It is out of lack of knowledge of the nature of human freedom, and the conditions which validate its exercise, that many young people are drawn to embrace doctrines of political oppression. If they reject tradition, and the transmission of it through education, they are rejecting their only protection against tyranny. They cannot, in other words, be sure what oppression means. Anarchism, in rejecting the past and assuming that the new is, by a kind of Hegelian necessity, better than the old, opens the way to tyranny. Moreover, the anarchist attributes evil to the State, which is the mere instrument of rule, and fails to acknowledge that the so-called free society must also find a technique for holding itself together. Bakunin saw, more clearly than most of his successors, that danger lay not only in the State but also in any powerful group that knew what it wanted - a fellowship of bankers or scientists, for instance. There is nothing magical about the State, making it uniquely engender a desire to hold on to power. A tyranny can be born out of any social group.
I have seen, in the United States, examples of young people's 'communes' that were dangerous for two reasons. They were based on ignorance of the first principles of agronomy. How to grow grain or look after pigs is something to be learnt out of the past, and the past is rejected. They were ignorant of the nature of the principles which hold a society, however small, together. They assumed the existence of a general will in the group and then found it to be no more than a bag of quarrelling individuals. The strongest of the individuals became a leader and demanded obedience. Often obedience was exacted irrationally and, as it were, mystically. The Charles Manson group was an extreme example of a leader's taking on the properties of a messiah, a kind of bloody Jesus. The acts of violence performed by his followers were fewer in number than those perpetrated by the Nazi State, but one does not measure evil quantitatively. There is no guarantee that the social body that rejects the rule of the State will behave better than those who control the State. Because of the ignorance of tradition on which anarchic bodies are founded, there is every likelihood that it will behave worse.
The anomaly of any commune or kibbutz or collective Walden (on the lines of B. F. Skinner's blueprint) is that it both denies and accepts the greater social body: it has torn itself away from the bigger fabric and yet is a pocket of it. Skinner's Walden Two grows its own food and generates its own power, but it cannot build either tools or machines. It cannot maintain a symphony orchestra, but it demands the right to hear Beethoven and Wagner on tape or disc. It has a library, but it cannot publish books. The more bizarre youth communes of America have made their dwellings out of Coca-Cola cases and old car bodies - the leavings of the consumer society they detest. Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point ended with an apocalyptic vision of the consumer society being blasted, on good Bakunin lines, to smithereens, but the vision was in the mind of a girl with a car and a radio in it. Anarchism is not possible. Bakunin is a dead prophet.
In democratic societies like the United States and Great Britain, whose great crimes in the eyes of the young are consumerism and belligerence, breakaway societies and protest groups often succeed in denting the iron of establishment. In time they modify the laws and even increase bureaucracy. The forces of Women's Liberation and Homosexual Liberation are making it a crime to discriminate in employment rights, which is wholesome and just, but they are prepared also to modify language by fiat, so that if I, a writer, use words that betray even grammatical discrimination, I am in danger of legal punishment. The same is true, of course, of such bodies as Britain's Race Relations Board, which rightly condemns bigotry, discrimination, and 'racist' language but renders the individual not always sure of the limits of his own acts and judgements. The trade unions are a conspicuous example, especially in Europe, of the power that collectives can have within the bigger collective of the nation. Sometimes the power is justly based, sometimes not. A government cannot invoke moral principles when dealing with the perhaps unreasonable demands of a powerful pressure group. And, outside the field of legitimate or tolerated group action, there are the politically motivated kidnappers and skyjackers blackmailing governments in a manner inconceivable on Airstrip One. Soon, we are told, our great cities will be held to ransom. This is the limit of Bakuninism. The cartoon anarchist of the old days, bearded like the saintly founder, carrying like a Christmas pudding a black smoking bomb, has been metamorphosed into a deadly monster. The revolutionaries who want to create Ingsoc differ from traditional anarchists only in lack of innocence and the possession of high intelligence. Ingsoc cannot come about in any of our existing systems of government in the West: it is waiting outside, blessed from heaven by Bakunin.
The individual alone can be a true anarch. Orwell saw this when writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is an allegory of the eternal conflict between any individual and any collective. Winston Smith, though thirty-eight years old, is very young in his ignorance, though the ignorance is not all his own fault. The only freedom he can think of is the right to say what is true and what is false. As O'Brien rightly says, he has no metaphysics to oppose to the doctrine of the State. Even if he had a coherent system of belief, he could not prevail against the massive engine of the Party. But at least he would have had the stoic satisfaction - like that of the heroes of Seneca - of knowing precisely what he was fighting for in the battle he was bound to lose. The situation is a melodramatic inflation of that which any freedom-loving individual finds himself in today, even in a permissive democracy. The individual, of whom Thoreau is the true patron saint, is always against the State, and his liberties are, inevitably, going to be reduced in proportion as the pressure groups gain more licence. Time that could be given to improving his mind is taken up with form-filling and fighting hopelessly with bureaucrats. His money is taken from him. He cannot travel the world freely, since he is limited as to foreign currency by the exchange control regulations. Comforts like tobacco and alcohol may be taxed out of his reach. But he can still exercise free judgement on epistemological, aesthetic and moral issues and act, or fail to act, on such judgements. He can go to jail because he considers war evil. He can kill, if he thinks, after long consideration, that killing is the only possible response to an attack on his person or loved ones or property. He can steal, commit libel, act or write or draw obscenities. He must, naturally, be ready to suffer for the exercise of free will, even to the lethal limit. 'Take what you want,' says the Spanish dicho, 'and pay for it.' The important thing is that he should not act without full knowledge of the meaning of his act. That is the condition of his freedom.
