Spare Me the Details

In the morning, on Election Day, 2024, I sat and streamed the late-night talk show hosts’ monologues from the night before on my hand-held device. I watched one after another and they were a unanimous and hysterically funny indictment of the person who is now President Elect. While each did cover the same event, one of his last rallies, their jokes were varied enough to stay fresh, and I confess to reveling in what they were making fun of at that time. In real-time we watched what looked to me like a presidential candidate seemingly committing political hari-kari before our eyes. Doing things and saying things at his rallies that should have disqualified him with every utterance and gesture. So outrageous that if one didn’t laugh, they would cry.

I am not laughing now. The results of the election showed such behavior to be positive attributes for the candidate. I admit to welling up while really contemplating the gruesome possibilities, impacts and outcomes we all are likely to witness and potentially be victims of.

The comedian showed a moment at the rally in which the candidate is being filmed bragging about crowd size at this and other recent rallies. On and on about how many people are in attendance and how every seat is taken. The camera then pulls back and pans a convention hall that is barely half full. Empty seats everywhere. The comedian jokes about the confused faces of loyalists behind the speaker as they experience the cognitive dissonance of seeing the truth and being told it is not there. That what they are seeing is not the truth. The truth is different. The truth is what the leader says.

The first time this President Elect was elected on a platform of lies and conspiracy theories in 2016, I made an attempt to understand how an entire population could be so easily convinced to subjugate their own sense of what the truth is. How? By asking for the complete works of George Orwell for Christmas. Of course!

What else?

He wrote a good number of books, both fiction and non-fiction, and wrote many more critical and narrative essays. But of course, he is most well-known for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. A common theme runs through vast amounts of his work which examines and focuses on the nature of truth. This theme becomes the major thrust of these two works of titanic import and influence.

Rather than jump right in and reread the big ones, I dug through a good portion of his early works. His books and essays were strongly influenced by his life experiences after abandoning a stable life of affluence. He went through poverty during The Depression doing restaurant work and menial labor, which led to Down and Out in Paris and London. He enlisted to fight communism on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, an experience that nearly cost him his life and also led to Homage to Catalonia. This experience also precipitated his understanding of how nascent new technologies – radio and television – could (and would) impact the tried and tested tools of governing, i.e. propaganda and disinformation. Throw in some good old-fashioned fascism, i.e. jack-booted thugs with truncheons brutally suppressing any form of dissent, and a plausible path to totalitarianism is laid.

All animals are equal. Some animals are more equal than others. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

There is an important and oft ignored footnote very early in the first chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Its placement by Orwell is intentional and he urges the reader start the whole work by first reading “The Principles of Newspeak,” via the footnote.

Reader beware. Reader take this on. Good luck. Psychotherapy may be in your future. I’m somehow compelled to read it again. It means even more now.

Back to the redneck rally and the late night comedian. The footage he jokes about is actually a full-blown scene in 1984, serving as one of the novel’s climax events. It is when the main character, Winston Smith, is in a crowd at a huge rally of hate for their country’s sworn enemy and love for their longtime ally in the eternal war against eternal peace. But in the middle of the Leader’s speech, the names of allies and enemies are reversed. One second, they are at war with this enemy, the next instant they are at war with their ‘former’ ally. No one in the crowd but Winston even notices. Either that or they did notice but didn’t care about details, it was solely about hating an enemy. Any enemy. Even a friend.

‘The Principles of Newspeak’ are at the heart of the novel’s theme. They chart a whole labyrinth of schemes and strategies designed, in essence, to dumb down the population and condition people to be pliable when faced with an obvious decision between right and wrong, or made to distinguish between truth and falsehoods. The gradual degradation of language and intellect, the purging of meanings and definitions out of words, over generations was its aim. In the book these ‘Principles’ were projected by the narrator to have “superseded Oldspeak” by 2050. Orwell wrote the book in 1948. It is now 2025. 25 years to go! Some say some of these aims have already succeeded.

In the book, all such social conditioning is reinforced by the placement of ubiquitous creepy omnipresent, single message, multimedia, two-way monitors surveilling each member of society’s every move. Especially in Party Members’s homes. A two-way bi-directional, one channel, government controlled human conditioner that can’t be turned off. Like present day TV if one only watched Fox News 24/7 – while under complete security camera coverage.

The book, as most dystopian stories do, distinguishes between a small upper class of Party Members and then the remaining bulk of the population being the uneducated working class known as The Proles. Orwell’s world had yet to spawn what is now known as The Middle Class. Just about all of western society prior to WWII was about the haves and the have nots. The rich vs the poor. The few controlling the many masses. It is why Bolshevisim and Socialism became real economic theories.

In the book, even Party Members were subjugated to an upper level of elite decision makers. All The Proles needed was the lottery and sports and alcohol. (FanDuel and Bud lite) These and a work wage that just barely kept them fed and amused and completely disinterested in politics or ideologies. Happy and apathetic.

Where Animal Farm was a parody of the events that led to the Russian Bolsheviks failure to replace the Czar with a Marxist socialist government and ending up with Stalinist Communism, Nineteen Eighty Four is a stark forecast of a worst-case scenario of life under absolute totalitarianism, where mere thoughts can be criminally prosecuted.

We are not there yet. But. The results of the 2024 Presidential election, coupled with a real agenda to “deconstruct” our government’s agencies via Project 2025 and have them do the Party’s bidding instead of protecting our country’s citizens from the real enemies from within, i.e. corporate greed, cronyism and corruption, indicate that we are about to take a huge step in that direction.

The horrifically sad part is that many of those that voted the President-elect into office will likely be ones most adversely affected by his anti-immigration policies, the Hispanic population of the swing states – they are immigrants with skin colors other than lily white. Conversely, another sad irony is that an entire gender has been thus made into 2nd class citizens with less rights than the other gender and the women who did not turn out to vote on their own behalf will experience consequences when they need the care of an obstetrician.

While Orwell’s societal shortcomings in 1984 were illustrated by the bleak day to day struggle of not having enough of anything, razor blades, bad oily gin, Free Will, the ills facing today’s global society would be unimaginable in post WWII period. What would Orwell say about AI generated deepfakes, the Internet or the impact of social media?

That being said, witnessing the acquiescence of fellow citizens as they are told what they see is not real, here in 2024, is why the book remains more relevant than ever.

Is the glass half empty or half full? It is both full and empty. Whatever I am told it is.