[The first two parts of this essay on George Orwell’s 1984 are here and here.]

THOUGHT police, groupthink, thoughtcrime, unperson, memory hole, doublethink and Newspeak — these are words from the book 1984 that have become part of our vocabulary. The novel chillingly depicts psychological warfare through mass propaganda:

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed— if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

Here is the work of a masterful artist, transporting us into a vivid alternate reality, an unforgettably bleak vision of hell on earth.

Orwell, who was born Eric Blair, was a socialist. He was aware of what had happened in Russia. He told the author and producer Sidney Sheldon that the book was about life in Bolshevik regimes:

[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

For good reason, Orwell despised the uniformity, ugliness and inhumanity of industrial capitalism too and many passages in 1984 are reminiscent of his writings on the working poor in England and France.

The main character Winston Smith is 39. He has grown up in London during a devastating war. He survives but his father, mother and sister were all taken away, never to be seen again. He painfully recalls his family:

The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.

Privacy, love, and friendship — these are the casualties of collectivism and ideological fanaticism.

After his mother disappears when he is about ten, Winston lives out his childhood in a colony for homeless children.  Winston’s childhood in London is one of perpetual war, near starvation and orphanhood. London is part of the territory known as Airstrip One in Oceania, a superstate encompassing North America and Great Britain. It’s a greasy, grimy, gritty, unrelentingly depressing world controlled by the Party. The middle class inhabits a monotonous and ugly landscape with bad food, puritanical restrictions and constant surveillance.

Smith comes to work for the Ministry of Truth. He likes his job even thought he participates in systematic lying. He marries, but intensely dislikes his wife, who is cold and warped from propaganda against sex. His affair with Julia is briefly discussed in the previous entry.

Is it surprising, given the circumstances described in the novel, that Winston is not an especially admirable person? That he is not capable of happy family life, that he doesn’t believe in God? One evening when he is taking a walk by himself — an activity discouraged by the Party —  he sees a severed human hand and kicks it into the gutter. It is not surprising that someone with his past would have so little human feeling.

But Winston does have a conscience — and that’s precisely why he commands our attention at all. He objects to what he has become.

He starts to keep a diary. He has haunting dreams of mistreating his mother. He is aware that kicking a human hand into the gutter is not the right thing to do. He is able to perceive the coarseness and brutishness around him and hate them. He fantasizes of giving his life to fight the coercions of the State.

Winston imprudently befriends O’Brien whom he thinks is part of the secret Brotherhood resisting the Party. He turns out to be a member of the secret police. (The Irish name is an interesting, albeit unrealistic twist.) Winston is entrapped. Both he and Julia are arrested.

They had foreseen this moment:

‘The one thing that matters is that we shouldn’t betray one another, although even that can’t make the slightest difference.’

‘If you mean confessing,’ she said, ‘we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can’t help it. They torture you.’

‘I don’t mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal.’

She thought it over. ‘

They can’t do that,’ she said finally. ‘It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—ANYTHING—but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.’

‘No,’ he said a little more hopefully, ‘no; that’s quite true. They can’t get inside you. If you can FEEL that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.

But as it turns out, Winston is optimistic about his own ability to believe “staying human is worth while.”

After their arrest, the process of reeducation begins. O’Brien reveals his fanaticism:

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self abasement. Everything else we shall destroy -everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the link between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.

Winston is tortured and bullied for many days. Faced finally with the possibility of having his face eaten by rats, he relents and betrays Julia, whom the Party knows is the only being that competes with his loyalties to it. He breaks down and begs O’Brien to “do it to Julia” instead.

The Party has gotten inside.

Winston and Julia are released from prison. They are no longer any threat. They meet briefly but are cold and indifferent to each other.

‘I betrayed you,’ she said baldly.

‘I betrayed you,’ he said.

She gave him another quick look of dislike.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.’

‘All you care about is yourself,’ he echoed.

‘And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel the same.’

