George Orwell died in 1950, and wrote mostly in the context of the struggle of liberal democracy against Nazism and Stalinism. He could hardly have imagined the world in which we live, and yet somehow he did, if not in its details then in many of its fundamentals. So I find myself reading him more than ever, especially his essays, in which form he has no peer but Albert Camus.
In 1945, Orwell published ‘The Prevention of Literature’, arguing that prose writing – fiction, history, criticism etc. – cannot exist in a totalitarian society. Although much of his focus is on the suppression of dissident thought in the USSR, and among Communist sympathisers elsewhere, he is equally perceptive about the destruction of thought and liberty by over-powerful capitalist industries. His analysis now seems pertinent to this age of populist authoritarianism:
The organised lying practised by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.
‘Organised lying’ is a precise term for what dominates the media and the Internet today.
From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.
Again, an uncannily accurate description of how over-powerful leaders require a devotion that can only be compared to religious faith, even when they contradict themselves and rewrite the past, or indeed the present. At such time belief itself is an excellent way of demonstrating subservient devotion and the negation of independent thought.
Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.
There is nothing new in alternative facts and a post-truth society.
Orwell even seems to have imagined the possibility of AI, while seeing its precursors in the industrial production of culture in his own time:
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanising process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism.
He argues that work produced by these means would be – would have to be – rubbish, because anything else would endanger the state. Today, it is necessary to understand the state to mean the nexus of politics, technology and finance that protects its hegemony through control of the media and the internet, backed by the violence of the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower named in 1961.
Because his essay concerns the situation of writers, George Orwell applies his conclusion to them, but everyone has a mind, and the danger of losing it is universal:
[A]ny writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. […] a bought mind is a spoiled mind.
- ‘The Prevention of Literature’ in George Orwell, 2016, The Collected Non-Fiction: Essays, Articles, Diaries and Letters, 1903-1950, Penguin.
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