tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/1984-1443/articles1984 – The Conversation2023-10-18T16:02:50Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2157352023-10-18T16:02:50Z2023-10-18T16:02:50ZJulia by Sandra Newman: a vibrant retelling of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four<p>George Orwell <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360500/#:%7E:text=He%20did%20get%20Nineteen%20Eighty,while%20I%20was%20writing%20it%27.">apologised to his close friends</a> the writers <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anthony-Powell">Anthony Powell</a> and <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/julian-symons">Julian Symons</a> for his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. He told one that it was “a good idea ruined” and the other that “I ballsed it up rather, partly owing to being so ill while I was writing it.” </p>
<p>For a work often seen as <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/top-classic-political-novels-3368080">the greatest political novel in English of the past century</a>, and certainly the best known and most quoted, this seems an unnecessarily harsh self-review. It’s clear that, ideally, he would have reworked the novel. As it happens, he wrote his apologies from a hospital bed. Orwell died barely six months after Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.</p>
<p>Nearly 75 years later, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/07/orwellian-nightmares-george-orwell-rage-culture-rewriting-1984">Sandra Newman’s</a> new novel, <a href="https://granta.com/contributor/sandra-newman/">Julia</a>, is not so much a reworking of Orwell’s novel as it is a lively and intelligent reorientation of its focus. Her version is told not from the perspective of Orwell’s protagonist, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Winston-Smith">Winston Smith</a>, but that of his lover, Julia.</p>
<p>One indication of the change of emphasis is that Newman’s Julia has a surname – Worthing. This an example of what is often seen as a flaw in the original novel: that Julia is not fleshed out sufficiently. That she is merely Winston’s apolitical love object.</p>
<p>It could be counter argued that given that Winston is the central character – Orwell had thought of calling his novel The Last Man in Europe – it is not surprising that other characters are less three dimensional. </p>
<p>Newman does something similar herself. Winston is a relatively minor character in Julia, appearing only occasionally, if significantly, in key scenes reworked from Nineteen Eighty-Four that give Julia’s view on events.</p>
<h2>Developing Julia</h2>
<p>Of course, one of the ironies Newman uses is that many readers will come to her novel already “knowing” Winston from Orwell’s work. </p>
<p>But whereas in Orwell’s book Winston is the hero (or anti-hero), in Newman’s he is viewed more sceptically. Julia has a backstory that precedes him and her own life (spoiler alert) continues significantly beyond Winston’s famous final capitulation: “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”</p>
<p>Not giving away the details here of Julia’s life pre- and post-Winston preserves the many thoughtful and inventive plot twists, added scenes and characters Newman weaves into the detailed scenario that simultaneously deploys and extends elements from Nineteen Eighty-Four. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/sandra-newman-george-orwell-julia-1984/">The George Orwell Estate approached Newman</a> to write the novel, but it is sufficiently independent minded that it can be seen both as a companion to and a critique of the original.</p>
<p>For instance, Newman explores a plausible take on Julia’s willingness to become Winston’s lover. She develops this beyond their relationship to a more complex exploration of Julia’s perspective on the surveillance state and sexual politics. Through this we find that Julia has an exuberant and earthy imagination.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jmmawolzwCs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Winston (John Hurt) and Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) in the cinematic adaption of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Given the relatively cardboard cut-out nature of the original character in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the foregrounding of her own sexual experiences and sexuality as well as her early life gives her a vitality in this retelling lacking in Orwell’s portrait.</p>
<p>This is not so surprising. Orwell’s female characters (even Dorothy Hare, the eponymous heroine of <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/clergymans-daughter-9781847499097/">A Clergyman’s Daughter</a>, 1935) tend to be slight figures. By contrast, Newman’s Julia Worthing is anchored and adventurous. She’s willing to take risks and to suffer for her actions in ways that might seem unlikely if not impossible with Orwell’s Julia. </p>
<p>Because we follow her, readers see and hear things of which Winston has no knowledge. A natural consequence of this different focus is that, in Newman’s novel, Winston is ignorant of important dynamics that Julia knows of and, in some cases, facilitates.</p>
<h2>Julia’s world view</h2>
<p>One implication of the new novel’s focus is that, because Julia is younger than Winston and has grown with less knowledge of a time before Big Brother, she is less oppressed by the world of Oceania. </p>
<p>His somewhat morose nostalgia contrasts with her more energetic view of reality, allowing her to deal with and resist explicit horrors in the present. And while his job reworking newspapers to suit the ever-changing reality promoted by the Party underpins a knowing rejection of it, her work in the Fiction Department allows for a cynical detachment.</p>
<p>These differences play out in the general moods of the respective books, so that while the world of Julia is dark and unappealing, it exhibits far fewer of the oppressive qualities that torment Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four.</p>
<p>Julia’s more benign view of the world of Big Brother is a feature of Orwell’s portrait. But because in Newman’s novel readers spend more time in Julia’s physical and emotional world, the worldview presented through her is far less subjugated. </p>
<p>These differences also have stylistic implications. Orwell’s stark, gloomy prose is central to his novel’s unrelenting oppression, whereas Newman’s more vibrant style reflects Julia’s energetic resistance to the Party. At least to a point – in time she will have to come to terms with darker forces. </p>
<p>We need not choose one style or approach over the other. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a totemic piece of political literature, but Julia offers contemporary readers new ways of thinking about Orwell’s novel while ingeniously constructing its own, fully realised, world.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215735/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Marks receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Potter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Julia offers contemporary readers new ways of thinking about Orwell’s novel.Simon Potter, Professor of Modern History, University of BristolPeter Marks, Emeritus Professor in English and Writing, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1972672023-01-31T19:31:26Z2023-01-31T19:31:26ZGeorge Santos: A democracy can’t easily penalize lies by politicians<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505662/original/file-20230120-8189-npl0d8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C17%2C5973%2C3970&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">George Santos, in the middle, lied his way to winning election to Congress, where he took the oath of office on Jan. 7, 2023.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/APTOPIXCongress/5e8adfe786f4483295cda7d93dcf20c8/photo?Query=George%20Santos&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=104&currentItemNo=15">AP Photo/Alex Brandon</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>George Santos is not the first politician to have lied, but <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/the-everything-guide-to-george-santoss-lies.html">the fables he told to get elected</a> to Congress may be in a class by themselves. Historian Sean Wilentz remarked that while embellishments happen, Santos’ lies are different – “<a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/1/24/23569138/george-santos-scandal-lies">there is no example like it” in American history, Wilentz told Vox in a late-January, 2023, story</a>.</p>
<p>Columnist <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-george-santos-lies-matter-new-york-house-gop-integrity-deception-fraud-voters-trust-11672347204">Peggy Noonan wrote</a> that Santos was “a stone cold liar who effectively committed election fraud.” </p>
<p>And now Santos has taken the dramatic step of removing himself temporarily from the committees he’s been assigned to: the House Small Business Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee. The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/31/santos-fabrications-committee-assignments-republicans/">Washington Post reports</a> Santos told his GOP colleagues that he would be a “distraction” until cleared in several probes of his lies.</p>
<p>While Santos’ lies got some attention from local media, they did not become widely known until <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny-republicans.html">The New York Times published an exposé</a> after his election. </p>
<p>Santos’ lies may have gotten him into hot water with the voters who put him in the House, and a few of his colleagues, including the New York <a href="https://people.com/politics/new-york-republicans-call-on-george-santos-to-resign/">GOP, want him to resign</a>. <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/george-santos-federal-investigation/">CBS News reported</a> that federal investigators are looking at Santos’ finances and financial disclosures.</p>
<p>But the bulk of Santos’ misrepresentations may be protected by the <a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/">First Amendment</a>. The U.S. Supreme Court has concluded that lies enjoy First Amendment protection – not because of their value, but because the government cannot be trusted with the power to regulate lies. </p>
<p>In other words, lies are protected by the First Amendment to safeguard democracy. </p>
<p>So how can unwitting voters be protected from sending a fraud to Congress? </p>
<p>Any attempt to craft a law aimed at the lies in politics will run into practical enforcement problems. And attempts to regulate such lies could collide with a 2012 Supreme Court case <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2011/11-210">United States v. Alvarez</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505664/original/file-20230120-12-33u2r3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A large, columned white building at the top of a grand, white set of stairs." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505664/original/file-20230120-12-33u2r3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505664/original/file-20230120-12-33u2r3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505664/original/file-20230120-12-33u2r3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505664/original/file-20230120-12-33u2r3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505664/original/file-20230120-12-33u2r3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505664/original/file-20230120-12-33u2r3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505664/original/file-20230120-12-33u2r3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that some false statements are ‘inevitable if there is to be open and vigorous expression of views.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/SupremeCourtDisabilitiesEducation/c46b6b0bf6ab45a4b6600360efe3083c/photo?Query=U.S.%20Supreme%20Court&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=8325&currentItemNo=19">AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Lies and the First Amendment</h2>
<p>Xavier Alvarez was a fabulist and a member of a public water board who <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-activities/facts-and-case-summary-us-v-alvarez">lied about having received the Congressional Medal of Honor</a> in a public meeting. He was charged in 2007 with violating the <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/s1998">Stolen Valor Act</a>, which made it a federal crime to lie about having received a military medal. </p>
<p>The Supreme Court rejected the government’s argument that lies should not be protected by the First Amendment. The court concluded that lies are protected by the First Amendment unless there is a legally recognized harm, such as defamation or fraud, associated with the lie. So the Stolen Valor Act was struck down as an unconstitutional restriction on speech. The court pointed out that some false statements are “inevitable if there is to be open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation.” </p>
<p>Crucially, the court feared that the power to criminalize lies could damage American democracy. The court reasoned that unless the First Amendment limits the power of the government to criminalize lies, the government could establish an “endless list of subjects about which false statements are punishable.” </p>
<p>Justice Anthony Kennedy, <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/567/709/#tab-opinion-1970529">who wrote the majority opinion</a> in Alvarez, illustrated this danger by citing <a href="https://www.george-orwell.org/1984">George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984</a>,” in which a totalitarian government relied on a Ministry of Truth to criminalize dissent. Our constitutional tradition, he wrote, “stands against the idea that we need” a Ministry of Truth.</p>
<h2>Lies, politics and social media</h2>
<p>George Santos, unlike Xavier Alvarez, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2023/01/18/george-santos-mom-wasnt-in-new-york-on-911-report-says-heres-the-full-list-of-his-lies/?sh=7e6598a46ce6">lied during an election campaign</a>.</p>
<p>In Alvarez, the Supreme Court expressed concern about laws criminalizing lies in politics. It warned that the Stolen Valor Act applied to “political contexts, where although such lies are more likely to cause harm,” the risk that prosecutors would bring charges for ideological reasons was also high. </p>
<p>The court believed that the marketplace of ideas was a more effective and less dangerous mechanism for policing lies, particularly in politics. Politicians and journalists have the incentives and the resources to examine the records of candidates such as Santos to uncover and expose falsehoods. </p>
<p>The story of George Santos, though, is a cautionary tale for those who hold an idealized view of how the marketplace of ideas operates in contemporary American politics. </p>
<p>Democracy has not had a long run when measured against the course of human history. From the founding of the American republic in the late 18th century <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/9780812250848/democracy-and-truth/">until the advent of the modern era</a>, there was a rough division of labor. Citizens selected leaders, and experts played a critical gatekeeping role, mediating the flow of information. </p>
<p>New information technologies have largely <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691180908/republic">displaced the role of experts</a>. Everyone now claims to be an expert who can decide for themselves whether COVID-19 vaccines are effective or who really won the 2020 presidential election. These technologies <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/03/1113702">have also destroyed the economic model</a> that once sustained local newspapers. </p>
<p>Thus, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/small-local-paper-uncovered-and-reported-george-santos-scandal-before-november-election">although one local newspaper did report on Santos’ misrepresentations</a>, his election is evidence that the loss of news reporting jobs has damaged America’s democracy. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505665/original/file-20230120-14-rrx667.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A piece of newspaper, burning up" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505665/original/file-20230120-14-rrx667.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505665/original/file-20230120-14-rrx667.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505665/original/file-20230120-14-rrx667.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505665/original/file-20230120-14-rrx667.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505665/original/file-20230120-14-rrx667.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505665/original/file-20230120-14-rrx667.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505665/original/file-20230120-14-rrx667.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">With the news business in serious decline, citizens don’t get the information they need to be informed voters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/burning-headlines-as-newspaper-catches-fire-royalty-free-image/1396098618?phrase=journalism%20decline&adppopup=true">iStock / Getty Images Plus</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Lies that harm democracy</h2>
<p>The election of George Santos illustrates the challenges facing American democracy. The First Amendment was written in an era when government censorship was the principal danger to self-government. Today, politicians and ordinary citizens can harness <a href="https://constitutionalstudies.wisc.edu/index.php/cs/article/view/73">new information technologies to spread misinformation and deepen polarization</a>. A weakened news media will fail to police those assertions, or a partisan news media will amplify them. </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=aIWyIH8AAAAJ&hl=en">scholar of constitutional law, comparative constitutionalism, democracy and authoritarianism</a>, I believe that Justice Kennedy’s Alvarez opinion relied on a flawed understanding of the dangers facing democracy. He maintained that government regulation of speech is a greater threat to democracy than are lies. Laws that targeted lies would have to survive the most exacting scrutiny – which is nearly always fatal to government regulation of speech.</p>
<p><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/567/709/">Justice Stephen Breyer’s concurring opinion</a> argued that a different test should be used. Courts, Breyer said, should assess any speech-related harm that might flow from the law as well as the importance of the government objective and whether the law furthers that objective. This is known as intermediate scrutiny or proportionality analysis. It is a form of analysis that is widely used by <a href="https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/302/">constitutional courts in other democracies</a>. </p>
<p>Intermediate scrutiny or proportionality analysis does not treat all government regulations of speech as presumptively unconstitutional. It forces courts to balance the value of the speech against the justifications for the law in question. That is the right test, Justice Breyer concluded, when assessing laws that penalize “false statements about easily verifiable facts.”</p>
<p>The two approaches will lead to different results when governments seek to regulate lies. Even proposed, narrowly written laws aimed at factual misrepresentations by politicians about <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/congressmans-santos-bill-aims-ban-obvious-candidates-who-lie-1770285">their records</a> or <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/in-testimony-wa-gov-inslee-says-bill-on-lying-about-election-results-written-to-protect-the-first-amendment/">about who won an election</a> might not survive the high degree of protection afforded lies in the United States.</p>
<p>Intermediate scrutiny or proportionality analysis, on the other hand, will likely enable some government regulation of lies – including those of the next George Santos – to survive legal challenge.</p>
<p>Democracies have a better long-term survival track record than dictatorships because they can and do <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178134/the-confidence-trap">evolve to deal with new dangers</a>. The success of America’s experiment in self-government may well hinge, I believe, on whether the country’s democracy can evolve to deal with new information technologies that help spread <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393357424">falsehoods that undermine democracy</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197267/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Miguel Schor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When candidates can get elected to Congress based on a mountain of lies they’ve told, is it time to reconsider whether such lies are protected by the First Amendment?Miguel Schor, Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Drake University Constitutional Law Center, Drake UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1654312021-08-12T12:26:36Z2021-08-12T12:26:36ZOrwell’s ideas remain relevant 75 years after ‘Animal Farm’ was published<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415532/original/file-20210810-27-1ph6862.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=65%2C28%2C2617%2C1920&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">George Orwell's writings have left a lasting imprint on American thought and culture.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/schriftsteller-grossbritannienan-seiner-schreibmaschine-news-photo/541450111?adppopup=true">ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Seventy-five years ago, in August 1946, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was published in the United States. It was a huge success, <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/currents/20150824_70-year-old__Animal_Farm__is_still_worth_a_read.html">with over a half-million copies sold in its first year</a>. “Animal Farm” was followed three years later by an even bigger success: Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” </p>
