Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined
What 1984 means today
GEORGE PACKER
JULY 2019 ISSUE
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984
BY DORIAN LYNSKEY DOUBLEDAY
OLIVER MUNDAY
No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwellâs 1984. The title, the adjectival form of the authorâs last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsocâdoublethink, memory hole, unperson, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brotherâtheyâve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. Itâs almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984. Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwellâs novel was paired with Aldous Huxleyâs Brave New World, whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwellâs essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didnât go back to 1984. Since high school, Iâd lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already âknewâ the book. It was too familiar to revisit.
Read: Teaching â1984â in 2016
So when I recently read the novel again, I wasnât prepared for its power. You have to clear away what you think you know, all the terminology and iconography and cultural spin-offs, to grasp the original genius and lasting greatness of 1984. It is both a profound political essay and a shocking, heartbreaking work of art. And in the Trump era, itâs a best seller.
DOUBLEDAY
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwellâs 1984, by the British music critic Dorian Lynskey, makes a rich and compelling case for the novel as the summation of Orwellâs entire body of work and a master key to understanding the modern world. The book was published in 1949, when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis, but Lynskey dates its biographical sources back more than a decade to Orwellâs months in Spain as a volunteer on the republican side of the countryâs civil war. His introduction to totalitarianism came in Barcelona, when agents of the Soviet Union created an elaborate lie to discredit Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies.
Left-wing journalists readily accepted the fabrication, useful as it was to the cause of communism. Orwell didnât, exposing the lie with eyewitness testimony in journalism that preceded his classic book Homage to Cataloniaâand that made him a heretic on the left. He was stoical about the boredom and discomforts of trench warfareâhe was shot in the neck and barely escaped Spain with his lifeâbut he took the erasure of truth hard. It threatened his sense of what makes us sane, and life worth living. âHistory stopped in 1936,â he later told his friend Arthur Koestler, who knew exactly what Orwell meant. After Spain, just about everything he wrote and read led to the creation of his final masterpiece. âHistory stopped,â Lynskey writes, âand Nineteen Eighty-Four began.â
The biographical story of 1984âthe dying manâs race against time to finish his novel in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura, off Scotlandâwill be familiar to many Orwell readers. One of Lynskeyâs contributions is to destroy the notion that its terrifying vision can be attributed to, and in some way disregarded as, the death wish of a tuberculosis patient. In fact, terminal illness roused in Orwell a rage to liveâhe got remarried on his deathbedâjust as the novelâs pessimism is relieved, until its last pages, by Winston Smithâs attachment to nature, antique objects, the smell of coffee, the sound of a proletarian woman singing, and above all his lover, Julia. 1984 is crushingly grim, but its clarity and rigor are stimulants to consciousness and resistance. According to Lynskey, âNothing in Orwellâs life and work supports a diagnosis of despair.â
Lynskey traces the literary genesis of 1984 to the utopian fictions of the optimistic 19th centuryâEdward Bellamyâs Looking Backward (1888); the sci-fi novels of H. G. Wells, which Orwell read as a boyâand their dystopian successors in the 20th, including the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatinâs We (1924) and Huxleyâs Brave New World (1932). The most interesting pages in The Ministry of Truth are Lynskeyâs account of the novelâs afterlife. The struggle to claim 1984 began immediately upon publication, with a battle over its political meaning. Conservative American reviewers concluded that Orwellâs main target wasnât just the Soviet Union but the left generally. Orwell, fading fast, waded in with a statement explaining that the novel was not an attack on any particular government but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals: âThe moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Donât let it happen. It depends on you.â But every work of art escapes the artistâs controlâthe more popular and complex, the greater the misunderstandings.
Lynskeyâs account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory. The novel has inspired movies, television shows, plays, a ballet, an opera, a David Bowie album, imitations, parodies, sequels, rebuttals, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Black Panther Party, and the John Birch Society. It has acquired something of the smothering ubiquity of Big Brother himself: 1984 is watching you. With the arrival of the year 1984, the cultural appropriations rose to a deafening level. That January an ad for the Apple Macintosh was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a manâoppressive technologyâto the astonishment of a crowd of gray zombies. The message: âYouâll see why 1984 wonât be like â1984.âââ
The argument recurs every decade or so: Orwell got it wrong. Things havenât turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating. But Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And itâs as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance. The week of Donald Trumpâs inauguration, when the presidentâs adviser Kellyanne Conway justified his false crowd estimate by using the phrase alternative facts, the novel returned to the best-seller lists. A theatrical adaptation was rushed to Broadway. The vocabulary of Newspeak went viral. An authoritarian president who stood the term fake news on its head, who once said, âWhat youâre seeing and what youâre reading is not whatâs happening,â has given 1984 a whole new life.
