This essay is the third in a series designed to dissect
the totalitarian mentality portrayed in George Orwell's
1984 and to draw parallels to trends in modern
academia and the sociopolitical arena of today. The
following is an index of previous portions of this
commentary:
1. Collectivism
2. Antiprogressivism
3.
Relativism
4.
Doublethink
5.
Popular Culture
6.
Newspeak
7. Vaporization
8. The Origin of Tyranny -
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this topic.
The Party
had first manifested itself in Oceania following a
hypothetical massive armed conflict between the NATO
nations and the Eastern Bloc during the 1950s, which had
left the infrastructures of both nations in utter
disrepair, on ground unstable enough for a new radical
tyranny to take root. A decade of turmoil and factional
rivalries ensued, in which the masses were swept up in
the most recent delusion of a "swift fix" to their
torments. The dogma of Marxism, with its veneer of
pseudo-compassionate sentiment for the working class,
quickly proliferated among the proletarians, deceiving
the uneducated into the belief that totalitarianism and
regulation would result in an egalitarian paradise. Such
ideological drifts were exploited by crafty
intellectuals, including the now destroyed Rutherford,
Jones, and Aaronson, in order to institute a transformed
version of Socialism, where the need for moral
justification of the oligarchy's behavior gradually
fades into nothingness as the Witch Doctors obtain a
firmer grasp on their ideal impression of power.
Doublethink, the new elite realized, would with the
passage of time erase the few inconsistencies yet
visible in Ingsoc (i.e. another Newspeak abbreviation
for "English Socialism", which the oligarchy had imposed
due to the wish to conceal the existence in the past of
such a mighty, progressive, capitalist, and
civilization-spreading state as Victorian Britain, and
to mask its identity as a Socialist regime, for numerous
arguments in doublethink require simultaneous praise and
condemnation of such an ideology, and ambiguity
concerning its place in the social order is therefore
most efficient to create compatibility with other Party
institutions).
In the mass uprisings and "grass-roots" philosophical
revolts emerged a clique of power-mongers led by the
mysterious figurehead, Big Brother. He existed as a
rallying point for proletarian fanatics, a technical
fabrication of the Witch Doctors in order to personify
the Party and create sentimental attachments to its
dominance within future slaves. O'Brien admits to Smith
twenty years later that the existence of Big Brother
shall be perpetual, and that Big Brother possesses not
the typical mortality of the individual. Symbolically,
Big Brother is the Party, embodying in his
entirety the lowly schemes of deception, falsification,
and emotional manipulation devised for the purpose of
inflicting suffering upon the persons so misled. Yet who
are the ventriloquists pulling the idol's strings?
"The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of
bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union
organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers,
journalists, and professional politicians. These people,
whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the
upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and
brought together by the barren world of monopoly
industry and centralized government. As compared with
their opposite numbers in the past ages, they were less
avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure
power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were
doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last
difference was cardinal. By comparison with that
existing today, the tyrannies of the past were
half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were
always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and
were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard
only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their
subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the
Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of
the reason for this was that in the past no government
had the power to keep its citizens under constant
surveillance." (p. 169) It would seem to the reader
atrocious that individuals whose social positions and
accomplishments indicate significant degrees of merit
would strive to suffocate further such aspirations for
the accumulation of merit and elevation on the part of
persons extraordinarily similar in occupation and
disposition of character to the emerging oligarchs.
Given such conditions as well as a speck of common sense
one will realize that there exists no inherent evil
within the above-mentioned professions nor in the
persons endeavoring to excel in them. Quite the
contrary, their labors (with the exception of
trade-union organizers, who should possess the right to
carry out their occupations, but not the special
privileges and legal exemptions they demand for the
purpose of crushing free markets and consensual
employment schemes), in a free world, are a necessity
for the acquisition of greater knowledge, material
prosperity, and sound legal statutes, all progressive
developments. Their voices are those of intellect, their
minds of ingenuity, their habits of diligence. If that
much is self-evident, what miserable vice then incited a
faction of their kind to destroy their remainder and
stall progress?
Let us refer for hints to the "common ground" which Mr.
Orwell had described the emerging Party officials to
possess. They held a belief that a centralized, rigid
establishment, looming over the remainder of existence
with a monopolistic stranglehold on all activities. This
is the precise antithesis of capitalism and meritocracy,
where individual choices and competition are the primary
determinants of the economic order and the degree of
control a man or organization would possess over the
available resources. A government that strives to create
an epicenter for all private life and squelch personal
rights is defined as a totalitarian "order", or,
as we had already derived, a totalitarian chaos.
The advocacy of totalitarian chaos formed the Ingsoc
movement. It is of immense difficulty for proper men
to imagine such a pure evil, emerging not as a result of
imposing circumstances (which never in any condition
inhibit an individual's free will) but rather a
volitional advocacy of the retrograde by men who would
have nevertheless been most prominent in a meritocratic
order. Their motivations will, as suggests the next
logical step, be ultimately irrational, i.e. countering
their individual survival interests, as well as those of
the human species. It has already been proven in
multiple ways that the Party's behavior and ideology are
utterly contradictory to logic. Moreover, Ingsoc
concedes this and embarks on a campaign to crush
rationality and objectivity. Their motives must, then,
be the delusions of unreasonable fools. Yet whence
precisely does their immorality emerge?