Clockwork oranges
I am aware that there is something intolerably romantic about the above view of human freedom. It posits an inviolable citadel in the human skull, where, however the adversary batters the outer fortifications, the values of individualism subsist. Stone walls do not a prison make. This is very old-fashioned and shows a lack of knowledge of the resources of modern tyranny. The first of the two cinema films made of Nineteen Eighty-Four - now, I believe, out of circulation - ended with Winston and Julia shouting 'Down with Big Brother,' while facing the firing squad. This wholly missed the point of the book. The Party is not concerned primarily with liquidating its enemies but with turning them into good citizens. The punishment is not important but the burning-out of heresy is essential. The seventh veil of the recusant mind must be dropped and the final nakedness exposed, ravished, impregnated. And yet, knowing that there is no untouchable citadel, many of us persist in believing, or wanting to believe, that there is a part of every individual soul that eludes the tyrant. Ingsoc knows all about the Christian martyrs, whose bodies were destroyed but voices unstilled. A martyr is, etymologically, a witness. The justice of the new State allows no witnesses.
There are a number of us these days who do not seek deliberately to go to prison but cherish a dream of being sent there to enjoy, paradoxically, true freedom. The stresses of contemporary life grow intolerable, and it is not just the State we blame. There are bills to pay, machines that go wrong an
d cannot be repaired, roofs that leak, buses that fail to arrive, dull work to be done, an. inability to make ends meet, insurance premiums that fall due, sickness, the panorama of the wicked world displayed in the daily press. One longs to be punished, Kafkastyle, for a crime that one has not committed but nevertheless is prepared to feel guilty for, and throw over all responsibility. There is a dream of solitary confinement, of writing Pilgrim's Progress or The Ballad of Reading Gaol. There is even a desire to be bereft of books, paper, pencil, light, and to be forced to sustain sanity by composing in one's head an endless epic poem in heroic couplets. Nor iron bars a cage. What one does in captivity is the true test of how free one is. Ingsoc, however, knows all about the incorrigible wilfulness of the human will and will be cosily with us in the oubliette.
And yet, though Orwell's cacotopia is the epitome of all unfree societies, we hear very little about the scientific takeover of the free mind. What is to happen in 1990 or 2900 or beyond is not yet clear, but in 1984 there are no signs that the brain is to be altered by surgery or psychotechnic conditioning. Admittedly, we have an episode in the cellars of the Ministry of Love where O'Brien shows Winston that it is possible to have the Party's vision of reality blasted into one's brain.
'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes fixed on mine.'
At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. . . . A terrific, painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain. . . .
O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'
'Yes.'
And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. . . .
'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is any rate possible.'
This is nothing more than a trick, though, a demonstration of what the brain is capable of if it tries. And it becomes clear to us that the unfreedom of Ingsoc depends, in a way not at all paradoxical, on the persistence of traditional mental freedom. For, if O'Brien's statement of the Party's programme is to be believed, the exercise of cruelty depends for its efficacy on being able to work on free minds. There may be satisfaction in being cruel to a dog, but it is a lesser satisfaction than being cruel to a human being, especially when that human being is sharply aware of what is happening and why. Ideally, the torturers of the Party would like to take a Shakespeare, a Goethe, an Einstein - with intellect bright and faculties unimpaired - and reduce him to a shrieking mass of flesh and brain tissue.
Evidently the Party uses techniques learnt from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany to induce states of hopelessness and emptiness, out of which the voluntary confession of crimes uncommitted and the postures of maudlin repentance will come. And Room 101 represents the crude ultimate in mechanistic terrorization, for 'the worst thing in the world' cannot be withstood, no matter what the inner resources of the sufferer. The technique depends on irrationality, the reflex response to a stimulus which varies from subject to subject - rats for Winston, snakes or black beetles or the noise of fingernails on velvet for another, the materials of terror chosen after loving consideration of idiosyncratic phobias. It is spectacular but implausible.