<p>In the years since, Orwell’s writing has left an indelible mark on American thought and culture. Sales of “<a href="https://money.cnn.com/2013/06/12/news/1984-nsa-snowden/">Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” jumped</a> in 2013 after the whistleblower Edward Snowden <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance">leaked confidential National Security Agency</a> documents. And “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/books/1984-george-orwell-donald-trump.html">Nineteen Eighty-Four” rose to the top of Amazon’s best-sellers list</a> after Donald Trump’s Presidential Inauguration in 2017.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://clasprofiles.wayne.edu/profile/hf1190">philosophy professor</a>, I’m interested in the continuing relevance of Orwell’s ideas, including those on totalitarianism and socialism.</p>
<h2>Early career</h2>
<p><a href="https://sutherlandhousebooks.square.site/product/george-orwell-a-life/4">George Orwell</a> was the pen name of Eric Blair. Born in 1903 in colonial India, Blair later moved to England, where he attended elite schools on scholarships. After finishing school, he joined the British civil service, working in Burma, now Myanmar. At age 24, Orwell returned to England to become a writer.</p>
<p>During the 1930s, Orwell had modest success as an essayist, journalist and novelist. He also <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/books-by-orwell/homage-to-catalonia/">served as a volunteer soldier</a> with a left-wing militia group that fought on behalf of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. During the conflict, Orwell experienced how propaganda could shape political narratives through observing inaccurate reporting of events he experienced firsthand.</p>
<p>Orwell <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/">later summarized</a> the purpose of his writing from roughly the Spanish Civil War onward: “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been, directly or indirectly, <em>against</em> totalitarianism and <em>for</em> democratic Socialism.” </p>
<p>Orwell did not specify in that passage what he meant by either totalitarianism or democratic socialism, but some of his other works clarify how he understood those terms.</p>
<h2>What is totalitarianism?</h2>
<p>For Orwell, totalitarianism was a political order focused on power and control. The totalitarian attitude is exemplified by the antagonist, O'Brien, in “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The fictional O'Brien is a powerful government official who uses torture and manipulation to gain power over the thoughts and actions of the protagonist, Winston Smith. Significantly, O'Brien treats his desire for power as an end in itself. O'Brien represents power for power’s sake.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A copy of George Orwell's novel '1984' is displayed at The Last Bookstore on January 25, 2017, in Los Angeles." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/415534/original/file-20210810-23-s4p5q4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (‘1984’) surged to the top of Amazon.com’s best-sellers list after Donald Trump’s Presidential Inauguration in 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/copy-of-george-orwells-novel-1984-is-displayed-at-the-last-news-photo/632692742?adppopup=true">Justin Sullivan/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Much of Orwell’s keenest insights concern what totalitarianism is incompatible with. In his 1941 essay “<a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-lion-and-the-unicorn-socialism-and-the-english-genius/">The Lion and the Unicorn</a>,” Orwell writes of “The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power … .” In other words, laws can limit a ruler’s power. Totalitarianism seeks to obliterate the limits of law through the uninhibited exercise of power. </p>
<p>Similarly, in his 1942 essay “<a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/looking-back-on-the-spanish-war/">Looking Back on the Spanish War</a>,” Orwell argues that totalitarianism must deny that there are neutral facts and objective truth. Orwell identifies liberty and truth as “safeguards” against totalitarianism. The exercise of liberty and the recognition of truth are actions incompatible with the total centralized control that totalitarianism requires.</p>
<p>Orwell understood that totalitarianism could be found on the political right and left. For Orwell, both Nazism and Communism were totalitarian.</p>
<p>Orwell’s work, in my view, challenges us to resist permitting leaders to engage in totalitarian behavior, regardless of political affiliation. It also reminds us that some of our best tools for resisting totalitarianism are to tell truths and to preserve liberty. </p>
<h2>What is democratic socialism?</h2>
<p>In his 1937 book “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/20/orwell-wigan-pier-75-years">The Road to Wigan Pier</a>,” Orwell writes that socialism means “justice and liberty.” The justice he refers to goes beyond mere economic justice. It also includes social and political justice. </p>
<p>Orwell elaborates on what he means by socialism in “<a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-lion-and-the-unicorn-socialism-and-the-english-genius/">The Lion and the Unicorn</a>.” According to him, socialism requires “approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privileges, especially in education.”</p>
<p>In fleshing out what he means by “approximate equality of incomes,” Orwell later says in the same essay that income equality shouldn’t be greater than a ratio of about 10 to 1. In its modern-day interpretation, this suggests Orwell could find it ethical for a CEO to make 10 times more than their employees, but not to make 300 times more, <a href="https://aflcio.org/press/releases/average-sp-500-company-ceo-worker-pay-ratio-rises-299-1-2020">as the average CEO in the United States does today</a>.</p>
<p>But in describing socialism, Orwell discusses more than economic inequality. Orwell’s writings indicate that his preferred conception of socialism also requires “political democracy.” As <a href="https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-david-dwan#/">scholar David Dwan</a> has noted, Orwell distinguished “<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/liberty-equality-and-humbug-9780198738527?cc=us&lang=en&">two concepts of democracy</a>.” The first concept refers to political power resting with the common people. The second is about having classical liberal freedoms, like freedom of thought. Both notions of democracy seem relevant to what Orwell means by democratic socialism. For Orwell, democratic socialism is a political order that provides social and economic equality while also preserving robust personal freedom. </p>
<p>I believe Orwell’s description of democratic socialism and his recognition that there are various forms socialism can take remain important today given that American political dialogue about socialism often overlooks much of the nuance Orwell brings to the subject. For example, Americans <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/do-you-know-difference-between-communist-and-socialist-a6708086.html">often confuse socialism with communism</a>. Orwell helps clarify the difference between these terms.</p>
<p>With <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/07/6-facts-about-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s/">high levels of economic inequality</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/new-study-says-trump-has-dangerously-undermined-truth-with-attacks-on-news-media/2020/04/15/4152f81c-7f2d-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html">political assaults on truth</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/totalitarian-ideologies-never-die-not-even-in-america/2017/11/03/3d39648e-c09c-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html">renewed concerns about totalitarianism</a>, Orwell’s ideas remain as relevant now as they were 75 years ago.</p>
<p>[<em>Explore the intersection of faith, politics, arts and culture.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/this-week-in-religion-76/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=religion-explore">Sign up for This Week in Religion.</a>]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165431/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Satta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was an instant success when it was first published. His writings on totalitarianism and socialism continue to be relevant today.Mark Satta, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Wayne State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1369082020-04-29T12:11:14Z2020-04-29T12:11:14ZAre we living in a dystopia?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330857/original/file-20200427-145503-so76k5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">State police officers during a "Reopen Virginia" rally around Capitol Square in Richmond on April 22, 2020. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/state-police-officers-monitor-activity-during-a-reopen-news-photo/1210663121?adppopup=true">Getty/Ryan M. Kelly / AFP</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Dystopian fiction is hot. Sales of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/326569/1984-by-george-orwell-with-a-foreword-by-thomas-pynchon/">George Orwell’s “1984”</a> and Margaret <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/6125/the-handmaids-tale-by-margaret-atwood/">Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”</a> have <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/02/dystopian-fiction-why-we-read/">skyrocketed</a> since 2016. Young adult dystopias – for example, <a href="https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/books/hunger-games-the-by-suzanne-collins/">Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games,”</a> <a href="https://veronicarothbooks.com/books/divergent/">Veronica Roth’s “Divergent,”</a> <a href="https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/The-Giver/9780547345901">Lois Lowry’s classic, “The Giver”</a> – were best-sellers even before. </p>
<p>And with COVID-19, dystopias featuring diseases have taken on new life. Netflix reports <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/outbreak-movie-top-10-netflix-titles-movies-pandemic-tv-series-coronavirus/">a spike in popularity</a> for “Outbreak,” “12 Monkeys” and <a href="http://blog.dvd.netflix.com/new-dvd-releases/4-virus-related-films-to-watch-in-the-time-of-covid-19">others</a>. </p>
<p>Does this popularity signal that people think they live in a dystopia now? Haunting images of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/23/world/coronavirus-great-empty.html">empty city squares</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronavirus-wild-animals-wales-goats-barcelona-boars-brazil-turtles/2020/04/14/30057b2c-7a71-11ea-b6ff-597f170df8f8_story.html">wild animals roaming streets</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/business/economy/coronavirus-food-banks.html">miles-long food pantry lines</a> certainly suggest this. </p>
<p>We want to offer another view. “Dystopia” is a powerful but overused term. It is not a synonym for a terrible time. </p>
<p>The question for us as <a href="http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jnBSYuwAAAAJ&hl=en">political</a> <a href="http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LWLkiYMAAAAJ&hl=en">scientists</a> is not whether things are bad (they are), but how governments act. A government’s poor handling of a crisis, while maddening and sometimes disastrous, does not constitute dystopia. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330876/original/file-20200427-145566-jkjxke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330876/original/file-20200427-145566-jkjxke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330876/original/file-20200427-145566-jkjxke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330876/original/file-20200427-145566-jkjxke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330876/original/file-20200427-145566-jkjxke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330876/original/file-20200427-145566-jkjxke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330876/original/file-20200427-145566-jkjxke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330876/original/file-20200427-145566-jkjxke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Today’s empty city streets capture the feeling of a dystopian time.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/empty-city-coronavirus?agreements=pa:77130&family=editorial&locations=61907&phrase=empty%20city%20coronavirus&sort=newest#license">Getty/Roy Rochlin</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Legitimate coercion</h2>
<p>As we argue in our book, “<a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/survive-and-resist/9780231188913">Survive and Resist: the Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics</a>,” the definition of dystopia is political.</p>
<p>Dystopia is not a real place; it is a warning, usually about something bad the government is doing or something good it is failing to do. Actual dystopias are fictional, but real-life governments can be “dystopian” – as in, looking a lot like the fiction. </p>
<p>Defining a dystopia starts with establishing the characteristics of good governance. A good government protects its citizens in a noncoercive way. It is the body best positioned to prepare for and guard against <a href="https://la.curbed.com/2018/4/17/17244978/lucy-jones-book-earthquake-flood">natural</a> and human-made horrors. </p>
<p>Good governments use what’s called “<a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a228/d1aceec6ea2cadf1c41d2319793dd0ca9d30.pdf">legitimate coercion</a>,” legal force to <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legitimacy/">which citizens agree</a> to keep order and <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174556/read-my-lips">provide services</a> like roads, schools and national security. Think of legitimate coercion as your willingness to stop at a red light, knowing it’s better for you and others in the long run. </p>
<p>No government is perfect, but there are ways of judging the imperfection. Good governments (those least imperfect) include a strong core of <a href="https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/Methodology_Proof1.pdf">democratic elements</a> to check the powerful and create <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Development_as_Freedom/Qm8HtpFHYecC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=amartya%20sen%20development%20as%20freedom&pg=PR4&printsec=frontcover">accountability.</a> They also include constitutional and judicial measures to check the power of the majority. This setup acknowledges the need for government but evidences <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Federalist-Anti-Federalist-Papers/dp/1495446697">healthy skepticism</a> of giving too much power to any one person or body. </p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=EWbOLZcXugsC&lpg=PA1&ots=G0KJZqipPn&dq=federalism%20democracy%20devolution&lr&pg=PR4#v=onepage&q&f=false">Federalism</a>, the division of power between national and subnational governments, is a further check. It has proved useful lately, with <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/13/politics/states-band-together-reopening-plans/index.html">state governors and mayors</a> emerging as strong political players during COVID-19.</p>
<h2>Three kinds of dystopias</h2>
<p>Bad governments lack checks and balances, and rule in the interest of the rulers rather than the people. <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0058%3Abook%3D3">Citizens</a> can’t participate in their own governance. But dystopian governments are a special kind of bad; they use illegitimate coercion like force, threats and the “disappearing” of dissidents to stay in power. </p>
<p>Our book catalogs three major dystopia types, based on the presence – or absence – of a functioning state and how much power it has. </p>
<p>There are, as in Orwell’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/1984-George-Orwell-ebook/dp/B003JTHWKU/ref=sr_1_1?crid=6FALM24842SX&dchild=1&keywords=orwell+1984&qid=1586894038&s=books&sprefix=orwell+%2Cstripbooks%2C142&sr=1-1">“1984,”</a> overly powerful governments that infringe on individual lives and liberties. These are authoritarian states, run by dictators or powerful groups, like a single party or corporate-governance entity. Examples of these governments abound, including <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/20/syria-torture-opposition-regime-defector/">Assad’s murderously repressive regime in Syria</a> and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm5pE_BDtCc">silencing of dissent</a> and <a href="https://cpj.org/data/killed/europe/russia/?status=Killed&motiveConfirmed%5B%5D=Confirmed&type%5B%5D=Journalist&cc_fips%5B%5D=RS&start_year=1992&end_year=2020&group_by=location">journalism</a> in Russia. </p>
<p>The great danger of these is, as our country’s Founding Fathers knew quite well, too much power on the part of any one person or group limits the options and autonomy of the masses. </p>
<p>Then there are dystopic states that seem nonauthoritarian but still take away basic human rights through market forces; we call these “capitocracies.” Individual workers and consumers are often exploited by the political-industrial complex, and the environment and other public goods suffer. A great fictional example is <a href="https://www.pixar.com/feature-films/walle">Wall-E</a> by Pixar (2008), in which the U.S. president is also CEO of “Buy ‘N Large,” a multinational corporation controlling the economy. </p>
<p>There are not perfect real-life examples of this, but elements are visible in the <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/republic-samsung">chaebol</a> – <a href="https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/south-koreas-chaebol-challenge">family business</a> – power in South Korea, and in various manifestations of corporate political power in the U.S, including <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/12/05/tracking-deregulation-in-the-trump-era/">deregulation</a>, corporate <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/575125/corporations-are-not-people-by-jeffrey-d-clements/">personhood</a> status and big-company <a href="https://time.com/5814076/coronavirus-stimulus-bill-corporate-bailout/">bailouts</a>.</p>
<p>Lastly there are state-of-nature dystopias, usually resulting from the collapse of a failed government. The resulting territory reverts to a primitive feudalism, ungoverned except for small tribal-held fiefdoms where individual dictators rule with impunity. The Citadel versus Gastown in the stunning 2015 movie <a href="https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/mad-max-fury-road/">“Mad Max: Fury Road”</a> is a good fictional depiction. A real-life example was seen in the once barely governed <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/23/somalia-no-longer-a-failed-state-just-a-fragile-one-says-un">Somalia</a>, where, for almost 20 years until 2012, as a U.N. official described it, “armed warlords (were) fighting each other on a clan basis.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330874/original/file-20200427-145503-3vslgu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330874/original/file-20200427-145503-3vslgu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330874/original/file-20200427-145503-3vslgu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330874/original/file-20200427-145503-3vslgu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330874/original/file-20200427-145503-3vslgu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330874/original/file-20200427-145503-3vslgu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330874/original/file-20200427-145503-3vslgu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330874/original/file-20200427-145503-3vslgu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fiction best describes dystopia – as in this reference to the landmark dystopian novel, ‘1984,’ by George Orwell.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/graffiti-1984-is-now-titel-of-the-novel-1984-by-george-news-photo/545003371?adppopup=true">Getty/Schöning/ullstein bild</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Fiction and real life</h2>
<p>Indeed, political dystopia is often easier to see using the lens of fiction, which exaggerates behaviors, trends and patterns to make them more visible. </p>
<p>But behind the fiction there is always a real-world correlate. Orwell had <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/books/review/dorian-lynskey-ministry-of-truth-1984.html">Stalin, Franco and Hitler</a> very much in mind when writing “1984.” </p>
