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.