The key to the answer lies in the emotions and practices
the upholding of which the Party demands, negative
impulses such as fear, hatred, intolerance, inward
fanaticism, outward persecution. These cannot be learned
and are possessed by the ignorant man to a greater
degree than by the cultured one. This is due to the fact
that such experiences are yet another failed string of
creations by Nature for the "survival of the species."
Nature in her pristine state, unlike the moral man,
knows no civility nor common courtesy, and it is her aim
to assure the said "survival" at all costs, death or
degradation of individual included. For this reason in a
purely "natural" setting, the instinct of "species
survival" mandates for a man to frequently exert force
on a fellow member of his kind that his genome would be
transmitted to future generations in the place of his
foe's. Yet, as in all other matters, Nature had here
blundered. A man's wanton destruction of another will
deprive the species of valuable contributions by that
particular individual and his learned skills. The
primeval Wilderness, of course, does not recognize
learned skills and merits of choice; hence the inherent
circumstantialism of instinct and, therefore, its
gene-based irrationality. Yet such mechanical schemes
for action, remaining from the time of our primate
ancestors and the rampant Paleolithic exchanges of
slaughter and genocide, are firmly present within the
ignorant man. It requires a degree of crudeness to
embrace the fallacies of Marxism and the infliction of
suffering as key to power. The collectivism (individual
sacrifice for "the sake of a whole", truly, a
contradiction in terms, for the whole is but the sum of
its parts) that attempts to do harm unto fellow man
possess instinctive roots. A man who had been thoroughly
instructed in the science of logic and in the logic of
science, genuine tools to individual and species
survival, will reject such a doctrine due to its immense
harms in practice. A man unexposed or unreceptive to a
moral and intellectual education, however, will possess
no alternative to such instinctive schemes and will
choose to act upon them, for he is misled into
perceiving that to do evil is virtuous, to torture is
the ultimate goal, to restrict progress is valuable for
the perpetuation of a status quo. Evidently, the men of
such high professions as described by Mr. Orwell had
been thoroughly exposed to the absolute. The only
conclusion remaining is that they had been unwilling
to grasp it.
The force of instinct is abominably strong within men,
and it requires superb fortitude to resist its constant
alternations of whispering and screaming into the mind,
the id destroying the ego. For the ego to thrive and
flourish a man must embrace progress and the value of
his own life. For it to die, a man must submit to his
emotions and inflict a mentality of self-sacrifice and
the sacrifice of beings like him for an artificially
designated "whole," a "group," a "society," a "Party,"
all arbitrary products of an instinctively collectivist
perception with no resonance in the Absolute Reality.
Such an obsequy, apparently, is the coward's way out...
of life. The mechanisms for the individual's subjugation
are from birth present within each specimen. Erudition
is a prerequisite to their rejection and the crafting of
a genuinely beneficial framework of action, of
rational aspiration. The men who designed the Party
had been presented with the opportunity to employ it for
such a purpose, yet they, filled with innate animal
sloth, rejected it, blocking it subconsciously from
their minds and embracing the instinctive creed.
Possessing the exposure but not the receptiveness to
rationality, they inevitably became hostile to their
academic environments due to envy (one of the impulses
propagated by Mr. O'Brien), a "natural condition" that
dictates for the worthless to possess an irrational
loathing directed at the worthy. As years passed, their
generation replaced the previous, predominantly rational
academic paradigm due to time's toll upon those who had
unsuccessfully partaken in their education. Certain
members of the new cult of sloth, crafting an
instinctive "morality" for themselves, in which power is
determined by the capacity to inflict suffering, as in a
primeval world exists no recognition of individual
rights nor that of the need for proper decorum, and the
proliferation of a genetic pattern, not self-interest,
is seen as the pinnacle of virtue. In that warped
idealism the craftiest among them had feigned their
academic interest for the purpose of ascending to
positions where they would be empowered sufficiently for
a sweeping and cataclysmic series of reforms. In
effect, they had become an anti-intellectual
intelligentsia.
The riots of the Sixties were filled with emotional
blather, primarily related to condemnations against
rationality, defamations against individualism, and
slander against capitalism as vile as a previous passage
from Mr. Orwell had described. They were coupled with
violent uprisings, originating from three innate
impulses, fear, envy, and hatred. Fear is an
inexplicable perception of a threat to one's welfare.