<p>Atwood, whom literary critics call the “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/margaret-atwood-the-prophet-of-dystopia">prophet of dystopia</a>,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/15/margaret-atwood-interview-english-pen-pinter-prize">recently defined dystopia</a> as when “[W]arlords and demagogues take over, some people forget that all people are people, enemies are created, vilified and dehumanized, minorities are persecuted, and human rights as such are shoved to the wall.” </p>
<p>Some of this may be, as Atwood <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/15/margaret-atwood-interview-english-pen-pinter-prize">added</a>, the “cusp of where we are living now.” </p>
<p>But the U.S. is not a dystopia. It still has functioning democratic institutions. Many in the U.S. fight against dehumanization and persecution of minorities. Courts are adjudicating cases. Legislatures are passing bills. Congress has not <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-nominations/trump-threatens-to-adjourn-u-s-congress-idUSKCN21X3GI">adjourned</a>, nor has the fundamental right of habeas corpus – the protection against illegal detention by the state – (yet) been <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/doj-coronavirus-emergency-powers-140023">suspended</a>. </p>
<h2>Crisis as opportunity</h2>
<p>And still. One frequent warning is that a major crisis can cover for the rolling back of democracy and curtailing of freedoms. In Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a medical crisis is the pretext for suspending the Constitution. </p>
<p>In real life, too, crises facilitate authoritarian backsliding. In Hungary the pandemic has sped democracy’s unraveling. The legislature gave strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orban the power to <a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/understanding-hungarys-authoritarian-response-pandemic">rule by sole decree indefinitely</a>, the lower courts are suspended and free speech is restricted. </p>
<p>Similar dangers exist in any number of countries where democratic institutions are frayed or fragile; leaders with authoritarian tendencies may be tempted to leverage the crisis to consolidate power.</p>
<p>But there are also positive signs for democracy. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330860/original/file-20200427-145544-nfvkhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330860/original/file-20200427-145544-nfvkhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330860/original/file-20200427-145544-nfvkhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330860/original/file-20200427-145544-nfvkhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330860/original/file-20200427-145544-nfvkhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330860/original/file-20200427-145544-nfvkhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330860/original/file-20200427-145544-nfvkhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330860/original/file-20200427-145544-nfvkhi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A sign ‘We are in this together’ is written in chalk on the sidewalk in front of NYU Langone Medical Center during the coronavirus pandemic on April 22, 2020 in New York City.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/sign-we-are-in-this-together-is-written-in-chalk-on-the-news-photo/1220487757?adppopup=true">Getty/John Lamparski</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/3/30/21199785/homemade-coronavirus-masks-n95-ppe">People are coming together</a> in ways that didn’t seem possible just a few months ago. This <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-vu-face-shields-st-0416-20200413-zyreuxfwqfajhirqlql2khhpj4-story.html">social capital</a> is an <a href="http://robertdputnam.com/bowling-alone/social-capital-primer/">important element</a> in a democracy. </p>
<p>Ordinary people are performing incredible acts of kindness and generosity – from <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/us/coronavirus-student-volunteers-grocery-shop-elderly-iyw-trnd/index.html">shopping for neighbors</a> to <a href="https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2020/03/17/son-serenades-mom-during-coronavirus-lockdown-harmony-brentwood-tennessee-nursing-home/5065211002/">serenading residents at a nursing home</a> to a <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/3/30/21199785/homemade-coronavirus-masks-n95-ppe">mass movement to sew facemasks</a>. </p>
<p>In politics, Wisconsin primary voters risked their lives to exercise their right to vote during the height of the pandemic. <a href="https://wisconsinexaminer.com/brief/voters-sue-legislature-leaders-and-wec-demanding-april-7-revote/">Citizens</a> and <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/14/time-essence-after-wisconsin-fiasco-150-civil-rights-groups-urge-congress-protect">civil society</a> are pushing federal and state governments to ensure election safety and integrity in the remaining primaries and the November election.</p>
<p>Despite the eerie silence in public spaces, despite the preventable deaths that should weigh heavily on the consciences of public officials, even despite the authoritarian tendencies of too many leaders, the U.S. is not a dystopia – yet. </p>
<p>Overuse clouds the word’s meaning. Fictional dystopias warn of preventable futures; those warnings can help avert the actual demise of democracy.</p>
<p>[<em>Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=upper-coronavirus-facts">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.</a>]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/136908/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>‘Dystopia’ is a term that’s gained popularity during the coronavirus pandemic. But it’s not a synonym for ‘a bad time,’ and a government’s poor handling of a crisis does not constitute dystopia.Shauna Shames, Associate Professor, Rutgers UniversityAmy Atchison, Associate Professor of Political Science & International Relations, Valparaiso UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1169402019-06-12T11:31:44Z2019-06-12T11:31:44ZWhat Orwell’s ‘1984’ tells us about today’s world, 70 years after it was published<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278699/original/file-20190610-52785-m9oejz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The dominant reading of George Orwell's dystopian novel, "1984" has been that it was a dire prediction of what could be. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Denis_C%C3%B4t%C3%A9_l%27%C3%A9crivain_lisant_%221984%22_de_George_Orwell.jpg#filehistory">Denis Hamel Côté</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Seventy years ago, Eric Blair, writing under a pseudonym George Orwell, published “1984,” now generally considered <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/19/legacy-george-orwell-nineteen-eighty-four">a classic of dystopian fiction</a>. </p>
<p>The novel tells the story of Winston Smith, a hapless middle-aged bureaucrat who lives in Oceania, where he is governed by constant surveillance. Even though there are no laws, there is a police force, the “Thought Police,” and the constant reminders, on posters, that “Big Brother Is Watching You.” </p>
<p>Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, and his job is to rewrite the reports in newspapers of the past to conform with the present reality. Smith lives in a constant state of uncertainty; he is not sure the year is in fact 1984. </p>
<p>Although the official account is that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, Smith is quite sure he remembers that just a few years ago they had been at war with Eastasia, who has now been proclaimed their constant and loyal <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=FTHnGZeroUoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=George+Orwell+1984+Annotated&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjohJSI2c3iAhU0JzQIHTEhAcQQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=George%20Orwell%201984%20Annotated&f=false">ally</a>. The society portrayed in “1984” is one in which social control is exercised through disinformation and surveillance. </p>
<p>As a scholar of <a href="https://washington.academia.edu/StephenGroening">television and screen culture</a>, I argue that the techniques and technologies described in the novel are very much present in today’s world.</p>
<h2>‘1984’ as history</h2>
<p>One of the key technologies of surveillance in the novel is the “telescreen,” a device very much like our own television. </p>
<p>The telescreen displays a single channel of news, propaganda and wellness programming. It differs from our own television in two crucial respects: It is impossible to turn off and the screen also watches its viewers. </p>
<p>The telescreen is television and surveillance camera in one. In the novel, the character Smith is never sure if he is being actively monitored through the telescreen.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278700/original/file-20190610-52739-r85r9b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278700/original/file-20190610-52739-r85r9b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278700/original/file-20190610-52739-r85r9b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278700/original/file-20190610-52739-r85r9b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278700/original/file-20190610-52739-r85r9b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278700/original/file-20190610-52739-r85r9b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278700/original/file-20190610-52739-r85r9b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A publicity photo on the set of the CBS anthology television series ‘Studio One’ depicts a presentation of George Orwell’s ‘1984.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/1984_Norma_Crane_Eddie_Albert_Studio_One_1953.jpg">CBS Television</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Orwell’s telescreen was based in the technologies of television pioneered prior to World War II and could hardly be seen as science fiction. In the 1930s Germany had a working videophone system in <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3815277">place</a>, and television programs were already being broadcast in parts of the United States, Great Britain and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107769900608300307">France</a>. </p>
<h2>Past, present and future</h2>
<p>The dominant reading of “1984” has been that it was a dire prediction of what could be. In the words of Italian essayist <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5856/umberto-eco-the-art-of-fiction-no-197-umberto-eco">Umberto Eco,</a> “at least three-quarters of what Orwell narrates is not negative utopia, but <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=u7wTAQAAIAAJ&dq=umberto+eco+apocalypse&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=orwell">history</a>.” </p>
<p>Additionally, scholars have also remarked how clearly “1984” describes the present. </p>
<p>In 1949, when the novel was written, Americans watched on average four and a half hours of television a day; in 2009, almost twice <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-did-tv-watching-peak/561464/">that</a>. In 2017, television watching was slightly down, to eight hours, more time than we spent <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/166553/less-recommended-amount-sleep.aspx">asleep</a>. </p>
<p>In the U.S. the information transmitted over television screens came to constitute a dominant portion of people’s social and psychological lives. </p>
<h2>‘1984’ as present day</h2>
<p>In the year 1984, however, there was much self-congratulatory coverage in the U.S. that the dystopia of the novel had not been realized. But media studies scholar <a href="https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty/Mark_Crispin_Miller">Mark Miller</a> argued how the famous slogan from the book, “Big Brother Is Watching You” had been turned to “Big Brother is you, watching” <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41398748">television</a>. </p>
<p>Miller argued that television in the United States teaches a different kind of conformity than that portrayed in the novel. In the novel, the telescreen is used to produce conformity to the Party. In Miller’s argument, television produces conformity to a system of rapacious consumption – through advertising as well as a focus on the rich and famous. It also promotes endless productivity, through messages regarding the meaning of success and the virtues of hard <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41398748">work</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278706/original/file-20190610-52776-ggwbg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278706/original/file-20190610-52776-ggwbg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278706/original/file-20190610-52776-ggwbg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278706/original/file-20190610-52776-ggwbg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278706/original/file-20190610-52776-ggwbg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278706/original/file-20190610-52776-ggwbg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278706/original/file-20190610-52776-ggwbg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Television has a profound effect on its viewers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/closeup-couple-watching-film-on-television-609057623?src=zdrh94jCvhy7l1P7g_-ANw-1-56">Andrey_Popov</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many viewers conform by measuring themselves against what they see on television, such as dress, relationships and conduct. In Miller’s words, television has “set the standard of habitual self-scrutiny.” </p>
<p>The kind of paranoid worry possessed by Smith in the novel – that any false move or false thought will bring the thought police – instead manifests in television viewers that Miller describes as an “inert watchfulness.” In other words, viewers watch themselves to make sure they conform to those others they see on the screen. </p>
<p>This inert watchfulness can exist because television allows viewers to watch strangers without being seen. Scholar <a href="https://cola.unh.edu/person/joshua-meyrowitz">Joshua Meyrowitz</a> has shown that the kinds of programming which dominate U.S television – news, sitcoms, dramas – have normalized looking into the private lives of <a href="http://ann.sagepub.com/content/625/1/32">others</a>. </p>
<h2>Controlling behavior</h2>
<p>Alongside the steady rise of “reality TV,” beginning in the ‘60s with “Candid Camera,” “An American Family,” “Real People,” “Cops” and “The Real World,” television has also contributed to the acceptance of a kind of video surveillance. </p>
<p>For example, it might seem just clever marketing that one of the longest-running and most popular reality television shows in the world is entitled “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/152747640200300307">Big Brother</a>.” The show’s nod to the novel invokes the kind of benevolent surveillance that “Big Brother” was meant to signify: “We are watching you and we will take care of you.” </p>
<p>But Big Brother, as a reality show, is also an experiment in controlling and modifying behavior. By asking participants to put their private lives on display, shows such as “Big Brother” encourage self-scrutiny and behaving according to perceived social norms or roles that challenge those perceived <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/152747640200300305">norms</a>.</p>
<p>The stress of performing 24/7 on “Big Brother” has led the show to employ a team of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/152747640200300305">psychologists</a>.</p>
<p>Television scholar <a href="https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/cinema-studies/92884091">Anna McCarthy</a> and others have shown that the origins of reality television can be traced back to social psychology and behavioral experiments in the aftermath of World War II, which were designed to better control people. </p>
<p>Yale University psychologist <a href="https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/stanley-milgram">Stanley Milgram</a>, for example, was influenced by “Candid Camera.” </p>
<p>In the “Candid Camera” show, cameras were concealed in places where they could film people in unusual situations. Milgram was fascinated with “Candid Camera,” and he used a similar model for his experiments – his participants were not aware that they were being watched or that it was part of an <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=4_W19oHGzZQC&lpg=PA40&dq=reality%20tv%20stanley%20milgram&pg=PA23#v=onepage&q=reality%20tv%20stanley%20milgram&f=false">experiment</a>. </p>
<p>Like many others in the aftermath of World War II, Milgram was interested in what could compel large numbers of people to “follow orders” and participate in genocidal acts. His “obedience experiments” found that a high proportion of participants obeyed instructions from an established authority figure to harm another person, even if <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1964-03472-001">reluctantly</a>.</p>
<p>While contemporary reality TV shows do not order participants to directly harm each other, they are often set up as a small-scale social experiment that often involves intense competition or even cruelty.</p>
<h2>Surveillance in daily life</h2>
<p>And, just like in the novel, ubiquitous video surveillance is already here.</p>
<p>Closed-circuit television exist in virtually every area of American life, from <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/02/surveillance-watching-you/">transportation hubs and networks</a>, to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/world/europe/25surveillance.html">schools</a>, <a href="https://www.tampabay.com/business/cameras-that-guess-your-age-and-sex-coming-to-store-shelves-20190423/">supermarkets</a>, <a href="https://www.videosurveillance.com/hospital.asp">hospitals</a> and <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/3000272/nypd-microsoft-launch-all-seeing-domain-awareness-system-real-time-cctv-license-plate-monito">public sidewalks</a>, not to mention law enforcement <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/some-us-police-departments-dump-body-camera-programs-amid-high-costs/2019/01/21/991f0e66-03ad-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html?utm_term=.9d250eb105c5">officers</a> and their <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/how-license-plate-readers-have-helped-police-and-lenders-target-the-poor/479436/">vehicles</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278703/original/file-20190610-52767-hph7o2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278703/original/file-20190610-52767-hph7o2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278703/original/file-20190610-52767-hph7o2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278703/original/file-20190610-52767-hph7o2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278703/original/file-20190610-52767-hph7o2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278703/original/file-20190610-52767-hph7o2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278703/original/file-20190610-52767-hph7o2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Video surveillance is part of our modern-day lives.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/safety-private-property-modern-technology-safeguard-566594038?src=2Y2pSj-hKKf03p04kjOCoQ-1-6">Africa Studio</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Surveillance footage from these cameras is repurposed as the raw material of television, mostly in the news but also in shows like “America’s Most Wanted,” “Right This Minute” and others. Many viewers unquestioningly accept this practice as <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=TtXin4BBii0C&pg=PA15&dq=reality+squared+fetveit&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwju7a3Pw9_iAhVLjp4KHQkYACcQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=reality%20squared%20fetveit&f=false">legitimate</a>. </p>
<h2>The friendly face of surveillance</h2>
<p>Reality television is the friendly face of surveillance. It helps viewers think that surveillance happens only to those who choose it or to those who are criminals. In fact, it is part of a culture of widespread television use, which has brought about what Norwegian criminologist <a href="https://prabook.com/web/thomas.mathiesen/474581">Thomas Mathiesen</a> called the “viewer society” – in which the many watch the few.</p>
<p>For Mathiesen, the viewer society is merely <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480697001002003">the other side</a> of the surveillance society – described so aptly in Orwell’s novel – where a few watch the many. </p>
<p>[ <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=expertise">Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get a digest of academic takes on today’s news, every day.</a></em> ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/116940/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Groening does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the year 1984, there was self-congratulatory coverage that the dystopia of the novel had not been realized. However, an expert argues that the technologies described in the novel are here and watching us.Stephen Groening, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of WashingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1120662019-04-29T20:14:22Z2019-04-29T20:14:22ZGuide to the classics: Orwell’s 1984 and how it helps us understand tyrannical power today<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265796/original/file-20190326-36256-lkfv0v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Written as the Cold War became entrenched, 1984 was meant as a warning on the nature of state power. Understanding this power is even more important today.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/download/confirm/792558856?size=huge_jpg">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As novel-openers go, they don’t come much better than this one in George Orwell’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40961427-1984?from_search=true">Nineteen Eighty-Four</a>. See how the unexpected “striking thirteen” runs powerfully into the beginnings of characterisation and world-building in just two arresting sentences. </p>
