{"id":12413,"date":"2022-10-25T12:32:24","date_gmt":"2022-10-25T01:32:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=12413"},"modified":"2022-10-25T17:06:24","modified_gmt":"2022-10-25T06:06:24","slug":"why-nineteen-eighty-four-is-not-a-reliable-guide-to-contemporary-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2022\/10\/25\/why-nineteen-eighty-four-is-not-a-reliable-guide-to-contemporary-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Why ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is not a reliable guide to contemporary politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

In January 2017, Donald Trump\u2019s advisor Kellyanne Conway was quizzed on White House press secretary Sean Spicer\u2019s false claims about the number of attendees at the president\u2019s inauguration. When pressed on why Spicer would \u201cutter a provable falsehood\u201d, Conway said that Spicer was offering \u201calternative facts<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Her wording was widely characterised as \u201cOrwellian\u201d. Everywhere from Slate to the New York Times to USA Today, journalists were linking the new administration to George Orwell\u2019s dystopian fiction. Less than a week after Conway\u2019s claim, the sales of Orwell\u2019s Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em> had\u00a0gone up an estimated 9,500%<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a serious case of \u201cI know you are but what am I?\u201d, Republicans have gotten in on the act, accusing the left of being the fulfilment of Orwell\u2019s dark prophesy. In April this year, for instance, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted: \u201cHistorically, was there ever a despotic regime that didn\u2019t have the equivalent of a Ministry of Truth?\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost everyone in every quarter sees Orwellian undertones in the manoeuvrings of their opponents. Like Elvis, Orwell has been spotted everywhere.<\/p>\n

But we should be suspicious, not simply because the designation is thrown around so freely and is plastic enough to fit almost all political phenomena indifferently, but because one of the legacies of Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em> itself is to leave us with a more finely tuned sense of what such propaganda looks like. Orwellian strategies are harder to propagate because of, well, the overwhelming success of Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Orwellian paradox<\/h3>\n

Some historical nuance is required. Orwell was responding to mid-twentieth century political regimes \u2013 Stalinist Russia, in particular. He was ringing the alarm bells on a new phenomenon: state control had moved beyond speech to thought and perception. Winston Smith, the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>, reflects: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”<\/p>\n

There is a paradox here. Propaganda is a mode of communication \u2013 pervasive, insistent, controlled. Orwell shows it flooding the airwaves, invading every workspace and living room through the screens on which the image of Big Brother is ever-present. Yet the goal of this kind of propaganda is to move beyond the phase of control through language to a regime of thought control where such communication has become redundant.<\/p>\n

The world of Big Brother is austere in every way \u2013 colourless, devoid of all entertainments and sensory pleasures \u2013 so language itself is subject to the principle of reduction and elimination. The Party officials in charge of Newspeak are in the business of \u201ccutting language down to the bone\u201d. They are destroying scores of words every day so that ‘thoughtcrime’ will ultimately become impossible, because there will be no means of articulating it, even inside the confines of your own mind.<\/p>\n

Thought is already being suppressed in the novel through an embargo on logic and evidence, which starts with a simple reversal of anything that might be regarded as an established truth. This means, conversely, that the regime of Big Brother is threatened by any and every expression of reality-based knowledge. And so: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.”<\/p>\n

Big Brother\u2019s propaganda is thus a self-eliminating program, working constantly and assiduously to make itself redundant. Eventually, there will be no words to protest with, or even to think with; there will be no perceptions to express and no realities to intrude upon the counterfactual world the Party is creating.<\/p>\n

The counter-Orwellian paradox<\/h3>\n

The principles of\u00a0glasnost<\/em>\u00a0(openness) and\u00a0perestroika<\/em> (restructuring), which began to take hold in Soviet culture from the end of the ‘real’ year 1984, served to dismantle the regime that prevailed in the USSR for much of the 20th century. Alternatives became possible again; enquiry and conjecture were licensed; inventiveness was set free.<\/p>\n

And here is the counter-Orwellian paradox. Under the new policy of openness, propaganda could thrive again. For what is propaganda if not a system of alternatives, as Kellyanne Conway so astutely grasped?<\/p>\n

The principle here is not to force one alternative on a population. By rendering\u00a0any<\/em>\u00a0alternative as\u00a0a priori<\/em> plausible, this form of propaganda casts doubt on ‘official’ accounts. All they<\/em>\u00a0can offer is a version of truth, one that will necessarily reflect their\u00a0own agendas.<\/em><\/p>\n

