The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.
– George Orwell, from 1984
Today is George Orwell’s birthday. Happy birthday George, you were right… just a few years too early. And now we have thermal imagers which means even darkness is no shield from the Panopticon State.
Nah! You must be paranoid! It’ll never happen here!
He foresaw the Anglosphere, only he called it Oceania.
Small countries make free peoples.
Yes indeed. All he did was get the name wrong. It’s not Ingsoc, its the EU. And Newspeak would be the tide of politically correct language which emanates from those on the Left of the spectrum.
All those offensive words that need rooting out, as if in an attempt to stop you even thinking them. Words like Woman, according to an old Steven Den Beste article on “female persons”. 🙂
Very Orwell.
It’s still one of the best books I’ve ever read. The ending, as nasty as it is to contemplate, struck me the most.
I’m sure we’ll all love the EU, or whatever your pet hate project is, eventually.
After all, the propaganda machine is hard at work spending our money to ensure it.
Sorry Emmanuel, you could not be more wrong. The Anglosphere is just an ‘affinity group’… it is the EU he really foresaw.
Tyranny comes in small packages too. North Korea is almost half the size of the UK.
Well said, Perry, in reply to Mr Goldstein. Quite what Orwell would have made of the EU is anyone’s guess, but I reckon he’d have regarded the whole edifice with contempt.
He died an unavowed collectivist and unashamed socialist – “prophet” indeed!
Indeed he did, Richard… but that does not mean that everything he wrote was wrong. You seem to have mistaken me for some dogmatist who dismisses the totality of a person’s views unless they are in ideological lock-step with me.
His vision of a panoptic surveillance state was indeed prophetic.
That makes him a prophet.
George Orwell was the greatest Englishman who ever lived, who wrote the two greatest books ever written in the English language; nay, the two greatest books ever written in ANY language. (With the possible exception of Lord of the Rings, of course 🙂
To all socialists out there, who haven’t yet read either Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four; do yourself your life’s biggest favour, and buy them today. Begin your escape from the dreamworld:
Animal Farm (£4-79)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (£3-99)
That’s the best £8-78 you will EVER spend.
BTW, not only was he history’s greatest Englishman, and a former socialist like all the best people, he was also history’s only proven successful clairvoyant. How else can you explain why he changed his name from Eric Blair, to dissociate himself from such an ignominous future failure? 🙂
I wonder, if by any chance, they are related? 😉
This adds, I think, a poetic note: UK babies may be genetically screened
grace writes:
This adds, I think, a poetic note: UK babies may be genetically screened
Blimey, grace, it gets worse every day! It’s like living in a waking nightmare.
I’m sorry socialists, I’m going to have to reduce your dole/soft student loan/civil service pension, retired early from “stress”/public sector salary a bit more, by a whole other £3-99. (Don’t worry, it’s only my money, in disguise. Enjoy it, I worked hard for it.)
Once you’ve staggered from the trauma of reading Orwell’s great works, your next stop on the road to salvation is via the great work of Aldous Huxley:
Brave New World (£3-99)
BTW, if you are still a committed socialist, and you have read these three books, there is no hope for you. You are clinically brain dead. I suggest you leave for an EU position in Brussels, immediately! 😉
Dear Andy Duncan,
I find your booktips very useful, especially the ones you wrote about in your splendid “Cure For Socialism”. Now, I’ve never been a socialist, nor do I intend to sell my soul to the red (haha) devil, but anyway…Those books are invaluable when it comes to equipping myself for future arguments and cleansing my mind every now and then from the vicious lies spread about by leftist media. Looking forward for the next booktip!
Regards,
Johan
PS. Oh, about Orwell….yes, a shame he was a socialist, but 1984 is nonetheless a great piece of work.
Orwell deserves to be highly regarded. He wrote a half-admiring book review of Hayek’s Road To Serfdom, which while it did not shake Orwell’s socialst views on economics, drew from him a frank admission about the dangers of state planning. I get the feeling that had he lived a bit longer, the effect of reading such folk would have pushed him further to the classical liberal side.
Of course that is pure speculation. Orwell surely does deserve most of the praise heaped upon him. And all journalists should read his essay on how to write as a masterful guide to clear, unpretentious prose.
Johnathan Pearce writes:
“And all journalists should read his essay on how to write as a masterful guide to clear, unpretentious prose.”
Not just journalists – Orwell’s essays are written in a wonderfully sparse style. Arguably, he was an even greater essayist than novelist and is a sublime antidote to purple prose.
If anyone is looking for a recommendation, ‘Inside The Whale and other essays’ has long been a favourite of mine and still stands head and shoulders above much modern writing.
Fellow Comrades,
It is apparent that Orwell saw a lot. He advocated a European Union in 1947 in his paper TOWARD EUROPEAN UNITY. He advocated creating “a Socialist United States of Europe”, a “federation of the western European states, transformed into Socialist republics without colonial dependencies”, aparently he wanted to do this to balance the power of the American Capitalists and Russians Communists. One of the prime dangers to this project he saw was “the danger that the United States will break up any European coalition by drawing Britain out of it”, or that British workers “may ultimately decide that it is better to remain an imperial power at the expense of playing second fiddle to America”.