<p>Orwell knew that words could both grip the attention and change the mind. He wrote the book as the Cold War was becoming entrenched, and it was meant as an explicit warning on the nature of state power at that time. </p>
<p>The book still sells by the thousands, and is read by students who are compelled to do so. But it can be read voluntarily and profitably, and it can tell us a lot about contemporary politics and power, from Donald Trump to Facebook.</p>
<h2>A world of ‘doublespeak’</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261590/original/file-20190301-22837-18ddz8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261590/original/file-20190301-22837-18ddz8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261590/original/file-20190301-22837-18ddz8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261590/original/file-20190301-22837-18ddz8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261590/original/file-20190301-22837-18ddz8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261590/original/file-20190301-22837-18ddz8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1252&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261590/original/file-20190301-22837-18ddz8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1252&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261590/original/file-20190301-22837-18ddz8p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1252&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/936221.Nineteen_Eighty_Four">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nineteen Eighty-Four became an instant classic when published in 1949. People could see in it a world that could easily become a reality. The memory of Nazi dictatorship was still fresh, the Soviet Union had erected the Iron Curtain, and the USA had the atomic bomb. </p>
<p>The novel’s setting is a dystopian Britain, which has become a part of Oceania, a region in perpetual war with the other super-regions of Eurasia and Eastasia. Oppression, surveillance and control are facts of life in a society ruled by the Party and its four Ministries of Truth, Peace, Plenty and Love.</p>
<p>It is a world of “doublespeak” where things are the opposite of what they appear; there is no truth, only lies – only war and only privation. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-does-orwellian-mean-anyway-87404">What does 'Orwellian' mean, anyway?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>One of Orwell’s innovations is to introduce us to a new political lexicon, a “Newspeak” where he shows how words can be used and abused as a form of power. Words like “Thoughtcrime”, where it is illegal to have thoughts that are in opposition to the Party; or “unperson”, meaning someone who has been executed by the Party (e.g. for Thoughtcrime) will have all record of his or her existence erased. </p>
<p>Not only do we use many of these words today, but the manipulative function that Orwell described is still intact. For example, when Kellyanne Conway, advisor to US president Donald Trump, stated in 2017 that the Administration has its own “alternative facts”, she was indulging in “doublethink”: an attempted psychological control of reality through words.</p>
<p>Nineteen Eighty-Four <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/books/1984-george-orwell-donald-trump.html">became an Amazon bestseller</a> following the election of Trump and the airing of this interview.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VSrEEDQgFc8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Kellyanne Conway explains the Trump adminstration’s ‘alternative facts’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Within the corridors of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, though, there’s a tiny flickering of real love that develops between protagonist Winston and co-worker Julia. They share unlawful thoughts about other possible ways of living and thinking, based upon vague and unreliable memories of a time before world wars and Big Brother and the Party.</p>
<p>But through its immense powers of surveillance and the efforts of the Thought Police, Big Brother knows everything, and soon the lovers are suspects. Winston is arrested and brought before O’Brien, the novel’s antagonist and a Party heavyweight who is openly cynical about the power structure of society. For him power is a zero-sum equation: if you don’t use it to keep others down, they will use it similarly against you. </p>
<p>There is much drama, suspense and even horror in Orwell’s book. He wrote about what he saw around him, but filtered it with an acute sensitivity to the innate fragility of civilisation. In 1943, when the plot-lines of Nineteen Eighty-Four were probably gestating in his head, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/467180.George_Orwell">Orwell wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Either power politics must yield to common decency, or the world must go spiralling down into a nightmare into which we can already catch some dim glimpses.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>1984 goes digital</h2>
<p>These days, a lot of power politics circulates online. Orwell, who worked for the BBC during the war, was sensitive to the power of communications. What he calls the “telescreen” is essentially a surveillance device that “received and transmitted simultaneously”.</p>
<p>He writes of the device that “any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover […] he could be seen as well as heard”. Remind you of anything? Alexa or Siri and their ilk may be fads, but the technology now exists; and so then does a new kind of power. </p>
<p>Such power is contingent and shifting and does not always reside with governments.</p>
<p>Donald Trump wields a new digital power through Twitter and Facebook and can “speak to his base” whenever he’s angry, bored or overcome by impulse. But through ownership of new digital technologies, new actors – data corporations – have acquired old powers. These are the powers to manipulate, surveil, and influence millions of people through access to their data.</p>
<p>And their power in turn can be leeched by hackers, state-sponsored or independent. The complexity of political power today means we need to be more attuned to its changing forms, to more effectively strategise and resist.</p>
<p>Orwell’s “common decency” reference may now sound rather quaint. But its very absence in social media is a problem. </p>
<p>The algorithms that Twitter, Facebook and Google insert into our communications act essentially as “manipulation engines” that can cause division, favour extreme views, and set groups of people against each other.</p>
<p>Divide-and-rule is not their intention – getting you online in order to sell your data to advertisers is – but that is the effect, and democratic politics is the worse for it.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-political-engagement-on-social-media-can-drive-people-to-extremes-44903">How political engagement on social media can drive people to extremes</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Understanding the nature of political power is even more important today than when Orwell wrote. Oppression and manipulation were “simpler” and more brutal then; today, social control and its sources are more opaque.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261591/original/file-20190301-22837-h0f4a8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261591/original/file-20190301-22837-h0f4a8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261591/original/file-20190301-22837-h0f4a8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261591/original/file-20190301-22837-h0f4a8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261591/original/file-20190301-22837-h0f4a8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261591/original/file-20190301-22837-h0f4a8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1023&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261591/original/file-20190301-22837-h0f4a8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1023&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261591/original/file-20190301-22837-h0f4a8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1023&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Orwell in 1943.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Orwell_press_photo.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Orwell’s imperishable value as a writer is that he provides a template on the character of political power that tells us that we cannot be complacent, cannot leave it to government to fix, and cannot leave it to fate and hope for the best.</p>
<p>Things did not turn out so well for Winston Smith. Pushed to the limit by torture and brainwashing, he betrays Julia. And in his abject state he convinces himself, finally, of the rightness of the Party: “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”</p>
<p>The story ends there. But for Orwell the writer and activist, the struggle for Truth, Peace, Plenty and Love was only beginning.</p>
<p>Today, Nineteen Eighty-Four comes across not as a warning that the actual world of Winston and Julia and O'Brien is in danger of becoming reality. Rather, its true value is that it teaches us that power and tyranny are made possible through the use of words and how they are mediated.</p>
<p>If we understand power in this way, especially in our digital world, then unlike Winston, we will have a better chance to fight it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112066/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Hassan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>George Orwell’s dystopian classic can tell us a lot about contemporary politics and power, from Donald Trump to Facebook.Robert Hassan, Professor, School of Culture and Communication, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1114192019-03-12T10:45:56Z2019-03-12T10:45:56ZBeyond blackface: How college yearbooks captured protest and change<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263151/original/file-20190311-86678-nfkgq9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">College yearbook editors in the 1960s juxtaposed pictures of traditional campus activities, such as Greek Life, alongside images of protests and marches.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt73xs5j9z6w?f%5Bsource_s%5D%5B%5D=University+of+Kentucky+Yearbook+Collection&f%5Bpub_date_sort%5D%5B%5D=1969&per_page=20#page/426/mode/2up">The Kentuckian, 1968</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ever since a photograph surfaced of someone in blackface – and another dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe – on the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/us/northam-yearbook.html">medical college yearbook page</a> of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam in February, efforts to scour college yearbooks have focused on finding similarly racist imagery.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262981/original/file-20190309-86686-12kakpj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam speaks at a news conference after revelations that his medical school yearbook page features photos of a man in blackface.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Democrats-Zero-Tolerance/958d0b315e7b4e569feb0efbeb2ae3cf/1/0">Steve Helber/AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>USA Today, for instance, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2019/02/20/how-we-tracked-down-blackface-kkk-and-other-racist-yearbook-images/2915964002/">sent 78 reporters</a> to page through more than 900 college yearbooks from the 1970s and ‘80s. The newspaper not only discovered photographs of students dressed in KKK robes and blackface, but also at mock lynchings and other blatant “<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/02/20/blackface-racist-photos-yearbooks-colleges-kkk-lynching-mockery-fraternities-black-70-s-80-s/2858921002/">displays of racism</a>.”</p>
<p>This focus on the racist reveling of college graduates from yesteryear who are today’s power elite is justified. However, as one who has <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/10/24/supreme-court-confirmation-hearings-showed-yearbooks-can-be-documents-research-well">studied college yearbooks</a> – and who has written a book about <a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/going-college-sixties">going to college in the sixties</a> – I believe this narrow focus on racist imagery obscures a similarly important element of college yearbooks that began to appear during a critical turning point for higher education in the United States.</p>
<h2>Black representation</h2>
<p>One of my biggest concerns with the current focus on racist imagery in college yearbooks is that in the search for images of blackface, journalists and others are overlooking the importance of the faces of black students. Black representation is important to consider because it wasn’t until the latter half of the 20th century that many of America’s colleges and universities began to accept black students.</p>
<p>Because of the topic of my book, I’ve mostly studied yearbooks from the 1960s – some 20 years before Northam graduated from medical school. During this time period, in the <a href="http://www.secsports.com/">Southeastern Conference</a> – where a <a href="https://ussporthistory.com/2015/06/29/confederate-iconography-and-southern-college-football/">Confederate legacy still loomed</a> – the first African-American student on a varsity basketball team was Perry Wallace of Vanderbilt during the 1967-68 season when he was a sophomore. Wallace appears on five different pages of the 1969 edition of The Vanderbilt Commodore, the college yearbook at Vanderbilt University. Perry majored in electrical engineering. He graduated from Columbia Law School and went on to become a distinguished law professor at George Washington University.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262982/original/file-20190309-86713-1nxhp56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vanderbilt’s Perry Wallace (25) scoops the rebound down from the Kentucky basket, in 1968, in Lexington, Kentucky.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-S-BKC-KY-USA-APHS88431-U-Of-Kentucky-/f403487c8ce24e71b4393c843d4a646e/5/0">H.B. Littell/AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The 1968 and 1969 editions of The Kentuckian – the college yearbook at the University of Kentucky where I teach – are also interesting case studies.</p>
<p>The University of Kentucky is home of the first African-Americans to play football in the Southeastern Conference: <a href="https://www.wymt.com/content/news/Greg-Page-A-dream-cut-short-but-a-legacy-that-shines-bright-367994241.html">Greg Page</a> and <a href="https://theundefeated.com/features/nate-northington-the-first-black-football-player-in-the-sec-finally-understands-his-place-in-history/">Nate Northington</a>, later joined by <a href="https://ukathletics.com/hof.aspx?hof=51">Wilbur Hackett</a> and <a href="https://www.owensboroliving.com/features/10022/">Houston Hogg</a>. The 1968 edition of the university’s yearbook – The Kentuckian – focused on a team <a href="https://www.wymt.com/content/news/Greg-Page-A-dream-cut-short-but-a-legacy-that-shines-bright-367994241.html">tragedy</a> – Page’s death. “Page had lain paralyzed for over a month due to an injury suffered in preseason practice,” an entry in the yearbook states. “But as it had to be, football continued.”</p>
<p>The appearance of black students in college yearbooks during this time period serves as a historical reminder that even though many colleges had become racially desegregated earlier, campus activities were still often racially exclusive. Black students were first admitted to the University of Kentucky in 1949 but were not allowed to participate in many student activities until much later – <a href="https://www.kentucky.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/mark-story/article176106916.html">1967</a> in the case of varsity sports. That’s a long delay. It indicates that admission did not necessarily mean full citizenship within the campus community.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263137/original/file-20190311-86717-gi41yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jim Green, the first African-American track and field athlete at the University of Kentucky, who went on to win NCAA championships, was honored in the 1969 Kentuckian as one of the university’s ‘Pacesetters’ for outstanding contributions in 1968-1969.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt73xs5j9z6w?f%5Bsource_s%5D%5B%5D=University+of+Kentucky+Yearbook+Collection&f%5Bpub_date_sort%5D%5B%5D=1969&per_page=20#page/5/mode/1up">The Kentuckian</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>An era of protest</h2>
<p>My other concern about the focus on racist imagery is that it distracts from the fact that, particularly during the late 1960s, college yearbooks helped chronicle an era of student protest and campus activism. Sometimes, college yearbook editors deliberately put images of traditional campus events alongside images of demonstrations and protests.</p>
<p>That’s what Gretchen Marcum Brown, editor of The Kentuckian had in mind during her stint as editor for the 1969 edition, which is particularly noteworthy for the amount of material that reflects black culture and politics. For instance, the 1969 yearbook features speakers such as civil rights activist Julian Bond, The Supremes, and extended photo caption information about a black history course and the Black Student Union. In a recent interview for this article, Brown told me she wanted to document the intense political events taking place on and off campus during the 1968-69 academic year.</p>
<p>In her acknowledgments, Brown credited the influence of Sam Abell, her predecessor who went on to become a <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/contributors/a/photographer-sam-abell/">renowned photographer for National Geographic</a>. Abell had advised Brown to start the 1969 yearbook with a photo essay in which traditional campus events, such as a Greek life prom in which students were dressed in Confederate regalia, would be placed alongside or near images of student groups seeking to uproot the status quo.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263163/original/file-20190311-86690-12gmhlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A student shown in a 1969 University of Kentucky yearbook examines African art in one photograph, while in another photograph in the same book, a student dances while draped in a Confederate flag.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt73xs5j9z6w?f%5Bsource_s%5D%5B%5D=University+of+Kentucky+Yearbook+Collection&f%5Bpub_date_sort%5D%5B%5D=1969&per_page=20#page/5/mode/1up">The Kentuckian, 1968-69</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The yearbook included extended coverage of controversies within student government. This included the house speaker of the student government telling the 40 black students present to “protest his bill requesting that 'Dixie’ be played at athletic events, that the song was not racist.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263167/original/file-20190311-86713-1plp5qc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A student government house speaker challenges black students to protest a bill he brought forth to have ‘Dixie’ sung before sporting events.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt73xs5j9z6w?f%5Bsource_s%5D%5B%5D=University+of+Kentucky+Yearbook+Collection&f%5Bpub_date_sort%5D%5B%5D=1969&per_page=20#page/5/mode/1up">The Kentuckian, 1969</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Imagining a better future</h2>
<p>At the end of a lengthy section on Greek life, the yearbook editor quoted fraternity leaders who invoked the importance of “brotherhood.” But she didn’t just let the brotherhood claim go unchecked. Instead, Brown broached the sensitive issue of racial exclusion. “Brotherhood is cheering together at a football game. Brotherhood is hanging together when the going gets tough. Brotherhood is borrowing your roommates’ clothes. Brotherhood may or may not be a ‘Caucasian only’ clause in your constitution.”</p>
<p>This wry observation showed awareness of both inclusion and exclusion in campus life. </p>
<p>The yearbook concluded with a photograph of a campus demonstration in which a student holds a placard that asked the University of Kentucky campus, “Will You Grow Up?” The editor’s final comment was, “This book is dedicated to those who have the courage and foresight for true reappraisal.”</p>
<p>The Kentuckian was not unique in its attention to social change. A review of yearbooks from Louisiana State University, North Carolina State University and the University of Mississippi shows a similar emphasis on student awareness of the political climate at the time, balanced by coverage of traditional campus life activities. </p>
