Notes from 1984

1984 is a favorite of mine; I read it at least once every couple years. I think it’s the questioning nature of Winston that gets me, feeling the same emotions myself on a smaller scale.

Interestingly in London this summer, I thought often of 1984. Whether they caused or were caused by the book, elements of the city constantly reminded me of the story. Cameras everywhere; [tall, windowless buildings](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Power_Station) ([used in the movie](http://www.oobject.com/15-scifi-movies-15-famous-architectural-locations/battersea-powerstation-1984/2578/), natch); sensationalist newspaper headlines.

As with any political satire, it’s easy to find similarities in our current world. In a time of unrest and war, however, it’s especially good to recognize that many of our fears are artificially-created and harmful, and that an intelligent reading of the news handed down to us is necessary.

### Notes

The dangers of oversimplification; be “as simple as possible, but no simpler”:

> “In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?” – Syme (55)

A similar sentiment to the “[9/11 Truth](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Truth_Movement)” assertions; and of new importance [in our digital age](http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/in-an-iranian-image-a-missile-too-many/index.html?hp).

> Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep people frightened’. (160)

The role of “feelings” in a police state:

> Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love…The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. (171-2)

War and suffering as a way to keep people in hardship and thus less ambitious. Reminded me of Huxley when I read it:

> The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent…It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. (198-9)

The danger of having the wrong goals:

> The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. Once is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. (201)

This is eerie given [how routine the war in Iraq has become](http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/basra.php)…and the public statements that [we could be there much longer](http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/14/mccain.king/); continuous war has the same effect as continuous peace:

> It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The particular pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace…this is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: _War is Peace_. (207)

A friend once said to me that he believed you “couldn’t learn from someone else what you didn’t already know”. I’ve tempered that to “what you aren’t ready to know”…but this passage reinforces his statement, and underlines the dangerous attraction of it:

> The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction…The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. (208)

Extended, the internet does far worse than this…but also far better, with its freedoms:

> The invention of print…made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end…The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time. (214)

If the evolution of genes is more fundamental than that of individuals, the evolution and survival of memes may be the ultimate societal goal…as [Richard Dawkins posited 30 years later](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene):

> The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. (218)

Like “precrime” in [Minority Report](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(film)):

> In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. (220)

Definitons ([complete list of Newspeak words](http://wiki.newspeakdictionary.com/wiki/List_of_Newspeak_words)):

* *Crimestop* – “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.” (220)

* *Blackwhite* – “the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts; [or] the ability to _believe_ that black is white, and more, to _know_ that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.” (221)

* *Doublethink* – “the power of holding two contradictory believes in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” (223) Interestingly, this is [the main suggestion of a prominent design thinker](http://www.amazon.com/Opposable-Mind-Successful-Integrative-Thinking/dp/1422118924).

An interesting corollary to [memories as experience](http://ryskamp.org/brain/design/designing-for-memories):

> The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence by survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. (222)

> “But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon parishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth, _is_ truth.” – O’Brien (261)

> Nothing exists except through human consciousness. (278)

I think several politicians right now are wishing this were true…

> To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed…all this is indispensably necessary (223)

I think this holds today…the first part addresses clearly the designer’s problem:

> In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is…One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. (224)