Yeah, that’s the problem with sacred texts. You can prove just about anything by cherrypicking your scriptures.
I see no small irony in Libertarians lionizing a Utopian Socialist who attended Britain’s most prestigous private school Eton. A person whose thinking reached its logical conclusion in the Khymer Rouge.
If Orwell was genuinely prescient about anything, it was in his identifying how language can be distorted and corrupted to hide the truth, which we see in modern day political correctness and the high-jacking of words like progressive by the Left.
I do not find 1984 particularly prescient. If anything it is a warning about how governments amass power and how difficult this is to stop. More specifically it is a warning against Stalinist Russia, which as we all know became a failed state. I would be much more impressed by Orwell’s prescience if he had written a book about how totalitarian states are doomed to failure. Collapsing under their own inefficiency and inability to accomodate technological and social change. Although such an interpretation would not fit certain peoples current agenda.
BTW, IMHO the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London is Orwell’s best book.
Phil Bradley: as I mentioned earlier, just because I do not agree with all of Orwell’s views that does not mean that everything he wrote was wrong. His vision of a panoptic surveillance state was prophetic and gives us a motherload of useful images to mine for our own ends.
Oh, and he was a superb writer.
Is that not reason enough?
Perry: I am concerned by a drift into what I consider an anti-modernist agenda that, not only I see as pointless, but also attracts the aluminium foil hat brigade (and credibility goes out the window). My primary concern is to beat back the capture of the perceived centre by the Left and we have been handed this amazing tool to do it, called the Internet.
Libertarianism has the opportunity to significantly change the orthodoxy (one of Orwell’s favourite words – in a negative sense). Lets not fritter away the opportunity on stuff that in the big picture doesn’t matter.
regards
Hi Johan,
If you need anything a bit lighter than “The Tyranny of Numbers”, to brighten things up a bit , while you equip yourself to fight off the evil hordes with the hard stuff, get anything by libertarian P.J.O’Rourke, particularly “Eat the Rich”, which I found in the economics section of Waterstones, in Piccadilly, one evening, while looking for Book V of “The Wealth of Nations”. Strange book placement, but there you go! 🙂
Also, get yourself an armful of Robert Heinlein books, for train/bus/airplane journeys, starting with “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, and then anything with my favourite Heinlein character, “Lazarus Long”, in it. Oh, and Starship Troopers.
In my bid to crush my old socialist self, to leave the angry fool as a museum piece rattling around in a cage in my mind, without me needing to constantly defeat him, I’m currently on page 34 of Murray N. Rothbard’s “Man, Economy and State” (on marginal economics).
It looks a great book, but it’ll be a long time before I surface again from that one, I reckon, as he’s promised in the Intro., that he’s going to cover ALL of economics. Ahhhhh!!!!! 🙂
And then, once that’s out the way, it’ll be onto Mr Rothbard’s “The Ethics of Liberty”, and Ms Rand’s “An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” (a word I can barely pronounce, let alone understand, without several vodkas 🙂
And then if Sean Gabb is willing, I’ll ask him to publish an “Advanced Cure for Socialism”, which’ll be an extended version of this post, plus some Popper! 8)
If anybody’s got this far down this interminably long epistle, if they have any “classic” recommendations for recovering socialists to read, and then propagate onwards to other recovering socialists, I’d love to hear ’em.
I’m looking for works of the quality of “The Road to Serfdom”, “Human Action”, “Atlas Shrugged”, and yes, even “Eat the Rich” 🙂
Anything, basically, that should be on the essential required reading canon, of all well-read libertarians. Oh, and the shorter (and cheaper $-) the better, if possible. I have the reading attention span of a fruit-fly, the historical acumen of a large jelly-fish, the capacious pockets of a Yorkshire-born Scottish-heritage Quarter-Jew (ther’e some Norwegian and Russian in there as well, but don’t ask me how), and the mathematical genius of a small pebble.
The ones I’ve got through so far are here, plus those books mentioned above, Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, and also Popper’s Objective Knowledge.
Any more definitive Popper works, paritcularly on actual fully worked-through piece-meal social policies, very welcome!
Well, better go now before I fill up even more of Mr De Havilland’s server.
Perry sez:
“His vision of a panoptic surveillance state was prophetic”
I don’t see 1984 as prophetic, I see it as an extreme satire of how things were in 1948. The panoptic surveillance state had already reached its zenith in the 1930s with Nazism and Stalinism; nothing since then compares. The attacks on liberty you tend to discuss here (speeding cameras, ID cards etc.) are utterly trivial compared with what happened in Germany and Russia in the 1930s, and your regular conflation of the EU with Nazism and Stalin merely underline the point. As someone mentioned above, it would have been more prophetic if Orwell had foreseen the waning of the panoptic surveillance state in Europe.