<p>Yearbook editors challenged readers to reconsider what college education was about and what a university should be. For example, the <a href="https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/agromeck1969nort#?c=&m=&s=&cv=91&xywh=-369%2C0%2C5919%2C3509">1969 Agromeck yearbook</a> of North Carolina State University, stated: “N.C. State’s heritage is essentially like that of any other predominantly white, southern technically oriented institution. The virtues which the school extols are Discipline, Patriotism, Hard Work and Good Grades.” </p>
<p>However, the yearbook editor continued: “There are changes afoot. From the past comes a dual tradition of technical and liberal education and the factors have clashed openly in the present.” Its major photographic essay presented themes of conflict and change within the university.</p>
<p>College yearbooks were built to last. They were also meant to commemorate the worlds that students created. This means that in 2019 alumni, and now the public, can look back at the blackface parties of 1984, the year of Gov. Northam’s medical college yearbook – but also at the student protests of 1969.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111419/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John R. Thelin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Recent blackface scandals that involve college yearbooks have overshadowed how yearbooks also chronicled important turning points in the history of US higher education, a historian argues.John R. Thelin, University Research Professor, University of KentuckyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/898502018-01-11T00:11:24Z2018-01-11T00:11:24Z‘Shithole countries’: Trump uses the rhetoric of dictators<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201744/original/file-20180112-101486-1l854ri.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A day after Donald Trump met with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, he told lawmakers the U.S. should have more immigrants from places like Norway and not "shithole" countries like Haiti.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>George Orwell warns us in his dystopian novel 1984 that authoritarianism begins with language. In the novel, “newspeak” is language twisted to deceive, seduce and undermine the ability of people to think critically and freely.</p>
<p>Donald Trump’s unapologetic bigoted language made headlines again Thursday when it was reported he told lawmakers working on a new immigration policy that the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpmeeting-445pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.a6146ac46b16">United States shouldn’t accept people from “shithole countries” like Haiti</a>. Given his support for white nationalism and his coded call to “Make America Great (White) Again,” Trump’s overt racist remarks reinforce echoes of white supremacy reminiscent of fascist dictators in the 1930s.</p>
<p>His remarks about accepting people from Norway smack of an appeal to the sordid discourse of racial purity. There is much more at work here than a politics of incivility. Behind Trump’s use of vulgarity and his disparagement of countries that are poor and non-white lies the terrifying discourse of white supremacy, ethnic cleansing and the politics of disposability. This is a vocabulary that considers some individuals and groups not only faceless and voiceless, but excess, redundant and subject to expulsion. The endpoint of the language of disposability is a form of social death, or even worse.</p>
<p>As authoritarianism gains strength, the formative cultures that give rise to dissent become more embattled, along with the public spaces and institutions that make conscious critical thought possible.</p>
<p>Words that speak to the truth to reveal injustices and provide informed critical analysis begin to disappear, making it all the more difficult, if not dangerous, to judge, think critically and hold dominant power accountable. Notions of virtue, honour, respect and compassion are policed, and those who advocate them are punished.</p>
<p>I think it’s fair to argue that Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future is no longer fiction in the United States. Under Trump, <a href="https://theconversation.com/scientific-information-is-the-key-to-democracy-88620?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20January%204%202018&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20January%204%202018+CID_c92244b9da5fa91dfaa10c6cbd4fe095&utm_source=campaign_monitor_ca&utm_term=waging%20a%20war%20against%20scientific%20information">language is undergoing a shift</a>: It now treats dissent, critical media coverage and scientific evidence as a species of “fake news.” </p>
<p>The Trump administration, in fact, views the critical media as the “enemy of the American people.” Trump has repeated this view of the media so often that <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/americans-media-poll-trust-trump-fake-news-attacks-a8091991.html">almost a third of Americans now believe it</a> and support government-imposed restrictions on the media, according to a Poynter survey. </p>
<h2>Thought crimes and fake news</h2>
<p>Trump’s cries of “fake news” work incessantly to set limits on what is thinkable. Reason, standards of evidence, consistency and logic no longer serve the truth, according to Trump, because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies of the state. Orwell’s “thought crimes” are Trump’s “fake news.” Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” is Trump’s “Ministry of Fake News.” </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"950014185299210240"}"></div></p>
<p>The notion of truth is viewed by this president as a corrupt tool used by the critical media to question his dismissal of legal checks on his power, particularly his attacks on judges, courts and any other governing institutions that will not promise him complete and unchecked loyalty.</p>
<p>For Trump, <a href="http://time.com/4665755/donald-trump-fear/">intimidation takes the place of unquestioned loyalty</a> when he does not get his way, revealing a view of the presidency that is more about winning than about governing. </p>
<p>One consequence is the myriad practices by which Trump gleefully humiliates and punishes his critics, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/us/politics/trump-reinventing-presidency.html">wilfully engages in shameful acts of self-promotion</a> and unapologetically enriches his financial coffers.</p>
<p>Under Trump, the language of civic literacy and democracy has become unmoored from critical reason, informed debate and the weight of scientific evidence, and is now being reconfigured and tied to pageantry, political theatre and a deep-seated anti-intellectualism. </p>
<p>One consequence, as language begins to function as a tool of state repression, is that matters of moral and political responsibility disappear and injustices proliferate.</p>
<h2>Fascism starts with words</h2>
<p>What is crucial to remember here, as authoritarianism expert <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/12/21/beware-of-president-trumps-nefarious-language-games/?utm_term=.dc9e11b2d2c9">Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes</a>, is that fascism starts with words. Trump’s use of language and his manipulative use of the media as political spectacle are disturbingly similar to earlier periods of propaganda, censorship and repression.</p>
<p>Under fascist regimes, the language of brutality and culture of cruelty was normalized through the proliferation of strident metaphors of war, battle, expulsion, racial purity and demonization. </p>
<p>As German historians such as Richard J. Evans and Victor Klemperer have made clear, <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazi-germany/censorship-in-nazi-germany/">dictators like Adolf Hitler</a> did more than simply corrupt the language of a civilized society, they also banned words. </p>
<p>Soon afterwards, the Nazis banned books and the critical intellectuals who wrote them. They then imprisoned those individuals who challenged Nazi ideology and the state’s systemic violations of civil rights. </p>
<p>The end point was an all-embracing discourse of disposability — the emergence of concentration camps and genocide fuelled by a politics of racial purity and social cleansing. </p>
<p>Echoes of the formative stages of such actions are upon us now. An American-style neo-fascism appears to be engulfing the United States after simmering in the dark for years.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201523/original/file-20180110-46706-fer80e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201523/original/file-20180110-46706-fer80e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201523/original/file-20180110-46706-fer80e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201523/original/file-20180110-46706-fer80e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201523/original/file-20180110-46706-fer80e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201523/original/file-20180110-46706-fer80e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201523/original/file-20180110-46706-fer80e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Donald Trump stands on the field for the U.S. national anthem before the start of the NCAA National Championship game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium between Georgia and Alabama on Jan. 8 in Atlanta.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More than any other president, Trump has normalized the notion that the meaning of words no longer matters, nor do traditional sources of facts and evidence. In doing so, he has undermined the relationship between engaged citizenship and the truth, and has relegated matters of debate and critical assessment to a spectacle of bombast, threats, intimidation and sheer fakery. </p>
<p>This language of fascism does more than normalize falsehoods and ignorance. It also promotes a larger culture of short-term attention spans, immediacy and sensationalism. At the same time, it makes fear and anxiety the normalized currency of exchange and communication. </p>
<p>In a throwback to the language of fascism, Trump has repeatedly positioned himself as the only one who can save the masses — reproducing the tired script of the model of the saviour endemic to authoritarianism. </p>
<p>There is more at work here than an oversized ego. Trump’s authoritarianism is also fuelled by braggadocio and misdirected rage as he undermines the bonds of solidarity, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/business/dealbook/trump-congress-financial-regulations.html?_r=0">abolishes institutions meant to protect the vulnerable</a> and launches a full-fledged <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/climate/trump-offshore-drilling.html">assault on the environment</a>.</p>
<p>Trump is also the master of manufactured illiteracy, and his obsessive tweeting and public relations machine aggressively engages in the theatre of self-promotion and distractions. Both of these are designed to whitewash any version of a history that might expose the close alignment between his own language and policies and the dark elements of a fascist past.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"951109942685126656"}"></div></p>
<p>Trump also revels in an unchecked mode of self-congratulation bolstered by a limited vocabulary filled with words like “historic,” “best,” “the greatest,” “tremendous” and “beautiful.” </p>
<p>Those exaggerations suggest more than hyperbole or the self-indulgent use of language. When he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/04/17-issues-that-donald-trump-knows-better-than-anyone-else-according-to-donald-trump/">claims</a> he “knows more about ISIS than the generals,” “knows more about renewables than any human being on Earth” or that nobody knows the U.S. system of government better than he does, he’s using the rhetoric of fascism. </p>
<p>As the aforementioned historian Richard J. Evans writes in <em>The Third Reich in Power</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“The German language became a language of superlatives, so that everything the regime did became the best and the greatest, its achievements unprecedented, unique, historic and incomparable …. The language used about Hitler … was shot through and through with religious metaphors; people ‘believed in him,’ he was the redeemer, the savior, the instrument of Providence, his spirit lived in and through the German nation…. Nazi institutions domesticated themselves [through the use of a language] that became an unthinking part of everyday life.”</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sound familiar?</p>
<p>Under the Trump regime, memories inconvenient to his authoritarianism are now demolished in the domesticated language of superlatives so the future can be shaped to become indifferent to the crimes of the past. </p>
<p>Trump’s endless daily tweets, his recklessness, his adolescent disdain for a measured response, his unfaltering anti-intellectualism and his utter ignorance of history work in the United States. Why? Because they not only cater to what <a href="https://www.salon.com/2017/12/19/author-brian-klaas-is-trump-an-aspiring-despot-or-a-bumbling-showman-yes/">historian Brian Klaas refers to as</a> “the tens of millions of Americans who have authoritarian or fascist leanings,” they also enable what he calls Trump’s attempt at “mainstreaming fascism.”</p>
<p>The language of fascism revels in forms of theatre that mobilize fear, hatred and violence. Author <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/43017-how-a-culture-of-fear-helped-propel-trump-into-the-white-house">Sasha Abramsky</a> is on target in claiming that Trump’s words amount to more than empty slogans. </p>
<p>Instead, his language comes “with consequences, and they legitimize bigotries and hatreds long harbored by many but, for the most part, kept under wraps by the broader society.”</p>
<p>Surely, the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-islam-muslim-islamophobia-worse-911-says-leader-a8113686.html">increase in hate crimes</a> during Trump’s first year of his presidency testifies to the truth of Abramsky’s argument.</p>
<h2>Fighting Trump’s fascist language</h2>
<p>The history of fascism teaches us that language operates in the service of violence, desperation and troubling landscapes of hatred, and carries the potential for inhabiting the darkest moments of history. </p>
<p>It erodes our humanity, and makes too many people numb and silent in the face of ideologies and practices that are hideous acts of ethical atrocity.</p>
<p>Trump’s language, like that of older fascist regimes, mutilates contemporary politics, empathy and serious moral and political criticism, and makes it more difficult to criticize dominant relations of power.</p>
<p>His fascistic language also fuels the rhetoric of war, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, anti-intellectualism and racism. But it’s not his alone. </p>
<p>It is the language of a nascent fascism that has been brewing in the United States for some time. It is a language that is comfortable viewing the world as a combat zone, a world that exists to be plundered and a view of those deemed different as a threat to be feared, if not eliminated. </p>
<p>A new language aimed at fighting Trump’s romance with fascism must make power visible, uncover the truth, contest falsehoods and create a formative and critical culture that can nurture and sustain collective resistance to the oppression that has overtaken the United States, and increasingly many other countries. </p>
<p>No form of oppression can be overlooked. And with that critical gaze must emerge a critical language, a new narrative and a different story about what a socialist democracy will look like in the United States.</p>
<h2>Reclaiming language as a force for good</h2>
<p>There is also a need to strengthen and expand the reach and power of established public spheres, such as higher education and the critical media, as sites of critical learning. </p>
<p>We must encourage artists, intellectuals, academics and other cultural workers to talk, educate, make oppression visible and challenge the common-sense vocabulary of <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/casino-capitalism-trump-style_us_59c9127ae4b0cdc77332f26a">casino capitalism,</a> white supremacy and fascism.</p>
<p>Language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence and intimidation; it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage and resistance.</p>
<p>A critical language can <a href="https://medium.com/quote-of-the-week/american-politics-and-the-crystallization-of-totalitarian-practices-464e1f02f514#.fyuncour9">guide us</a> in our thinking about the relationship between older elements of fascism and how such practices are emerging in new forms.</p>
<p>Without a faith in intelligence, critical education and the power to resist, humanity will be powerless to challenge the threat that fascism and right-wing populism pose to the world. </p>
<p>Those of us willing to fight for a just political and economic society need to formulate a new language and fresh narratives about freedom, the power of collective struggle, empathy, solidarity and the promise of a real socialist democracy. </p>
<p>We would do well to heed the words of the great Nobel Prize-winning novelist, J.M. Coetzee, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/21/lies/">who states in a work of fiction</a> that “there will come a day when you and I will need to be told the truth, the real truth ….no matter how hard it may be.” </p>
<p>Democracy, indeed, can only survive with a critically informed and engaged public attentive to a language in which truth, rather than lies, become the currency of citizenship.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89850/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henry Giroux does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Donald Trump’s language has disturbing similarities to the words and verbal tactics used by fascists, including his cries of “fake news” and his obsessive exaggerations about his achievements.Henry Giroux, Chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/874042017-11-21T14:58:58Z2017-11-21T14:58:58ZWhat does ‘Orwellian’ mean, anyway?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195614/original/file-20171121-6051-rgxhn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">aradaphotography via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Leading Conservative Brexiteers, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/12/michael-gove-and-boris-johnson-send-secret-brexit-letter-to-may">wrote recently</a> to the UK prime minister, Theresa May, and – surprise, surprise – the text of the letter duly found its way into the hands of the press. It contained a set of demands on how to run Britain’s withdrawal from the EU in language that was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/13/monday-briefing-boris-and-the-orwellian-brexit-manual">described by an unnamed minister</a> as “Orwellian”. For which, read: sinister. But what do we understand by the word – and how has its meaning changed over the years since George Orwell’s death in 1950?</p>
<p>Orwell’s career as a writer was <a href="http://www.george-orwell.org/">long and productive</a> – at one time or another he produced novels, journalism, memoirs, political philosophy, literary criticism and cultural commentary. But the term “Orwellian” most often relates to his dystopian novel <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nineteen-Eighty-four">Nineteen Eighty-Four</a>, completed a couple of years before his death. The novel presents a vision of a Britain taken over by a totalitarian regime in which the state exerts absolute power over its citizens. </p>
<p>Think what you will of Johnson and Gove, but they are hardly representative of the dark forces at work in Orwell’s dystopian novel. The minister describing the letter seems to be watering down the adjective to mean something like a secretive and undemocratic influence of one faction over another within the government. This is certainly not the situation in Orwell’s novel in which The Party appears, on the surface at least, to be absolutely in control – something that could hardly be said of the prime minister at the moment. </p>
<p>Nineteen Eighty-Four presents a number of concepts and ideas that have worked their way into the contemporary imagination – and that, in so doing, have shifted somewhat from their original meanings. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/big-brother">Big Brother</a>, the all-seeing, all-knowing emblem of totalitarian control, and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pqlvy">Room 101</a>, the regime’s torture chamber, for example, are concepts that have developed a life of their own beyond Orwell’s original ideas. </p>
<p>Other concepts, such as the telescreen, doublethink, thoughtcrime, the Two-Minute Hate, memory holes and Newspeak are all introduced in Orwell’s novel to represent the ways in which technology can be marshalled by the state to control its citizens. It is this aspect of absolute state control that is most often conjured up when hearing the term Orwellian.</p>
<h2>Newspeak, Doublespeak and thoughtcrime</h2>
<p>It may be an exaggeration to describe the activities of some of our current cabinet ministers as Orwellian – nevertheless, there is a sense in which it might be accurate. The anonymous minister who commented on the letter also seemed to suggest that it was the language that was being used that was in some way Orwellian. </p>