What does the novel mean for us? Not Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, where Winston is interrogated and tortured until he loses everything he holds dear. We donât live under anything like a totalitarian system. âBy definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four,â Lynskey acknowledges. Instead, we pass our days under the nonstop surveillance of a telescreen that we bought at the Apple Store, carry with us everywhere, and tell everything to, without any coercion by the state. The Ministry of Truth is Facebook, Google, and cable news. We have met Big Brother and he is us.
Trumpâs election brought a rush of cautionary books with titles like On Tyranny, Fascism: A Warning, and How Fascism Works. My local bookstore set up a totalitarian-themed table and placed the new books alongside 1984. They pointed back to the 20th centuryâif it happened in Germany, it could happen hereâand warned readers how easily democracies collapse. They were alarm bells against complacency and fatalismââthe politics of inevitability,â in the words of the historian Timothy Snyder, âa sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.â The warnings were justified, but their emphasis on the mechanisms of earlier dictatorships drew attention away from the heart of the malignancyânot the state, but the individual. The crucial issue was not that Trump might abolish democracy but that Americans had put him in a position to try. Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.
We are living with a new kind of regime that didnât exist in Orwellâs time. It combines hard nationalismâthe diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatredâwith soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984, where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it isâthe goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and divisionânot excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.
During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, propagandists at a Russian troll farm used social media to disseminate a meme: âââThe People Will Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe.â â George Orwell.â But Orwell never said this. The moral authority of his name was stolen and turned into a lie toward that most Orwellian end: the destruction of belief in truth. The Russians needed partners in this effort and found them by the millions, especially among Americaâs non-elites. In 1984, working-class people are called âproles,â and Winston believes theyâre the only hope for the future. As Lynskey points out, Orwell didnât foresee âthat the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.â
We stagger under the daily load of doublethink pouring from Trump, his enablers in the Inner Party, his mouthpieces in the Ministry of Truth, and his fanatical supporters among the proles. Spotting doublethink in ourselves is much harder. âTo see what is in front of oneâs nose needs a constant struggle,â Orwell wrote. In front of my nose, in the world of enlightened and progressive people where I live and work, a different sort of doublethink has become pervasive. Itâs not the claim that true is fake or that two plus two makes five. Progressive doublethinkâwhich has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kindâcreates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justiceâa word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.
For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stanceâeven its subject matterâis scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value. This confusion of categories guides judgments all across the worlds of media, the arts, and education, from movie reviews to grant committees. Some people who register the assumption as doublethink might be privately troubled, but they donât say so publicly. Then self-censorship turns into self-deception, until the recognition itself disappearsâa lie you accept becomes a lie you forget. In this way, intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police.
Orthodoxy is also enforced by social pressure, nowhere more intensely than on Twitter, where the specter of being shamed or âcanceledâ produces conformity as much as the prospect of adding to your tribe of followers does. This pressure can be more powerful than a party or state, because it speaks in the name of the people and in the language of moral outrage, against which there is, in a way, no defense. Certain commissars with large followings patrol the precincts of social media and punish thought criminals, but most progressives assent without difficulty to the stifling consensus of the moment and the intolerance it breedsânot out of fear, but because they want to be counted on the side of justice.
This willing constriction of intellectual freedom will do lasting damage. It corrupts the ability to think clearly, and it undermines both culture and progress. Good art doesnât come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate canât find real solutions. âNothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word,â Orwell wrote in 1946. âWhat is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.â Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.
1984 will always be an essential book, regardless of changes in ideologies, for its portrayal of one person struggling to hold on to what is real and valuable. âSanity is not statistical,â Winston thinks one night as he slips off to sleep. Truth, it turns out, is the most fragile thing in the world. The central drama of politics is the one inside your skull.
This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline âGeorge Orwellâs Unheeded Warning.â
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
George Packer is a staff writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.
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