In February this year,\u00a0Dmitri Kiselev<\/a>, a fast-talking Russian version of Fox News commentator\u00a0Sean Hannity<\/a>\u00a0and a prime-time host with the Kremlin\u2019s official media outlet\u00a0Rossiya Segonya<\/a>, stated this outright: “Objectivity is a myth that is proposed and imposed on us.”<\/p>\n

Similarly, in 2017, Fox News\u2019 version of Dmitri Kiselev, Sean Hannity, went on CBS and told Ted Koppel: “I don\u2019t pretend that I\u2019m fair and balanced and objective. You do.” When the program went to air, Hannity blasted CBS and called it \u201cfake news\u201d.<\/p>\n

If we want to understand what is going on here, Orwell is not our guide. We would do better to turn to the writings of Russian political theorist\u00a0Alexander Dugin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dugin is an ideologue who aligns himself with Vladimir Putin\u2019s visionary sense of Russian destiny. While he dismisses the suggestion that he is \u201cPutin\u2019s brain\u201d, he is the most influential analyst of the cultural environment Putin has sought to create.<\/p>\n

The world of Big Brother is austere in every way \u2013 colourless, devoid of all entertainments and sensory pleasures \u2013 so language itself is subject to the principle of reduction and elimination. <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his book\u00a0The Fourth Political Theory<\/em><\/a>, Dugin makes the case for a new political direction, one that moves away from the modernist regimes of Marxism and fascism, whose extremes of ideological conformity he calls \u201cuninteresting\u201d and \u201cworthless\u201d. The literalism of such regimes of control, he says, makes them \u201centirely useless\u201d.<\/p>\n

Without making direct reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>, Dugin\u2019s critique at times echoes the debates at the core of Orwell\u2019s novel. In Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>, the Party official O’Brien makes an extended doctrinal statement. He foresees a world with no need for art, literature or science, a world where curiosity and all forms of \u201cenjoyment of the process of life\u201d are eliminated. Such a world would never endure, protests Winston Smith: “It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.”<\/p>\n

Dugin would no doubt take Winston\u2019s side in this exchange. He proposes a cultural model that is much more flexible, cunning and resourceful than anything O\u2019Brien and his masters might envisage.<\/p>\n

The Fourth Political Theory<\/em> draws its \u201cdark inspiration\u201d from postmodernism, an ethos Dugin despises, but uses as a Trojan horse to penetrate the defences of the world of liberalism (Dugin\u2019s anathema). All the pleasures and enjoyments banished from the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em> come surging back.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not really understand why certain people, when confronted with the concept of the Fourth Political Theory,\u201d Dugin writes, “do not immediately rush to open a bottle of champagne, and do not start dancing and rejoicing, celebrating the discovery of new possibilities. After all, this is a kind of a philosophical New Year \u2013 an exciting leap into the unknown.”<\/p>\n

In this brave new world \u2013 which is not Aldous Huxley\u2019s any more than it is Orwell\u2019s \u2013 \u201cnothing is true and everything is possible\u201d.<\/p>\n

The journalist Peter Pomerantsev, a more congenial guide for those who find Dugin\u2019s new ideology hard to stomach, uses this phrase as the title of his book on the propaganda culture surrounding Russian television, where \u201ceverything is PR\u201d is a declared principle.<\/p>\n

The ‘postmodern’ influence here is, more specifically, the influence of French theorist Jean Baudrillard, who proposed that the ‘real’ was no longer accessible in a world where layers of image replication \u2013 ‘simulacra’ \u2013 had evolved into an autonomous pseudo-reality. This is the world in which a television celebrity becomes president and the presidency becomes a celebrity media game.<\/p>\n

In such a world, propaganda thrives and manipulation is rife. With no shared or objective reality, the individual subject of liberalism can gain no traction. According to Dugin: “If we lose our identity, we will also lose alterity, the capacity for ‘otherness’, and the ability to distinguish between self and not-self, and consequently to assume the existence of any alternative viewpoint.”<\/p>\n

The image here is not one of a strong difference being asserted, but of a fragile and slender one under threat; and the threat is real. As alterity is lost, the obsession with creating antagonists increases, as if it were a mode of survival.<\/p>\n

Mirroring<\/h3>\n

One of the key insights of the French-American cultural theorist\u00a0Ren\u00e9 Girard<\/a>\u00a0is that adversaries are often involved in an intense and escalating mirroring. They increasingly come to reflect each others\u2019 logics, strategies, and rationales. That this state of affairs can invariably only be seen outside the viewpoint of antagonists (who see between themselves all sorts of radical differences) is of little import.<\/p>\n