<p>In Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the projects the totalitarian state is undertaking is to create a new language: Newspeak. This involves the simplification and purification of the English language to the extent that it functions purely as a means of maintaining state power and control. </p>
<p>In this context, thoughtcrime is the key concept that has to be avoided – it is not only objecting to The Party, but even thinking about objecting that is outlawed. As one of the characters involved in refining the new language explains: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Newspeak is all about the simplification of language, paring it back to its bare bones in order to reduce it to pure function. So, for example, the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love become Minitrue and Miniluv in Newspeak. One can’t help thinking of all the complexities of Britain leaving the European Union that are shoehorned into the term <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/brexit-9976">Brexit</a>.</p>
<p>Another aspect of this manipulation of language is the concept of doublespeak, whereby words are used to mask their real meaning, and in fact refer to their exact opposites. So, for example, the Ministry of Plenty deals with food shortages and The Ministry of Love is where The Party uses violence and torture to extract confessions. Think of our own Ministry for Work and Pensions, which spends a good proportion of its time <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/universal-credit-26173">dealing with unemployment</a> and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/pensions-1565">erosion of pension rights</a>. Or terms like “streamlining” and “increasing productivity” – which usually equate to making people redundant. </p>
<p>In this vein, the leaked letter suggests that anti-Brexiteers in the Conservative party are in need of “clarifying their minds” – and one particularly Orwellian use of language explains: “If we are to counter those who wish to frustrate that end, there are ways of underlining your resolve.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195619/original/file-20171121-6039-5fxjh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195619/original/file-20171121-6039-5fxjh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195619/original/file-20171121-6039-5fxjh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195619/original/file-20171121-6039-5fxjh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195619/original/file-20171121-6039-5fxjh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195619/original/file-20171121-6039-5fxjh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195619/original/file-20171121-6039-5fxjh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Orwellian, after the success of Nineteen Eighty-Four, has come to represent something sinister in politics.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">1000 words via Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This use of language to produce an unspecified threat is just the kind of thing that might have resonated with Orwell.</p>
<h2>Politics and the English language</h2>
<p>Perhaps one of the ironies of using writers’ names as adjectives is that they become saddled with the very things that they were warning us about. <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/04/30/ditching-dickensian/">Dickensian</a>, for example, has become synonymous with the worst aspects of a class-ridden Victorian society, while <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/kafkaesque-meaning-video_us_57768f83e4b09b4c43c02e5b">Kafkaesque</a> refers to the dehumanising effects of the individual’s encounter with inflexible state bureaucracy. </p>
<p>Orwell’s name will forever be associated with totalitarianism and the manipulation of language in order to maintain state control. This is particularly ironic given that in an essay of 1946 – <a href="http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/">Politics and the English Language</a> – he was keen to champion plain speaking in political discourse. His rules for writing contain pieces of advice that remain invaluable for all writers and public commentators. For example: “Never use a long word where a short one will do”, “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”, and “Break any of these rules rather than say anything outright barbarous.” </p>
<p>I wonder if Johnson has a copy?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87404/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Bentley is affiliated with The Labour Party. </span></em></p>Boris Johnson and Michael Gove may not be the stuff of Orwell’s dystopian nightmare, but they clearly know how to talk in ‘doublespeak’.Nick Bentley, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/725112017-02-23T08:53:00Z2017-02-23T08:53:00ZBrave New World: the pill-popping, social media obsessed dystopia we live in<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157909/original/image-20170222-6409-1189121.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Orwellian dystopia of Doublespeak is very much in vogue right now thanks to concerns over Trump’s use of “alternative facts”. But alternative facts are just the tip of a dystopian iceberg that owes more to the soft brainwashing technologies of Aldous Huxley’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/nov/17/classics.margaretatwood">Brave New World</a> than it does to <a href="https://theconversation.com/2017-isnt-1984-its-stranger-than-orwell-imagined-71971">1984’s</a> harsh Stalinist oppressions and propagandist trickery. </p>
<p>To grasp the Huxleyesque nature of current events we need see them as part of a culture increasingly pervaded by the ideas of neuroscience – what <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-assemblage-brain">I have termed neuroculture</a>. </p>
<p>The origins of neuroculture begin in early anatomical drawings and subsequent neuron doctrine in the late 1800s. This was the first time that the brain was understood as a discontinuous network of cells connected by what became known as synaptic gaps. Initially, scientists assumed these gaps were connected by electrical charges, but later revealed the existence of neurochemical transmissions. Brain researchers went on to discover more about brain functionality and subsequently started to intervene in underlying chemical processes. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157921/original/image-20170222-6409-ffhg08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157921/original/image-20170222-6409-ffhg08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157921/original/image-20170222-6409-ffhg08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157921/original/image-20170222-6409-ffhg08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157921/original/image-20170222-6409-ffhg08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157921/original/image-20170222-6409-ffhg08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157921/original/image-20170222-6409-ffhg08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Interpretation of Cajal’s anatomy of a Purkinje neuron, by Dorota Piekorz.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On one hand, these chemical interventions point to possible inroads to understanding some crucial issues, relating to mental health, for example. But on the other, they warn of the potential of a looming dystopian future. Not, as we may think, defined by the forceful invasive probing of the brain in Room 101, but via much more subtle intermediations.</p>
<h2>Soma</h2>
<p>Huxley’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/13/100-best-novels-brave-new-world-aldous-huxley">Brave New World</a> (1932) is about a dystopian society that is not controlled by fear, but rendered docile by happiness. The mantra of this society is “everybody’s happy now”. As Alex Hern <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/26/1984-dystopias-reflect-trumps-us-orwell">argues</a> in The Guardian, Huxley presents a more relevant authoritarian dystopia to that of 1984, one that can still be “pleasant to live in for the vast majority, sparking little mass resistance”. The best dystopias are often dressed up as utopias. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158056/original/image-20170223-24107-7gvrtz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158056/original/image-20170223-24107-7gvrtz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158056/original/image-20170223-24107-7gvrtz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158056/original/image-20170223-24107-7gvrtz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158056/original/image-20170223-24107-7gvrtz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158056/original/image-20170223-24107-7gvrtz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158056/original/image-20170223-24107-7gvrtz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aldous Huxley in 1954.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is Huxley’s appeal to emotional conditioning that most significantly resonates with today’s dystopian neurocultures. He noted the clear advantages of sidestepping intellectual engagement and instead appealing to emotional suggestibility to guide intentions and subdue nonconformity. </p>
<p>As such, to achieve its goal, the society of Brave New World combines two central modes of control. First, the widespread use of the joy-inducing pharmaceutical, Soma, and second, a hypnotic media propaganda machine that works less on reason than it does through “feely” encounters. </p>
<p>Today’s neurocultures correspond to these technologies in conspicuous ways. To begin with, the rise of neuro-pharmaceuticals, like Prozac, have <a href="http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/05/the-downsides-of-prozac-html">drawn attention</a> to a growing societal need for self-medicated happiness. But equally alarming is the rise in prescriptions for ADHD treatments, like Ritalin, which control attention while simultaneously subduing difficult behaviour. The ADHD child’s mental state is a kind of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/30/adhd-real-brain-disorder-further-medicalising-childhood">paradoxical docile attentiveness</a>.</p>
<h2>The College of Emotional Engineering</h2>
<p>Comparisons can also be made between Huxley’s College of Emotional Engineering and contemporary social media. In his book, the college is an important academic institution found in the same building as the Bureaux of Propaganda, with a unique focus on emotional suggestibility. This is where the feely scenarios, emotional slogans and hypnopedic rhymes are written. This kind of propaganda is for mass media consumption, but today’s emotional engineering takes place in far more intimate and contagious arenas of social media. </p>
<p>For example, in 2014, Facebook took part in an <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/">experiment</a> designed to make positive and negative emotions go viral. Researchers manipulated the news feeds of over 600,000 users in an attempt to make them pass on positive and negative emotions to others in their network.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158057/original/image-20170223-24085-douuiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158057/original/image-20170223-24085-douuiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158057/original/image-20170223-24085-douuiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158057/original/image-20170223-24085-douuiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158057/original/image-20170223-24085-douuiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158057/original/image-20170223-24085-douuiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158057/original/image-20170223-24085-douuiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Streamlining emotions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">rvlsoft / Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The idea that social media acts as a vector for both positive and negative emotional contagions might help us to rethink Trump’s ability to seemingly tap into certain negative feelings of disillusioned US voters. Certainly, the contagion of fake news is typically a poisonous concoction of fear and hate. But much of the populist appeal of Trump (and Brexit) has perhaps played on more joyful encounters with celebrity politicians than those experienced with the dry intellectual elites of conventional politics.</p>
<h2>Roses or orchids?</h2>
<p>The pervasiveness of today’s neuroculture started with the neuroscientific emotional turn in the 1990s. Scientists realised that emotions are not distinct from pure reason, but enmeshed in the very networks of cognition. The way we think and behave is now assumed to be <a href="http://bigthink.com/videos/how-our-brains-feel-emotion">greatly determined by how we feel</a>.</p>
<p>The seismic influence of this profound shift has extended beyond science to <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/11785391">economic theories</a> concerned with the neurochemicals that are supposed to affect decision making processes. It also underpins <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jon-buss/a-beautiful-mind-is-neuro_b_7884742.html">new models of consumer choice</a> focused on the “buying brain”. The advent of neuroeconomics, followed by neuromarketing, has resulted in further spin-offs in product design and branding informed by emotional brain processing. The consumer experience of a brand is now measured according to the frequency of brainwaves correlated with certain attentive and emotional states.</p>
<p>Perhaps there’s nothing new in neuroculture. Advertisers have been trying to infect feelings since the advent of advertisements. Similarly, politicians have been kissing babies for affect since the age of the crowd. Maybe my idea of neuroculture is an example of what has been cynically termed <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dj-jaffe/brainwashed-the-seductive_b_3712860.html">neuro-speculation</a>. But in an age hastened by social media and self-medication, there is a dystopic intensification of infected and manipulated feelings that cannot be ignored.</p>
<p>Not everyone agreed with Huxley’s predictions of a neuroscientific dictatorship. One literary critic once <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Aldous-Huxley/Watt/p/book/9780415848268">compared him</a> to a rabbit going down a hole only to think all the world was dark. </p>
<p>But it was the <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Aldous-Huxley/Watt/p/book/9780415848268">attention he received from scientists</a> that should alert us to the profundity of his dystopia. In particular, the 20th century scientist Joseph Needham argued that scientific knowledge is not immune to political interferences. Needham called Huxley’s Brave New World an “orchid garden” – a demonstration that scientific knowledge does not always lead to a bed of roses. Huxley, he noted, helps us to “see clearly what lies at the far end of certain inviting paths”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72511/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tony D Sampson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Alternative facts owe more to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s 1984.Tony D Sampson, Reader in Digital Culture and Communication, University of East LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/721352017-02-03T11:55:33Z2017-02-03T11:55:33ZWhat are the Orwellian dystopias of the 21st century?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155449/original/image-20170203-14027-plmo90.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Savitsky Stanislav/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fictional metaphors matter, and in the battle to safeguard our civil liberties few metaphors matter more than George Orwell’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/1984-1443">1984</a>. Although first published almost 70 years ago, the lasting salience of this most archetypal dystopia is undeniable. </p>
<p>In the week after Edward Snowden’s revelations of US government mass surveillance were first revealed, sales of the novel rocketed by <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10115599/Sales-of-Orwells-1984-rocket-in-wake-of-US-Prism-surveillance-scandal.html">6,000%</a>. A year later, in Thailand, 1984 became a <a href="https://theconversation.com/third-hunger-games-film-poses-biggest-protest-threat-yet-to-thai-government-34501">symbol of resistance</a> to government repression, and was promptly banned. And following Trump’s inauguration and the conspicuously Orwellian admission by one of his chief strategists, Kellyanne Conway, that his administration trades in “alternative facts”, 1984 once again leapt to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/2017-isnt-1984-its-stranger-than-orwell-imagined-71971">top of the bestseller list</a>.</p>
<p>Orwell is ingrained in the West’s political lexicon. “Big Brother”, “Newspeak” and “DoubleThink” are now bywords for totalitarianism and political mendacity. But doesn’t every crystal ball have a shelf life, even the most prescient?</p>
<p>Orwell conceived his imaginary surveillance state of Oceania before personal computing, before the information revolution, before CCTV, before 24-hour news cycles, before reality television. As pointed out by <a href="https://theconversation.com/2017-isnt-1984-its-stranger-than-orwell-imagined-71971">John Broich</a>, surveillance and political repression today is far more complex than in Orwell’s time, and far more technologically sophisticated. </p>
<p>For one thing, it is no longer just Big Brother that is watching you. Alongside governments, corporations like Facebook and Google also collect our data and use it to profile us, and we all collect data on each other every time we scroll our social media walls. But if 1984 is anachronistic, an analogue vision applied to a digital age, then what about more contemporary fictions? Who are the digital dystopians, the George Orwells of the present day?</p>
<p>Here are five suggestions:</p>
<h2>Super Sad True Love Story</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155447/original/image-20170203-14020-oglkql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155447/original/image-20170203-14020-oglkql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155447/original/image-20170203-14020-oglkql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155447/original/image-20170203-14020-oglkql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155447/original/image-20170203-14020-oglkql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155447/original/image-20170203-14020-oglkql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155447/original/image-20170203-14020-oglkql.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In this 2010 novel “there is no need for a Big Brother”, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrlaqvH6bzU,">notes its author</a>, Gary Shteyngart, “because everyone’s been deputised to chronicle their lives at all times”. <a href="http://supersadtruelovestory.com/">Super Sad True Love Story</a>’s citizens of 2030s New York are transfixed by their “äppäräti” (which are basically smartphones) that collect and transmit torrents of personal data. Everything from <a href="http://www.webmd.boots.com/cholesterol-management/guide/triglycerides">triglyceride</a> levels to intimate sexual predilections are openly broadcast to anyone – which is everyone – who owns an äppäräti.</p>
<p>While “Big Brother” still exists in the Trump-like guise of Defence Secretary Rubenstein, who oversees numerous acts of severe government repression in the novel, Shteyngart reserves his most biting satire for the way in which our own incessant sharing and insatiable consumption of data, along with the banalisation of our cultural life that ensues, implicates us all in the erosion of privacy and our civil liberties.</p>
<h2>The Circle</h2>
<p>Soon to be released as a <a href="http://variety.com/2016/film/news/tom-hanks-emma-watson-the-circle-first-trailer-1201934776/">major motion picture</a> starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, Dave Eggers’s novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/09/circle-dave-eggers-review">The Circle</a> (2013) blames the loss of privacy on the messianic utopianism of Silicon Valley. </p>
<p>The titular “Circle” is basically Google, a giant tech-corporation that rolls out a series of invasive technologies that promise to make the world fitter, happier, healthier, more rational and less corrupt by eradicating privacy. Eggers’ satire of techno-utopianists like <a href="https://www.wired.com/1996/12/fftransparent/">David Brin</a>, who in the 1990s lauded the impending emergence of “the transparent society”, offers a warning, as Margaret Attwood put it in <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/11/21/eggers-circle-when-privacy-is-theft/">her review of his novel</a> that “we can be led down the primrose path much more blindly by our good intentions than our bad ones”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zH0E69gtQtI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>LoveStar</h2>
<p>Along with its surrealist imagery that conjures Norse mythology, what is remarkable about Icelandic novelist Andri Magnason’s <a href="http://www.andrimagnason.com/books/lovestar/">LoveStar</a> is its prescience. First published in 2002 (before smartphones and social media), though not translated into English until a decade later, Lovestar foresees a world of hyperconnectivity in which the previously sacred (read private) domains of love, death and religion have all been colonised by a global tech corporation. Its algorithms now determine even the most intimate human interactions.</p>
