I propose that a modern reader needs to tread carefully. De la Boétie lived in an era where the government looked upon the people as their subjects. In a modern democracy, the government’s mandate is from the electorate. This is a fundamental difference which people have fought and died for ever since the rise of liberalism and it must not be neglected or diminished. An orphan growing up in a working-class foster family in a small village far away from the capital becoming the prime minister and leader of the country would be a fairy-tale in de la Boétie’s times but is democracy in ours. It is thus folly to advocate nihilism and anarchy based on writings from the 16^th century.

I do not know if Sartre read “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”. Nor do I know if de la Boétie read “The Prince”. Yet these behemoths in the history of thought are closely interlinked through the study of domination and submission, and they all help us understand ourselves and the choices available to us.

*The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz (Indianapolis: 1942).