Implausible in its operation, to judge from Winston's response. The starving rats are about to be unleashed on him: they will jump on his face, tear open his mouth and start to devour his tongue. All that will stop O'Brien's opening their cage is Winston's utterance of the right words. He has not betrayed his mistress; now he must ask that she be eaten by the rats, not he. It is enough. The rats are called off. He has now betrayed everything and everybody. He is cured. And yet we know that enforced betrayal is not betrayal at all, that the conscience will quickly enough exculpate itself, blaming instead the machinery of the nerves that is not in the control of the intellect, and that an even stronger fidelity - reinforced by renewed hatred of the manipulators - will ensue. In fact, Ingsoc's knowledge of the techniques of breaking down individual resistance is crude and elementary. Yet this is in accordance with a philosophy based on doublethink. Big Brother both wants and does not want to be in total control. The victim is not a true victim if he is not allowed a modicum of hope.
The victory of the State over Winston Smith is not achieved through a systematic, or Pavlovian, reduction of his personality to the status of a mere mass of conditioned reflexes. As Orwell makes clear, he has to conquer his resistance to Big Brother through the exercise of his own will, with some help from the Ministry of Love. He has to be shown the inadequacy of his own mental resources, which, in comparison with the rigorous metaphysics of the Party, are nothing - a mere bundle of inchoate velleities and catchphrases. He has been shown his essential emptiness, and now he knows that it must be filled with the only thing available to fill it - devotion to the Party and love of Big Brother. Ingsoc depends, then, on a kind of exercise of free will, for acceptance of its authority is nothing unless it is free acceptance.
Winston, during an evening spent at the club, has to listen to an imbecilic lecture on the relationship between Ingsoc and chess. We do not know what the content of the lecture is, but we do know that there is something chess-like about the relationship between the State and its members, as there is something chess-like also in the intellectual techniques which sustain the system. To use doublethink is to play chess - planning a strategy of thought and taking into account its unexpected disruption by an unforeseen move from the Party; to use Newspeak is to play a complex game with a limited number of semantic pieces. The game played by the State against Winston has had prescribed moves if no limitation on length: he has been granted freedom of manoeuvre, but he has had no hope of prevailing against the stronger player. At the end of the story, Winston sits in the Chestnut Tree Cafe4, pondering a chess problem in The Times - white to mate in so many moves:
Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil?. . . . White always mates.
White always mates because the better player has opted for the white pieces. But black is free to win if he can.
In that its citizens are free to play the game of memory control, of working out the devices of orthodoxy, the Orwellian State bears a direct relation to the one in which English Socialism, not Ingsoc, operates. Human souls have not been modified, prenatally or through infantile conditioning, as they have in the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley. Orwell rightly saw that the neo-Pavlovian society, with its members incapable of unhappiness through sexual or social frustration, lacked that dynamic of conflict which animates real totalitarianism - a conflict dependent on the individual's awareness of the impairment of free will at the hands of the tyrant. On the other hand, it did not occur to him that the sustention of power could itself be a product of conditioning, that the Alpha-plus executive of the World State could no more break out of his predestined slot than could the Gamma-minus street-sweeper. Orwell was an inveterate proponent of free will, and even made his nightmare out of it. That Huxley's Utopia should be based on happiness rather than fear seemed to him to indicate a lack of elan. You cannot have dictatorship without misery.
The techniques for total manipulation of the human soul were in existence in 1932, when Brave New World first appeared. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov had four years more t
o live, he had done his work, and had been able to see something of the possibilities of its social application. Like his fellow-countryman Bakunin, Pavlov was the product of a great phase of intellectual optimism which could not be held back by Czarist repression - indeed, censorship and obscurantism were a positive stimulus to the revolution of thought. Bakunin believed that men were already good; Pavlov believed that men could be made good. A materialist of the true nineteenth-century brand, he saw the human brain as an organ, in Wundt's words, secreting thought as the liver secretes bile, and no more of a mystery to the scientific investigator than any other organ of the body. The brain, seat of thought and emotion, instigator of action, could be probed, cut about, radically altered, but it must always be altered in the direction of a more efficient mechanism, a machine dedicated to the improvement of its owner's functioning as a human organism. This was the ultimate Pelagianism. The perfectibility of man should be not merely a pious aspiration but a scientific programme. He worked on dogs and discovered that their reflexes could be conditioned: ring a bell when bringing food and the dog will salivate: ring a bell without bringing food and the dog will still salivate. The potentialities of this discovery were enormous, and Huxley saw them clearly. In Brave New World, infants of the lowest social group must be made to hate consumer goods they can never afford to buy. Children are encouraged to crawl towards highly coloured toys with gurgles of delight; as they start to touch them, electric bells shrill, sirens hoot, electric shocks are given off by the toys themselves. A few sessions of such conditioning, and the children will hate toys. In the same way, in maturity, they can be made to loathe champagne and caviar-surrogate. This is negative conditioning, conditioning employed in the service of rejection, but positive conditioning is used too. Make sweet scents and lovely music arise out of dustbins and the child is ready to be a life-long refuse operative.
1985 Page 10