<h2>Black Mirror</h2>
<p>Dystopian imaginings are no longer just the preserve of literature. Recent award-winning films such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/">Ex Machina</a> (2015) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Her</a> (2013) render vivid speculative worlds in which our inner life is exposed by technology. But one of the most pertinent excavations of the social consequences of contemporary technology appeared on the small screen, not in cinemas: Charlie Brooker’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/">Black Mirror</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/R32qWdOWrTo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/13379204/black-mirror-season-3-episode-1-nosedive-recap">first episode</a> of the most recent series in particular echoes Shteyngart’s parable of a world in which we are all reduced to a constantly fluctuating metric – friends, colleagues and strangers rate each social interaction. This metric is then be used to sort us into categories and grant or deny us access to goods, services and public spaces. Think the idea of an aggregate “social credit” score is fantasy? China’s proposed <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-34592186">Sesame Credit</a> scheme, whereby every citizen will be awarded a “social credit” score, suggests that science fiction increasingly resembles documentary.</p>
<h2>Inside</h2>
<p>Another medium that has successfully updated the Orwellian tradition for a digital age is video games. Playdead’s award-winning Indy platformer <a href="http://playdead.com/inside/">Inside</a> (2016) is one of the best examples of a recent interactive dystopia. Video games don’t just imagine surveillance, but force the player to experience it. </p>
<p>In Inside you play a young nameless boy, and your progression through the game is largely determined by evading or conforming to the surveillance gaze. In one of the most chilling moments in the game you are forced to walk in step with a line of zombie-like figures, whose movements are conditioned by the watchful eyes of CCTV. Few narratives better evoke the philosopher Michel Foucault’s metaphor of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham">panoptic prison</a>, in which our behaviour is disciplined by the surveillance gaze, than Inside.</p>
<p><em>Simon Willmetts is also curator of <a href="http://www.digitaldystopias.com">Digital Dystopias</a>, the Hull UK City of Culture festival which uses culture as a means to explore the ways in which technology is transforming society.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72135/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Willmetts receives funding from the UK Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC) for a project entitled "The Common Good: The Ethics and Rights of Cyber Security". He is also curator of the Hull 2017 UK City of Culture Festival "Digital Dystopias", which explores the impact of technology upon society through dystopias. </span></em></p>Every crystal ball has a shelf life, even the most prescient.Simon Willmetts, Lecturer in American Studies, University of HullLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/719712017-01-26T21:28:53Z2017-01-26T21:28:53Z2017 isn’t ‘1984’ – it’s stranger than Orwell imagined<p>A week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s “1984” is the best-selling book on Amazon.com. </p>
<p>The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment. </p>
<p>Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in domestic control.</p>
<p>Oceania demands total subservience. It is a police state, with helicopters monitoring people’s activities, even watching through their windows. But Orwell emphasizes it is the “ThinkPol,” the Thought Police, who really monitor the “Proles,” the lowest 85 percent of the population outside the party elite. The ThinkPol move invisibly among society seeking out, even encouraging, thoughtcrimes so they can make the perpetrators disappear for reprogramming.</p>
<p>The other main way the party elite, symbolized in the mustached figurehead Big Brother, encourage and police correct thought is through the technology of the Telescreen. These “metal plaques” transmit things like frightening video of enemy armies and of course the wisdom of Big Brother. But the Telescreen can see you, too. During mandatory morning exercise, the Telescreen not only shows a young, wiry trainer leading cardio, it can see if you are keeping up. Telescreens are everywhere: They are in every room of people’s homes. At the office, people use them to do their jobs. </p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="150" data-image="" data-title="John Broich discusses 1984 on The Academic Minute" data-size="4801540" data-source="The Academic Minute" data-source-url="https://academicminute.org/2017/04/john-broich-case-western-reserve-university-1984/" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/693/04-21-17-case-western-reserve-1984-1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
John Broich discusses 1984 on The Academic Minute.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://academicminute.org/2017/04/john-broich-case-western-reserve-university-1984/">The Academic Minute</a><span class="download"><span>4.58 MB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/693/04-21-17-case-western-reserve-1984-1.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<p>The story revolves around Winston Smith and Julia, who try to resist their government’s overwhelming control over facts. Their act of rebellion? Trying to discover “unofficial” truth about the past, and recording unauthorized information in a diary. Winston works at the colossal Ministry of Truth, on which is emblazoned IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. His job is to erase politically inconvenient data from the public record. A party member falls out of favor? She never existed. Big Brother made a promise he could not fulfill? It never happened.</p>
<p>Because his job calls on him to research old newspapers and other records for the facts he has to “unfact,” Winston is especially adept at “doublethink.” Winston calls it being “conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies… consciously to induce unconsciousness.”</p>
<h2>Oceania: The product of Orwell’s experience</h2>
<p>Orwell’s setting in “1984” is inspired by the way he foresaw the Cold War – a phrase he <a href="http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31915">coined</a> in 1945 – playing out. He wrote it just a few years after watching Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carve up the world at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. The book is remarkably prescient about aspects of the Stalinist Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China.</p>
<p>Orwell <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/897/">was a socialist.</a> “1984” in part describes his fear that the democratic socialism in which he believed would be hijacked by authoritarian Stalinism. The novel grew out of his sharp observations of his world and the fact that Stalinists tried to kill him.</p>
<p>In 1936, a fascist-supported military <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/spanish-civil-war-breaks-out">coup</a> threatened the democratically elected socialist majority in Spain. Orwell and other committed socialists from around the world, including Ernest Hemingway, volunteered to fight against the rightist rebels. Meanwhile, Hitler lent the rightists his air power while Stalin tried to take over the leftist Republican resistance. When Orwell and other volunteers defied these Stalinists, they moved to crush the opposition. Hunted, Orwell and his wife had to flee for their lives from Spain in 1937.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154452/original/image-20170126-30385-114579s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154452/original/image-20170126-30385-114579s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154452/original/image-20170126-30385-114579s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=835&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154452/original/image-20170126-30385-114579s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=835&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154452/original/image-20170126-30385-114579s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=835&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154452/original/image-20170126-30385-114579s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1050&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154452/original/image-20170126-30385-114579s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1050&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154452/original/image-20170126-30385-114579s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1050&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Orwell at the BBC.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Back in London during World War II, Orwell saw for himself how a liberal democracy and individuals committed to freedom could find themselves on a path toward Big Brother. He worked for the BBC writing what can only be described as “propaganda” aimed at an Indian audience. What he wrote was not exactly doublethink, but it was news and commentary with a slant to serve a political purpose. Orwell sought to convince Indians that their sons and resources were serving the greater good in the war. <a href="http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?sid=bcc037c1-31c3-4378-9122-490a38024c4a%40sessionmgr4007&vid=0&hid=4201&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=26137436&db=a2h">Having written things</a> he believed were untrue, he quit the job after two years, disgusted with himself.</p>
<p>Imperialism itself disgusted him. As a young man in the 1920s, Orwell had served as a colonial police officer in Burma. In a distant foreshadowing of Big Brother’s world, Orwell reviled the arbitrary and brutish role he took on in a colonial system. “I hated it bitterly,” he <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/">wrote</a>. “In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts…”</p>
<p>Oceania was a prescient product of a particular biography and particular moment when the Cold War was beginning. Naturally, then, today’s world of “alternative facts” is quite different in ways that Orwell could not have imagined.</p>
<h2>Big Brother not required</h2>
<p>Orwell described a single-party system in which a tiny core of oligarchs, Oceania’s “inner party,” control all information. This is their chief means of controlling power. In the U.S. today, information is wide open to those who can access the internet, <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/06/26/americans-internet-access-2000-2015/">at least 84 percent</a> of Americans. And while the U.S. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-oligarchy">arguably might be</a> an oligarchy, power exists somewhere in a scrum including the electorate, constitution, the courts, bureaucracies and, inevitably, money. In other words, unlike in Oceania, both information and power are diffuse in 2017 America.</p>
<p>Those who study the decline in standards of evidence and reasoning in the U.S. electorate <a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-01-12/america-divided-and-thats-design?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialFlow">chiefly blame</a> politicians’ concerted <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=5L8AcOBkvyIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=one+nation+indivisible+chapman+colby&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjlgLPg9d7RAhWI54MKHcdNDBoQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=discredit&f=false">efforts</a> from the 1970s to <a href="https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/gingrich-and-the-destruction-of-congressional-expertise/">discredit expertise</a>, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=1Fio4KqA7koC&pg=PT77&lpg=PT77&dq=undermine+faith+in+government+gingrich&source=bl&ots=XOOb3xnLPD&sig=7R3U9-iUayBWKEJVqwMCveNlSGM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiPufTP7d7RAhUlwYMKHWuxC8A4ChDoAQgzMAQ#v=onepage&q=eroding%20pu">degrade trust</a> in Congress and its members, even question the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=gzZLBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=einstein+do+facts+matter&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwik6N2J8d7RAhUj5oMKHc2rAIUQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=highly%20mistrustful%20of%20the%20federal&f=false">legitimacy of government</a> itself. With those leaders, institutions and expertise delegitimized, the strategy has been to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=OmqODQAAQBAJ&pg=PA237&dq=republican+alternative+reality&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjpm5S8-d7RAhWB6oMKHbS9CdU4FBDoAQg8MAY#v=onepage&q&f=false">replace</a> them with alternative <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=_Tn_AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA168&lpg=PA168&dq=berinsky+rumors+truth&source=bl&ots=JgBHuel9I6&sig=80qb9YWYcAwy94H13yrwkrvjxik&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQj4eU997RAhUJ7YMKHWHAC4sQ6AEIQjAF#v=onepage&q&f=false">authorities</a> and <a href="http://schoolsites.schoolworld.com/schools/Cheltenham/webpages/rwilman/files/article-lemann-the%20word%20lab.pdf">realities</a>. </p>
<p>In 2004, a senior White House adviser <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html">suggested</a> a reporter belonged to the “reality-based community,” a sort of quaint minority of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.… That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”</p>
<p>Orwell could not have imagined the internet and its role in distributing alternative facts, nor that people would carry around Telescreens in their pockets in the form of smartphones. There is no Ministry of Truth distributing and policing information, and in a way everyone is Big Brother. </p>
<p>It seems less a situation that people are incapable of seeing through Big Brother’s big lies, than they embrace “alternative facts.” <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Enyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf">Some</a> researchers have <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Enyhan/opening-political-mind.pdf">found</a> that when some people begin with a certain worldview – for example, that scientific experts and public officials are untrustworthy – they believe their misperceptions more strongly when given accurate conflicting information. In other words, arguing with facts can <a href="https://hbr.org/2015/02/why-debunking-myths-about-vaccines-hasnt-convinced-dubious-parents">backfire</a>. Having already decided what is more essentially true than the facts reported by experts or journalists, they seek confirmation in alternative facts and distribute them themselves via Facebook, no Big Brother required.</p>
<p>In Orwell’s Oceania, there is no freedom to speak facts except those that are official. In 2017 America, at least among many of the powerful minority who selected its president, the more official the fact, the more dubious. For Winston, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” For this powerful minority, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make five.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71971/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Broich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The best selling book on Amazon is ‘1984’ – which was originally published in 1949. A historian from Case Western Reserve University considers how the novel helps us think about our present moment.John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/480002015-10-20T04:20:35Z2015-10-20T04:20:35ZTwo plus two equals 1984: is this Orwell’s nightmare or a smug satire for the inner party?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98969/original/image-20151020-23275-17me81v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">1984's politics, while tuned for the threat of a different villain at a different time, ring eerily true today.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Manuel Harlan/Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>First the good news. Headlong Theatre’s <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/1984/#.ViWHdhArKys">1984</a>, currently showing as part of the Melbourne Festival, is competent, skillful and clever. It’s easy to watch and has a pleasant aesthetic that relies on post-war design and long-forgotten standards drifting through the soundscape to generate a sense of comfortable nostalgia. </p>
<p>But the production is burdened by the weight of its forebear. </p>
<p>It employs stagey narrative devices sparsely but authoritatively; an on-stage book-club reading of Orwell’s 1984 is a particularly egregious example of the show’s foregrounding of its bulkiest aspect – the source text.</p>
<p>1984, of course, is a heavily laden text, which turned its author’s name into a byword for authoritarian nightmare. Its politics, while tuned for the threat of a different villain at a different time, ring eerily true today. </p>
<p>Of course, this is evidence more of the systemic persistence of the structures of power than any prescience on the part of original author.</p>
<p><a href="http://headlong.co.uk/">Headlong</a> – which began life in the UK in 1974 as The Oxford Stage Company – has specialised in adaptation, and its work is highly regarded. The company is also responsible for developing works by Lucy Prebble, including The Effect and Enron.</p>
<p>But with 1984 the dramaturgical logic of the production is overburdened. From the first intoning church bell that opens the production, it never escapes its inheritance and becomes a kind of parody of the original. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98804/original/image-20151019-7748-1yf9l3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Headlong Theatre’s 1984.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Manuel Harlan/Melbourne Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our knowing laughter at famously telling lines from the book reveals that, as an audience, we are all Big Brother, watching. It also foregrounds the fact that, in modern times, we each are Big Brother to one another. Through social media we willingly, actively participate in total surveillance culture. </p>
<p>Instead of the ominous shadows Orwell casts over his world, the absurdity of “our” world is perhaps more evocative of Beckett. </p>
<p>And this despite the fact that, as the production itself reminds us, the “never ending war”, “Emmanuel Goldstein” and the “terrorist brotherhood” all really do exist in their own mediated way today.</p>
<h2>Screen time</h2>
<p>It’s worth noting that Headlong’s use of media problematises the role of the female protagonist Julia (Janine Harouni) in interesting ways. At first the use of video screens on stage appears as another unavoidable image. Naturally the world is dominated by the screen – it’s 1984. </p>
<p>The same holds true in our world too, through a proliferation of thousands of little screens as opposed to the lowering big screen that, in Headlong’s handling, has replaced the sky, making the overloaded dramaturgy particularly apparent. </p>
<p>A screen on stage means something different from a screen in a novel or a screen on a screen for that matter – the screen’s “liveness”, in a stage context, is thrown immediately into question. </p>
<p>Until its introduction, everything we’ve seen happen on stage has actually happened; the physical bodies of the actors are present in the room with us, no matter how far away. But when they leave the stage and appear “elsewhere” on the screen, our lived experience of them is severed. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98805/original/image-20151019-7754-1gk9bw4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Headlong Theatre’s 1984.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Manuel Harlan/Melbourne Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But two crucial moments of Julia’s interaction with the cameras fundamentally alter her character by introducing potentially new information. When male protagonist Winston (Matthew Spencer) leaves the room for the first time, and Julia is left alone with a snow globe, she moves into the view of a specific camera at a deliberate angle, and then quickly moves out of it again to place the snow globe in view of another camera at another specific angle. </p>
<p>This is done, undoubtedly, to show the audience the snow globe, but it also reveals to us momentarily that Julia knows the cameras are there. She uses the camera to show the snow globe to us, at once the audience and Big Brother. </p>
<p>If she knows where the cameras are, the implication is that Julia is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Police">Thought Police</a> after all, as Winston first suspected. But the force of the original text overwhelms this possibility and reasserts itself in the final scene, as Julia and Winston confess their failures to one another. </p>
<p>An argument could be made that neither this production, nor Orwell, ever show us what actually happened to Julia. So we can’t really know what to believe.</p>
<p>Ultimately Headlong’s 1984 rests on a fairly antiquated notion of truth and the authenticity of the individual and so reaffirms the cultural assumptions of the audience. It thereby serves to strengthen that which it purports to warn us against: the erasure of dissent.</p>
