“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
Big Brother?

I was extraordinarily confused, when discussing Orwell and Huxley with my husband a few weeks ago, to realize that I had somehow mentally concatenated 1984 and Brave New World into a single horrendous story. This is the reason why keeping this blog is so important: my memory, much as that of the 1984 characters, appears to be very flexible – though I do not require a Ministry of Truth and doublethink to achieve that suppleness.

1984, then: a world divided between three warring powers (Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia) and a society split between the vast masses of the proletariat (“the proles”) and the ruling bureaucracy of the Party. The hapless party members are under constant surveillance, every deviancy ruthlessly punished, none harder than mind crimes. Under Big Brother, the ultimate transgression is independent thought.

An employee of the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith is part of the huge administration in charge of constantly readjusting any documentation of the past to obliterate any Party failings. All day, he rewrites newspapers that are then reprinted to replace the originals. While he enjoys the minutiae of his job, revolt is growing in his heart, but he is too terrified to act on it… And where to begin when even your sleep is being watched?

Winston starts with a diary – a transgression made possible by a suspicious find (the paper diary, found in a prole shop) and a suspiciously favorable disposition of his apartment (which has an alcove hidden from the eye of the telescreen). From there conspiracy reaches out to him: first a colleague, Julia, initiates an affair with him, and then the Underground (the mythical resistance, which existence remains a question) reaches out to him via O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party. There are touching moments of a man waking back up to himself as long-forgotten memories of his family come back to him, as his body’s constant soreness fades – but of course, as Winston always knew, his escapade soon ends in the caves of the Ministry of Love. There, he is “re-educated”: physically and psychologically tortured until his broken spirit comes to accept the Party’s doctrine as true.

Re-reading 1984, I was just as awed as I remembered being at first read by the completeness of Orwell’s vision. The precision of it, the well-chosen details give it utter reality, and the philosophical erudition of the writer supplies intellectual conviction. Yet, much like Winston before his conversion, I couldn’t help but feel that the Party could not forever endure, no matter how sophisticated the sophisms defending it. Orwell convincingly warns of the dangers of totalitarian collectivism if it was ever cut from its humanitarian roots – dangers we have seen realized in the former USSR (and some manifestations of which we have come to see realized in our very own vision of a “meritocratic” democracy); he is slightly less convincing in his belief than perfect cynicism would somehow be less soluble in human nature than perfect idealism. Yet the danger is here, in our economic life if not in political bureaucracy. I can think of a dozen examples in my own corporate experience of doublethink, of Inner Party corruption and taste for power/ money, of minor vexations, of disgruntled employees enjoying the tasks if not the goals, and ignoring the later to focus on the firsts, of rewriting the past without seeming to notice. In fact, as I type this, I become more and more troubled by the analogies.

I wonder if and how Orwell would write this book today.