It's Not 1984

2017...a book in search of an author


As I’ve written before, George Orwell’s 1984 is one of the most significant books in my life. So let me stipulate here at the beginning that this post is not intended as a Nobby Works take down of Orwell, à la Hitchens in Heavens (Hitchens’ admiration of Orwell was the one small piece of common ground we shared in fact). This post is more a rebuttal to the current fashion for viewing 1984 as an uncannily apt commentary on our dark times. I’m happy to see sales of the book dramatically increase in the age of Trump, but I think if anyone takes 1984 as a guide for coping with the age of Trump…well, I’m afraid one might just as well use AOL dial-up to surf the Internet.
The nightmare vision Orwell foresaw in 1984 was borne of the time he lived in…a time when totalitarian states--first Germany and then the Soviet Union--were on the rise and threatening to crush human individual freedom under a monolithic order where even personal relations, communications, and dreams were under state control. It’s not that Orwell was wrong. He was right for his time, but there was no way he could foresee how technology and innovation would turn his nightmare vision on its head…how such seemingly benign advances in society like cable TV, the Internet, social media, and smart phones would make an unimagined dystopia where it’s not ignorance that’s strength, but alternate truth.
Because of my long-time admiration of 1984, I realized how un-predictive it was of our current situation long before Trump’s ascension...excerpt from The Nob four years ago: 

Kahneman’s book is full of empirically proven evidence that we live in a state of unreality dominated by a myriad of unseen forces--or more accurately inconspicuous forces. In his book these forces are identified variously as "priming," "the illusion of understanding," "the illusion of validity," "the halo effect," "the endowment effect," "the anchoring effect." These and many others are subtle beyond Orwell’s imaginings, but have an impact on our thinking and behavior as insidious as anything designed under the ever-watchful eye of Big Brother.

As anyone who engages in political discussion as I have over the years can attest, you find yourself increasingly arguing with people who are not at all ignorant in the common sense of that word. They are people who are "informed" in a manner of speaking, but are constantly subject to those unseen forces Daniel Kahneman writes about and have intellectually embraced and assimilated counterfactual information. A number of these conversations instantly spring to mind as I write this. There was my debate with the man who had FOX News on all day long, yet had no idea that Barack Obama (who he dismissed as a typical tax and spend Democrat) had offered Republicans “a grand bargain” in which they would agree to lower the national debt by cutting $10 in entitlements for every $1 in new taxes. It was a proposition that cost Obama dearly among his base, but this 24-7 Fox watcher had never heard of it. Then there was my healthcare confrontation with someone who argued against his own man Romney’s healthcare plan by insisting that Romneycare was driving Massachusetts into bankruptcy because he had read it somewhere. And it’s not only Republicans who choose to soak in their own reality…just this morning I had a "Bernie or Bust" boy repeat once again the certifiably false charge that the Democratic National Committee had rigged the primaries for Hillary Clinton.
These are all arguments made from the comfort of one’s own sources, certitude, and sectarianism. They’re arguments that defy deliberation because deliberation itself is seen as a weakness. Moreover…and more to the point…they’re not arguments that need a Big Brother to impose them…they are imposed from below…by a thousand little brothers and sisters posting and sharing made-up information that gains currency not because it is tested, debated and analyzed but simply because it exists. In 2017, the most ominous message is not “Big Brother is watching you”; it’s “I saw it on the Internet.”
Only if you're standing in his mirrorOr in the case of the most mentally unbalanced and intellectually incurious president in American history, “I saw it on Fox News”…which was what he said after falsely citing a terrorist attack in Sweden. Think of it: a person with access to all the secrets and intelligence in the world making a public ass of himself by referring to a bogus TV story? (Big Brother, if he had existed, would, be turning in his grave with Hitler and Stalin). This is why comparisons of Trump to Big Brother are so wildly off target. This man is not watching you; he’s too busy watching himself. Focusing on the authoritarian, we miss the far more dangerous and unstable narcissist in charge.
We are not suffering the suffocating, gray totalitarian state of 1984; we are lost in A Night on Bald Mountain, where every bat is freed from its belfry, where undead resentments against sharing rights and equality with others rise up from the grave, where peace is always at war with itself, and where freedom is slavery to the con artist. And if we needed any further evidence of how this is not a totalitarian nightmare but quite the opposite, just look at the reaction to it from the so-called Deep State. If this were the culmination of our paranoid fantasies, our keepers of the secrets, soldiers in the shadows, thought police would be rushing to reinforce and solidify the power of the fraud at the top. Instead, FBI, CIA, NSA, along with corporate media are rushing to undo him through non-stop leaks and devastating leak-based reporting. Their very reliance on order and stability is what drives them to undermine this new reign of disorder and instability…misrule by Tweet, Reality TV, personal pique, and unchecked juvenile ego.

Orwell for all his intelligence and cleverness could not have imagined this world we now inhabit. We do our gross, present harm further insult to think that he did.