<p>The argument it lays out, about a book that changes you forever as soon as you read it, disappears in an infinite regression of self-referentiality. We are Big Brother. We are the dead. </p>
<p>Is any staged production of 1984 doomed to bear the same burden? </p>
<p>Certainly the dogmas of the past are still insistently present here in Headlong’s attempt but, before it begins, because we already know how it ends, it feels as though an urgent warning to the post war “proles” has been co-opted as slightly smug satire for the inner party.</p>
<p><br>
<em>1984 by Headlong is showing at the Melbourne Festival until October 25. Details <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/1984/#.ViWHdhArKys">here</a></em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48000/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Reid does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Orwell’s 1984 is a heavily laden text, which turned the author’s name into a byword for authoritarian nightmare. So what can we take from the 2015 stage version at the Melbourne Festival?Robert Reid, Lecturer in Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/490412015-10-14T19:33:03Z2015-10-14T19:33:03ZGoodbye to all that: Orwell’s 1984 is a boot stamping on a human face no more<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98339/original/image-20151013-876-1qnjb2t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Every year thousands of students read George Orwell's 1984 and are doubtless convinced that its perspective on language and power is "definitive". Except that it's not; and hasn’t been since at least the 1970s. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Manuel Harlan/Melbourne Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The blurb for <a href="http://roberticke.com/reviews/webcv.pdf">Robert Icke</a> and <a href="http://www.duncanmacmillan.co.uk/">Duncan Macmillan</a>’s stage adaption of George Orwell’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5470.1984">1984</a> for the Melbourne Festival, announces that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The definitive book of the 20th century is re-examined in this radical, award-winning adaptation exploring surveillance, identity and why Orwell’s vision of the future is as relevant now as ever.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1248&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1248&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98341/original/image-20151014-879-xygt0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1248&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Primo Levi’s If This is a Man.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A blurb is a blurb. But if we wanted to define the 20th century with a book that explores the extremes into which humanity can descend, then one might ask whether 1984 stands up against, say, Primo Levi’s account of surviving Auschwitz, in <a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780349100135?redirected=true&gclid=CO2xn4rOwMgCFZeSvQodoa8Eeg">If This is a Man</a>, printed the year before Orwell’s 1949 book. </p>
<p>The blurb’s position is nonetheless common and every year thousands of schoolkids read it and many are doubtless convinced that its perspective on language and power are indeed “definitive”. Except that it’s not; and hasn’t been since at least the 1970s. And it’s relevance for our future must be near to zero.</p>
<p>1984 is a literary curio, a time-capsule containing – in terms of the functions of language and power in political and cultural life – elements that had already reached their zenith when Orwell published it in 1948. </p>
<p>The book’s dystopian horizon reflected the psychology of Orwell himself, a writer shaped by the traumatic political and economic transformations that post WWI Britain underwent in the 1920s and 1930s. </p>
<p>In this real-world context, Orwell’s social and cultural antennae were directed towards a generalised social domination – by class, by political institutions, by militarism — and 1984 was a projection of such domination taken to extremes. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98342/original/image-20151014-885-n9w4hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Orwell’s generational pessimism seemed validated in the totalitarianism of the time and 1984 brilliantly expresses this as a political parable. In 1940 he reviewed Hitler’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54270.Mein_Kampf?from_search=true&search_version=service">Mein Kampf</a> and remarked that Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini had “enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples”. </p>
<p>But physical terror alone has its limits. It must be accompanied, as Orwell saw in Mein Kampf, and in an idea he freighted into 1984, by what Hitler called “the big lie”, <em>die grosse lüge</em>. To repeat a lie as truth endlessly through narrow communication channels that people cannot avoid will convince many, or enough of them, that it is true: 2 + 2 = 5. </p>
<p>Such concentrated communicative power over language, enabled dictators to prevail and for the fictional Big Brother of 1984 to create the control-language of Newspeak. Notwithstanding the book’s projection 36 years hence, Orwell was no futurologist. </p>
<p>Futurology exists as a way of thinking about how things might be different, better or worse, but changed. Orwell saw the anti-utopian expression of his own world as a world that would always be, and the future as “a boot stamping on a human face –forever”.</p>
<p>The period between 1950 and 1970 seemed to underline his vision: a Cold War that appeared permanent, the “big lies” propagated West and East about the superiority of capitalism or communism, and so on. But from the 1970s onwards, two things occurred that would cause Orwell’s message about the nature of language and power to become relics from another age: the rise of free-market neoliberalism (globalisation), and the computer revolution (also globalisation). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98343/original/image-20151014-863-1ww7tip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98343/original/image-20151014-863-1ww7tip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98343/original/image-20151014-863-1ww7tip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98343/original/image-20151014-863-1ww7tip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98343/original/image-20151014-863-1ww7tip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98343/original/image-20151014-863-1ww7tip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98343/original/image-20151014-863-1ww7tip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98343/original/image-20151014-863-1ww7tip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s 1984.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Melbourne Festival.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The emergence of networked society has utterly transformed the material forms of communication and, as a consequence, the nature and function of language and power. If we exempt the claims about the wonders of the free market (an immense indemnity, admittedly), then <em>die grosse lüge</em> is no longer possible. </p>
<p>The capacity for mass self-communication has generated uncountable outlets for information-creation and sharing. </p>
<p>It has also meant the capacity for the production of numberless <em>kleine lügen</em>. Networked society is shot-through with lies, half-truths and distortions that make “truth” difficult to find, and the big lie (told again and again for effect) impossible for governments to perpetrate. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98344/original/image-20151014-882-1lf4e45.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98344/original/image-20151014-882-1lf4e45.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98344/original/image-20151014-882-1lf4e45.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98344/original/image-20151014-882-1lf4e45.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98344/original/image-20151014-882-1lf4e45.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=879&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98344/original/image-20151014-882-1lf4e45.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98344/original/image-20151014-882-1lf4e45.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/98344/original/image-20151014-882-1lf4e45.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1104&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s 1984.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Melbourne Festival.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Indeed, western governments are no longer in the business of “persuasion”, only survival. And mainstream media, or what’s left of it, devotes its efforts to being heard within the noise and distraction of pervasive social media. </p>
<p>When the power of language dissipates, then so too does power itself – atomised to circulate endlessly through the webs of the network, never being able to settle and concentrate for long.</p>
<p>Icke and Macmillan’s 1984 should be judged on its own merits. One of those merits, however, shouldn’t be as a kind of “cautionary tale”, still less as something “relevant” to how the future might be. We’ve become slaves to computer technology, not party ideology. </p>
<p>The postmodern “surveillance state”, such as it is, makes it up as it goes along; responding to computer developments and failing to cope (in our interests or its own) with the challenges of the dissolution of language and power. </p>
<p>Facebook might be the closest thing we have to Big Brother today; but social media’s owners have no interest in you or me beyond extracting as much information as possible. </p>
<p>Truth, lies, it does not matter; it’s the data that matters, not what you think. The future, we might say, then, is a human face staring at a screen – forever.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>1984 is at Melbourne Festival from October 16-25. Details <a href="https://www.festival.melbourne/events/1984/#.Vh2meROqpBc">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49041/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Hassan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many still regard George Orwell’s 1984 and its message about the nature of language and power “definitive”. But globalisation has revolutionised how we communicate; 1984 tells us nothing about our future.Robert Hassan, Associate Professor, School of Culture and Communication, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/32432011-09-22T20:42:38Z2011-09-22T20:42:38ZAn Orwellian climate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/3557/original/truth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C17%2C763%2C563&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The climate change "debate" bears the stains of Orwellian interference.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Truthout.org</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>“Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts” – Senator Daniel Moynihan</em></p>
<p>Science is a systematic, evidence-based, testable and self-correcting way of investigating the world. This is done through empirical observation, by experimentation and mathematics. </p>
<p>Ideologically dominated or totalitarian societies – such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc">George Orwell’s famous “1984” Ingsoc</a> – are marked by:</p>
<ul>
<li>attempts to alter reality (“2 + 2 = 5 if the party says so”)</li>
<li>elimination of history (“He who controls the past, controls the future”)</li>
<li>rewriting collective memory (“Oceania is at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia”)</li>
<li>The corruption of logic through aleration and elimination of language <a href="http://wiki.newspeakdictionary.com/wiki/List_of_Newspeak_words">“Newspeak”</a></li>
<li>mind control (<a href="http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-dict.html#crimethink">“thought crime”</a>). </li>
</ul>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/3613/original/newspeakpledge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/3613/original/newspeakpledge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3613/original/newspeakpledge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3613/original/newspeakpledge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3613/original/newspeakpledge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3613/original/newspeakpledge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3613/original/newspeakpledge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But even science fiction writers such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley or Doris Lessing did not envisage a civilisation that would knowingly, against the <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126">best scientific evidence</a>, devastate its own atmosphere and ocean system as comprehensively as has been and continues to be done through anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change.</p>
<p>The bulk of the peer-reviewed science, premier research organisations and the <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml">Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)</a> are in agreement: carbon emissions are causing a shift in the state of the atmosphere-ocean system.</p>
<p>But as a spate of extreme weather events around the world, related to rising temperatures, is intensifying, so has a chorus of pro-carbon advocacy. Advocates will tell you “it is the sun”, or “the Earth is cooling”, or “coal is clean”. It must be true if the conservative think tanks say so! </p>
<p>Other tactics aimed at “altering reality” include:</p>
<p>1) Questioning the role of greenhouse gases as drivers of climate, in contrast to the basic laws of physics and chemistry (such as <a href="http://astronomyonline.org/Science/PlancksLaw.asp">Planck’s law</a>, <a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/stefan.html">Steffan-Bolzmann’s law</a>, <a href="http://kirchhoffslaw.org/">Kirchhof’s law</a>). </p>
<p>2) Invoking a plethora of unsupported alternative mechanisms such as solar radiation, <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11651-climate-myths-its-all-down-to-cosmic-rays.html">cosmic rays</a>, water vapour, <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-on-Mars.html">Mars and Venus warming</a>, volcanic emissions and geothermal heating, to name but a few.</p>
<p>3) Negating empirical scientific measurements by misciting the literature and propagating unreferenced plots from unknown sources. An example is the exaggeration of the Medieval Warm Period, which reached less than 25% of 21st century warming. </p>
<p>4) Avoiding, misrepresenting or attacking the bulk of the peer-reviewed literature (only a <a href="http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html">very small minority of papers</a> question anthropogenic global warming).</p>
<p>5) Claiming scientists are working together in some imagined climate change conspiracy.</p>
<p>According to Vaclav Klaus, former president of the Czech Republic: “Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”</p>
<p>6) Employing a plethora of websites containing <a href="http://notrickszone.com/">recycled, long-discarded arguments</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/3603/original/Orwell.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/3603/original/Orwell.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=834&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3603/original/Orwell.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=834&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3603/original/Orwell.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=834&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3603/original/Orwell.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1048&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3603/original/Orwell.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1048&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3603/original/Orwell.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1048&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Even Orwell couldn’t predict the climate debate.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The debate would have remained academic in nature had the issue not concerned the future of the atmosphere and ocean system – the lungs of the planet – and its inhabitants, including us.</p>
<p>Given the daunting consequences of current climate trajectories, climate scientists wish they were wrong and that the spectre of climate change would go away. </p>
<p>By contrast, pro-carbon lobbyists do not appear to express too many doubts, nor appear to understand the consequences should their version of reality prove wrong. </p>
<p>But never mind those who <a href="http://blogs.crikey.com.au/rooted/2011/02/25/a-medieval-climate/">deny the science</a>, when those who have been elected on a climate change platform are giving-up or delaying <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903927204576573113505308544.html">critical EPS legislation</a>. </p>
<p>In Australia those elected under the banner of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqZvpRjGtGM">“the greatest moral challenge of our generation” </a>
state “<a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/coal-industry-is-safe-says-greg-combet/story-fn59niix-1225919936683">the coal industry is safe</a>”. Governments fail to directly inform the population of the realities and consequences of dangerous climate change.</p>
<p>Here is a summary of some of these realities:</p>
<p>1) Global temperature has already exceeded the upper target of a +2°C relative to pre-industrial levels <a href="http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2009/cop15/eng/l07.pdf">set by the international community at both Copenhagen and Cancun</a>.</p>
<p>Thus, atmospheric greenhouse gas-forced energy rise (solar heat trapped in the atmosphere) has now reached levels equivalent of +2.3°C. </p>
<p>This figure is masked only by a short-lived -1.1°C cooling effect, caused mainly by industrially emitted sulphur dioxide <a href="http://theconversation.com/beyond-two-degrees-celsius-sulphur-wont-save-us-for-long-1885">stratospheric aerosols</a> – particles, which partly block sunlight from reaching the surface and warming the earth.</p>
<p>Incredibly the +2°C target is <a href="http://www.lessthan2degrees.info/house/details">still discussed</a> in political and economic reports <a href="http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2009/08/g8s-2-degrees-goal/">as if it hasn’t been reached</a>.</p>
<p>2) The connection between the spate of extreme weather events around the globe and climate change (see figure below) is still largely ignored by governments and most of the media, which either overlook extreme weather events, or <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-03-12/great-flood/363142">dismiss such events as once-in-a-century event</a>. </p>
<p>Arguably people would only be motivated to seriously tackle climate change if and when they understand the connection between the rising spate of cyclones, floods, heat waves and fires and the rise in temperatures over continents and ocean.</p>
<p>3) Despite political pre-election promises, development continues on infrastructure for extracting economic carbon from coal, oil (including from the <a href="http://www.gazprom.com/press/news/2011/august/article117539/">Arctic Sea</a>), coal seam gas, oil shale and tar sands.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/26/obama-approves-pipeline-alberta-texas">These developments</a> can only lead to the further release of hundreds of gigatons of carbon into an atmosphere already at 393 parts-per-million of CO₂. </p>
<p>As established by multiple <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/292/5517/686.abstract">studies of the history of the atmosphere</a>, a concentration of 500+/-50 parts-per-million CO₂ in the atmosphere leads to the breakup of the Antarctic ice sheet.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/3578/original/Figure3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/3578/original/Figure3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3578/original/Figure3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3578/original/Figure3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3578/original/Figure3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3578/original/Figure3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/3578/original/Figure3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But paradoxically, as the evidence for dangerous climate change has been strengthening, those who do not accept the scientific evidence appear to exert increasing influence over public opinion.</p>
<p>Inertia prevails. The current success of pro-carbon lobby is, at least in part, attributable to the “good news”, even though false, they and their media mouthpieces appear to project, using alternate “reality”, language and terms increasingly akin to Orwellian “Newspeak”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/3243/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Glikson is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.</span></em></p>“Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts” – Senator Daniel Moynihan Science is a systematic, evidence-based, testable and self-correcting way of investigating the world. This…Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleo-climate scientist, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.