What’s most interesting here on a psychological level is not that Winston and Julia relent under torture but that they accept the idea after their release that they have betrayed each other. A person can be broken in torture, but afterword disavow or repent of what he has said. They had not exactly betrayed each other with free will. Wouldn’t it be possible that they would come out of prison loving each other more and feeling compassion?

Let’s say they are physically wrecked. That’s plausible. But that doesn’t mean they would feel cruelty toward each other. The novel suggests that the cruelty they felt under torture can’t be undone.

Interestingly, the C.I.A. bought the movie rights to 1984 and in the 1956 movie version its information officers changed the movie’s ending. It was a small, but significant change. Both Winston and Julia cry out, “Down with Big Brother” and are shot at the end.

Though I haven’t seen the movie, this revision strikes me as a change for the better.

Orwell suggests that resistance, even on an inner level, is impossible. Human freedom is a thing of the past. Perhaps that’s why the book is so often on high school reading lists?

According to Russell Kirk,

In a strange and desperate way, Orwell was a lover of the permanent things. Yet because he could discern no source of abiding justice and love in the universe, Orwell found this life of ours not worth living.

He continued:

… He could not say how the total corruption of man and society would be produced; he could not even refer to the intrusion of the diabolical; but he could describe a coming reign of misrule wonderfully like the visions of St. John the Divine. He saw beyond ideology to the approaching inversion of humanitarian dogmas. All the norms for mankind would be defied and defiled. Yet because he could not bring himself to believe in enduring principles of order, or in an Authority transcending private rationality, he was left desperate at the end. A desperado, literally, is a man who has despaired of grace.

In the Christian view, the torturer — not the tortured — lose their humanity. Torture can even redeem us.

Orwell describes a starkly dehumanized world — and his tale itself is dehumanizing. It’s untrue. Given the vividness of its passages, especially the descriptions of torture, it’s even arguably, when promoted and disseminated by the state, a literary tool of terror, one more trick to keep humanity in the grip of fear. When we are afraid, we are powerless. That’s Thoughtcontrol 101!

What really threatens us is not Orwellian thought control, not a grinding machine of state propaganda, but our own potential refusal to make the internal affirmation that Winston refuses to make.

In the end, we only have ourselves to fear. — And God.

— Comments —

Bruce Charlton writes:

I’ve been appreciating your analysis of George Orwell with which I (broadly) agree – positive and negative.

I have found it interesting to speculate whether Orwell might have become a Christian had he lived longer – and the whole, I think he probably would. One small piece of evidence I found on my doorstep, since I live in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, where Orwell’s first wife came-from, and where she is buried; I explained my reasoning in this post.

Eileen Blair had a Church of England burial in a Christian cemetery, and Eric intended to join her.

My hunch is that Orwell’s honesty would have led him to learn from experience. For instance, despite his ‘liberated’ sexual ideas, which I think was a factor in his early anti-Christian aspects. He was seemingly against birth control, and regarded national sub-fertility as a sign of corruption and decadence – once he had seen that the one led to the other, I think he would have made the right choice.

Laura writes:

Thank you for writing, Bruce.

That’s an interesting post and the detail about his wife’s grave is fascinating. His last-minute marriage to Sonia Brownell seems to have been an impulsive decision by a sick man and would probably have been unhappy if he had survived.

You’re right, his honesty might have led him to learn from experience and if he had lived longer he would possibly have undergone major changes in his thinking, perhaps for the better. We don’t know what happened to Eric Blair in the moments before his death. Perhaps he had a spiritual reckoning in the end, but so much of his work is implicitly a protest against the loss of Catholic economic principles and the great charitable edifice that was Catholic England it is hard for me to imagine him an Anglican if he had survived tuberculosis. He had a sincere and profound revulsion against the greed and inhumanity of modern capitalism. There would have been no financial support for him as a writer if he had traced this phenomenon to its source. A writer never becomes famous simply because he is a good writer. He must have financial support from the powerful.

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