Here Comes the Chopper to Chop Off Your Head (1984 Pt. 2 Ch. 11 - End)

It really shouldn't be surprising to me as much as it is, but not since Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged has a book affected me as much as 1984.  It has shone a light, been the comforting "You're not alone" message in a bottle that has washed up on my shore, has shown me pitfalls to avoid and defenses to set within my mind and personal philosophies.  I do feel like a better person for having read it or, at least, a better prepared member of an intelligent species anyway.

There are plenty of political parties, institutions both religious and secular, even work environments where people simply want to grasp power for power's sake, and that is by far the most insidious motivation.  They will lie, cheat, steal, brainwash, and then look at you like you are the crazy one for finding fault in them.  There are far more people who ask us regularly to deny the truth of our senses.  Our society currently is taken up in a swell of moral/philosophical/ethical/religious relativity.  The facts, we are told, do no matter.  "Madame, kindly do not confuse the issue with facts" used to be a joke line and now it's practically a protest march chant.  We've been told by our superiors in Washington D.C. that we have to vote on a bill first and then we can find out what is in it...and nobody acts like that is madness.  "There is nothing good or bad except that thinking make it so," was a line from Shakespeare and our generation turned it into "There is nothing right or wrong...".  Gender is no longer considered a fact of birth.  It's what you "feel" that is more important than facts, these days.  The sea level hasn't risen to predicted levels, but we're still right on track for the environmental flambe...until we're headed for another Ice Age (as was recently decided by top scientists).

The scariest, darkest part of the entire novel was this last quarter.  Winston is captured and psychologically dismantled piece by piece until he gave in at the end and found his heart full of nothing but love for Big Brother.  "We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves..." was the quote that filled me full of fear.  I've spent a good portion of my life looking at the world and desperately trying to find consistency.  I'm attracted to consistency.  You say what you believe and what you are going to do and then you do it and you'll have my vote fairly easily.  I've felt crazier in this past six or so years than I ever have before and, like Winston, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not insane.  The media tends to do just that, scoop you out and put themselves back in.

"Water will wet us and fire will burn," is practically a mantra between my wife and I these days.  It comes from Rudyard Kipling's "The Gods of Copy Book Headings" which is a poem about what happens when we deny universal truths for too long.  When we pretend to be masters over reality we eventually get our comeuppance.  When we print trillions of dollars and give out sub prime loans eventually the piper must be paid.  "...we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun..." O'brien declares while torturing Winston into realigning his beliefs with the Party which include their fact that 2 + 2 = 5.  We find it convenient...sometimes when we need it to 2 + 2 = 4...That mentality has always filled me with nothing but contempt for whoever has expressed it.  It is the most selfish of phrases.  I once admired a girl for being a pretty rational feminist.  She seemed to walk the talk, which is always big in my book, and then she was talking about how she'd go to the bars, dress in something tight and revealing so that guys would buy her drinks.  She boasted that she hasn't paid for a drink since her 21st birthday...and she immediately lost my respect.  Why?  Because she was not a person of principle.  What we shout from the roof tops had better be how we live in the day to day or it's little better than a full on lie.

I've had this discussion so many times before where someone expresses a supposedly deeply held principle that doesn't carry over into other areas of their life.  I'll say, "OK, so you believe and declare this, but what about over here where you violate that principle."  I get the most dumbfounded looks where they say, "Uh, that's not what I'm talking about, dude."  The most notorious example of this in my life has been with people who believe, and generally say in an airy fairy hippy manner, "All life is sacred and so precious, ya know?" This usually is said after explaining why they are against war or for veganism.  I reply, "Ok.  So are you for the death penalty" "Well, yeah, of course." "Abortion?" "I think that the supreme court has ruled quite clearly on Abortion, thank you.  I don't understand why you're bringing those things up.  I'm talking about how sacred life is."  Doublethink is not a far off fantasy of dystopian science fiction.  We've already trained ourselves to have principles and opinions that are limited to a specific issue in a specific portion of our brain and neither the twain shall meet.

It's not about having the courage of our convictions anymore...I'd be happy with just the consistency of our convictions.

Orwell cautions us to reject sensationalism, to reject those who would say that facts are subject to our whim, to embrace principal, and to know without a doubt that any Party is a fox in a henhouse...but it is so difficult.  We have forever been slipping toward 1984 and we will be forever slipping until it actually arrives.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a face - forever."

For the past few months this has been a haunting image.  It's one of the most famous lines from the novel so I knew that it was coming, but it has never seemed more appropriate or more potent.  Find a cause, give them someone to hate, whip them into an emotional frenzy, reject logic and they will press that boot into flesh every single time.  The mob...no one on either side is immune.  Our own parties are replete with this rhetoric.  Republicans hate the poor and want to starve your grandmother while carpet bombing the third world.  Democrats just want to bankrupt the country financially and morally...gay pride parades every day while they tear down the churches.  They each make you demonize the other side and call one another out on the demonization.  Why?  Because it's an election year and you need to feel afraid or you won't vote and they won't win.

I know I've been rambling and all over the place...try talking to me about it and it will be 20 times more so.  I have but one more point to cover and then I will place some of the most meaningful quotes from this chapter as a closing on this amazing, provocative, and most enduring of novels.

After Julia and Winston are released from torture and re-education they see each other again.  It should be hopeful.  Love should conquer all...but this isn't that kind of story.  There is an intensity to the moment as they admit to each other that they had betrayed one another.  Their love was broken by what they said and did under interrogation.  For a moment Winston is determined to begin again.  He walks with her side by side to the tube station, through the crowd.  And then he stops.  He lets her go.  She disappears and they never see each other again.  It is so fraught with things unspoken, deep wells of feeling dampened by the horrors of the society that they live in.  I so want to see that moment done well on screen.  In my head it is so intense, and it reaches so many because, as I've said about every novel so far, it is real life.  We are all broken people in search of healing and society will lean on, put pressure on every hairline crack to make us bend to its will.  It will destroy love with hate every time that it can.  "The ends justify the means" it is often said and I defy that with every breath.  "The means condemn the ends".  It is such a basic thing that we forget because we want to, because it is easier to live without principle...and the Party and Big Brother are just waiting for us to compromise.  The only way 1984 can come to pass is in a world where the good compromise, where those able to stand just beg it all to happen to someone else when the pain comes.

"...the aim of this (the torture/re-education) was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning."

"...in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed."

"You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right.  You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident...Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else...only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.  Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.  It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party."

"The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.  We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them."

"The command of the old despotisms was 'Thou shalt not.'  The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt.'  Our command is 'Thou art.'"

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.  We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power."

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.  Power is not a means; it is an end.  One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship." (This quote should make activists run scared...but it never will.  We'd like to believe all humanity is good at its core...it is selfserving to its core and always has been.)

"How does one man assert his power over another...By making him suffer.  Obedience is not enough.  Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?  Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.  Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing."

"The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice.  Ours is founded upon hatred.  In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement...all competing pleasures will be destroyed."

"It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph.  The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition the tighter the despotism...Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible - and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord." (This is what scares me about the current thinking that to disagree is to hate, to dissent is to be a bigot.  They don't just agree to disagree, many in this world destroy the lives of those who dare to disagree.)