In the parallel cases of the US and Russia, we should look beyond the trivialities and psychopathologies of two men who have had toilets made out of gold for them, who brag about their wealth but evade questions about it, who view women as ornaments, who obsess over the smallest criticisms, and whose \u201cstrong man\u201d bluster is always in the service of some nostalgia about a mythical era.<\/p>\n

Putin and Trump have lavished each other with praise: Putin has described Trump as a \u201cbrilliant, talented person\u201d; Trump has called Putin \u201ca strong leader [\u2026] a powerful leader\u201d. But the sincerest flattery, as we know, appears as imitation.<\/p>\n

As Russian television has embraced the world of images, with all its extravagance and glamour and duplicity, it has become more like Fox News, and vice versa. When Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine, the news on Russian state media was editorially committed to official Kremlin positions. One of its methods was to echo Fox News. In February, a prime-time overview of the news of the week \u2013 presented by Kiselev \u2013 featured an opening monologue from\u00a0Tucker Carlson\u2019s Fox program<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The situation in America since Trump was voted out of office has, if anything, become more dire. As evidence unfolds of his involvement in the January 6 coup attempt and his\u00a0appropriation of top secret documents<\/a>\u00a0as his private property, the legal case against him is fraught with obstacles created by the propaganda enterprise he continues to lead.<\/p>\n

What should be clear cases of right and wrong under the US Constitution, and of guilt under law, have become a contest over truth in a hall of mirrors. Every accusation prompts an equal and equivalent counter-accusation. The confusion thickens with the strategy of the pre-emptive strike: whatever Trump has done wrong, he has already accused his opponents of doing just that.<\/p>\n

With the prospects of a MAGA dominated election looming, no one can predict the consequences, but it is clear that American democracy is fighting for its life in a political environment that may be damaged beyond hope of recovery.<\/p>\n

We need to entertain the idea that Orwell\u2019s success in recognising the propaganda of his day might have incurred a cost \u2013 namely, that we are now too confident that we know what propaganda is. Good propaganda is precisely that because it is hard to pick; it rarely wears a neon sign around its neck. Enforced subscription to the Party\u2019s messages has been replaced by voluntary consumption of the Kool Aid. The French philosopher\u00a0Simone Weil<\/a>\u00a0once said that \u201ctruth is a need of the soul\u201d. But we are often now satisfied with a more Trumpian, Twitterian logic: \u201cA lot of people agree with me [\u2026] a lot of people are saying\u201d.<\/p>\n

Enforced subscription to the Party\u2019s messages has been replaced by voluntary consumption of the Kool Aid. <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is not that nothing of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em> remains, or that the novel does not serve as a reminder of what a certain kind of political control can look like. There are, no doubt, statements by Trump and Putin that are, in some sense, ‘Orwellian’. Regimes with Orwellian characteristics still exist \u2013 like Bashar al-Assad\u2019s Syria, for example, which is known for its compulsory slogans (\u201cAssad or we Burn the Country\u201d) and for torturing those who subvert them.<\/p>\n

But large parts of the world now have fewer uses for the kinds of ideological strong-arming depicted in Orwell\u2019s novel. And this is one of the reasons propaganda is harder to track. If our capacity to detect propaganda only surfaces in relation to what we oppose, we are all the more likely to respond in kind. In a post-Orwellian world, we are producers as well as consumers of the inflated rhetoric, sensational imagery and crazed dramaturgies promoted by those who are all too conscious of what they are doing.<\/p>\n

As the philosopher\u00a0Bernard Williams<\/a>\u00a0contended 20 years ago, we live in an uncomfortable era. On the one hand, we have a heightened sensitivity about being fooled; on the other hand, we are living with a general scepticism of whether anything at all might answer to \u201cthe truth\u201d. We are deeply committed to something we don\u2019t even know whether we believe.<\/p>\n

How this tension will \u2013 or might \u2013 be sorted out is not something that will be resolved by philosophers or social theorists. It will be taken up and lived out in that increasingly murky domain that we still call, with less confidence than ever, ‘politics’.<\/p>\n

This article is co-authored by Jane Goodall, Emeritus Professor at the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on <\/strong><\/em>The Conversation<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Photo by Ivan Radic<\/a> on Flickr (CC).<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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