Although the combating of threats is key to the Absolute
Morality, the only secure manner of undertaking such
endeavors is through rational evaluation and precise
targeting of the menace. Instinct neglects to accomplish
this. Instead it plants a crude urge within a creature,
the manner of release as well as the recipient of which
are unpredictable. This results in the creation of
scapegoats and in the negligence of the genuine causes
of human misery. This fear, both exhibited by the Party
toward and directed by it against capitalism, became
irrationality's tool for breeding greater irrationality
and imposing its tyranny. The majority of the so-called
working class, an initial backbone of the Party, had not
the sophistication to realize that their enemies, in
actuality, were not capitalism and meritocracy but
insufficient progress, too great a hold of Wilderness on
their lives, insufficient exploitation of the Earth's
material resources, government regulations on the
economy, a lack of education, and the "Ignorance is
Strength" factions which became the Ingsoc movement.
Thus, by assailing their allies, they, both willfully
and through the influence of the anti-intellectual
intelligentsia, had driven themselves to their eventual
state of cattle. Envy, the heated desire to undermine
and degrade anything superior to oneself, was another
urge amplified within the uneducated masses by the new
man-haters. Envy, as has been previously explained,
emerges from pristine Nature's scheme of perpetuating
one's genetic pattern at all costs, even at those of a
superior one (according to the purely Darwinistic
Wilderness, of course, a superior set of DNA is
possessed by a man with the capacity for the most
ruthless elimination of other sets of DNA). This was,
then, targeted at the most prominent members of society,
its businessmen and its genuine thinkers, the advocates
of reason, for the purpose of inflicting suffering upon
them and removing them, for they would have become the
most formidable obstacle to further infliction of
suffering. A third temptation exploited by the Witch
Doctors was hatred, a fanatical, intense, and illogical
dislike of an individual or, as is the case during a
vastly more significant number of occasions, of traits
pertaining to a certain lifestyle or circumstantial
"group". It is the nature of hatred that it
parasitically thrives upon victims of immense merit or
inalterable differences from the dominant paradigm.
Because an organism that condones and cherishes higher
accomplishments than its own, i.e. higher aspirations
than its own, i.e. greater freedom from the status of
Nature's toy than its own, is one free of the
Wilderness's vile scheme of things, she will attempt to
detain him in a condition of obsequy at all costs. Hence
the instinctive requirement for an ignorant man to
despise his superiors in position and intellect and
constantly seek their overt destruction. A man who
supports genius will himself become elevated from the
primeval quagmire as a byproduct of the great man's
acquisitions. The Wilderness wishes to hold him in
place, as to her he is not an end in himself but a tool
for the institution of similar orders of chaos to that
of the Party, namely, ecosystems, where an arbitrary
"whole" prospers through relentless genocide,
extinction, extermination, decay, and cycles of
regeneration and death on all fronts, where there is no
hope for the individual specimen. This is, as has been
demonstrated, is not a mere similarity. The
conditions of animals and those of the Oceanian populace
are identical because they stem from the same primeval
impulses. The power elite of the Party are
themselves feeble slaves to that arbitrary whole known
as the Wilderness, which attempts to dictate to mankind
schemes for suicide. As in the Wilderness, the weak
thrive parasitically upon the corpses of the strong, the
noble are sacrificed to the petty, the innovative are
suppressed by the stagnant, and all perish while the
undefined "whole" remains, precisely because it has not
been clearly labeled, nor its boundaries explicitly
drawn. If they had been, the whole itself would have
inevitably plunged into oblivion as well, for naught but
decomposing tissue can float atop the primordial bog.
Only pseudo-intellectuals branching off from the middle
class would possess the craftiness of mind as well as
the utter stupidity required to enact the scheme of
constant, increasing mass media manipulation, terror
against "thought criminals", and vigilant surveillance
to preclude the emergence of insight into the chaos'
wretched condition. This group, given a will to learn
and a desire to fathom an Absolute Morality of progress
which had been attaining ground steadily during the late
capitalist era (in which the Witch Doctors had been
educated), could have instead worked wonders, produced
geniuses such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Theodore
Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Ayn Rand, Max Planck, and Frank
Lloyd Wright to name a few, who, each within their field
of occupation, elevated the species to unprecedented
heights of comfort while forever (or, in the case of Mr.
Orwell's hypothetical situation, until the Party altered
the past and "deleted" "memory" of them) securing their
own legacies. They could have embraced the centrality of
the individual and his necessity to craft machines for
the uplifting of all and freedom from the original
despot of collectivism. They could have defined power as
the capacity to spend natural resources for the
expansion of civilized influence, or as the individual's
ability to sway other men to voluntary action as a
result of mutually undertaken calculations of gains.
They could have recognized the existence of a single
external world, mastery of which is a prerequisite to
survival. Yet this, from sloth and slavery, they
denounced. And only darkness ensued...
G. Stolyarov II
is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical
essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer,
contributor to
Enter Stage Right,
Le Quebecois Libre,
Rebirth of Reason,
and the
Ludwig von Mises Institute,
Senior Writer for
The Liberal Institute,
and Editor-in-Chief of
The Rational Argumentator,
a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights,
and progress. His newest science fiction novel is
Eden against the Colossus.
His latest non-fiction treatise is
A Rational Cosmology.
Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at
gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.
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A Rational Cosmology,
explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time,
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http://www.geocities.com/rational_argumentator/rc.html.
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