As for Orwell being a superb writer, he was clearly obsessed with style – in his case a plain English style that when taken to extremes, becomes just as much a mannerism as anything else. Not to say he’s a bad writer, but I think rather too much is made of his writerly gifts.
George Orwell wrote: “and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.”
Ah the blessings of modern technology that the state doesn’t even have that hinderence now!
Of course, though 1984 and Animal Farm (a book that it was attempted to ban because it promoted an anti-soviet view during the Second World War when uncle Joe was an ally) are thoroughly recommended as cures for socialism – though I would still hesitate to exclude Henry Hazlit’s Economics in One Lesson
Orwell was a socialist, so I doubt that he saw 1984 and Animal Farm as “cures for socialism”. They were about totalitarianism. Socialism can lead to totalitarianism, just as fascism can. But clearly Orwell didn’t believe it necessarily does, or else he wouldn’t have been a socialist. Plenty of countries have functional social welfare systems without being totalitarian in the sense that Stalinist Russia was totalitarian.
The panoptic surveillance state had already reached its zenith in the 1930s with Nazism and Stalinism; nothing since then compares.
Not so. Those regimes were far more repressive, that is for sure, but their ability to conduct surveillance was far less than modern Britain for sheer reasons of technology. They had no systems like Echelon/Carnovore or vast networks of CCTV. My whole point is not that the EU or Britain are the same as Nazi Germany or Soviet Union, but that they are indeed setting the stage for something more directly analogous… and when it comes, it will have all the infrastructure of hitherto undreamt of surveillance at its disposal. I am concerned about the present but much more alarmed about the future.
Plenty of countries have functional social welfare systems without being totalitarian in the sense that Stalinist Russia was totalitarian.
It is just a matter of time. As economic reality gradually catches up with them, they will have to became ever more coercive to survive.
Perry, how so you think our European democracies going to become USSR-style tyrannies? Surely the flaw in your thesis is, if one party starts proposing too many coercive measures, the people will just vote in someone who won’t at the next election…
…unless they’ve been conditioned by carefully-named reality tv shows first! 😉
Andy Duncan: Excellent! I’ll take notes on those books. I live in Sweden so you can imagine what I have to go through every time I open up a newspaper (there’s only 1 sane, ordinary, right-wing newspaper left today; Svenska Dagbladet). Lots of junk in the other papers with the aim of chaining my mind.
Sorry I can’t give you any booktips, I’ve just started reading myself. Even though I’ve never been a socialist, growing up in a socialist country is not better – especially when the majority of your friends are devoted marxist-leninist or simply don’t care. I’m working my way through “On Liberty” now….wish me good luck! (Books like that aren’t too easy for a teenager when PlayStation2 and PC Games scream for attention)
“Plenty of countries have functional social welfare systems without being totalitarian in the sense that Stalinist Russia was totalitarian.”
If you refer to the slaughter of millions of people, then no, but many are totalitarian in other ways, such as there’s only 1 (one) opinion which is accepted, government control on trade, regular distortion of news, facts, enforcing the will of the government over people and so forth. We’re not talking about physical totalitarianism, but a mental, intellectual version. If you can’t kill a man, you can destroy him in many other ways.
Hi Johan,
You may wish to see my latest post, at this fabulous new Internet site:
http://andyduncan.blogspot.com
ad.
A_t: I do not expect something exactly like the Nazi or Soviet regimes. I really have no idea what form it will take, just that it will regulate the life out of civil society and use force to back that up. The notion that democracy is a check on anything in and of itself strikes me as bizarre. It could be we will end up in a completely political society (i.e. a post-social ‘society’ of the sort Hain wants) then we will be living in a low level town-hall tyranny of democratic envy based begger-thy-neighbour hell.
I do not intend to be in the EU 10 years from now, that is for sure (and that can happen two ways).
Andy Duncan: my my, I indeed need to get that book! Thank you very much 🙂
There are two things going on in some of these posts that I see over and over again in so many discussions in various blogs.
One, the flaws of the author become more important than the writing. So what if Orwell was a socialist? The fact is he wrote a ferocious denunciation of totalitarian power in “1984”, with images so vivid that no one who reads it can forget the pictures created in the mind. Close your eyes and you can see and hear the rats scrabbling to get to you.
The sarcastic wit of “Animal Farm” is aimed directly at the Bolshevik method of whittling away at the non-true believers, just as Lenin and Stalin did with the various other types of socialists and anarchists in Russia. The value of these writings, at a time when Marxism was the intellectual rage of the Western intelligentsia, is incalculable.
They were especially welcomed by one teenager (yours truly) struggling with the onslaught of the New Left while in school in the 1960’s.
Secondly, the continuous reference to the right-left spectrum, as if humanity’s only choices were the statism of Hitler on one side and the statism of Stalin on the other. This is a false choice that only gives aid and comfort to statists who can point to their opposition and claim, “see, if you oppose me, you must be advocating that”.
The collectivism of the left and the statism of the right are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin. The antiquated “left-right” shorthand only obscures the fact that there is a very clear, coherent alternative to these endless statist schemes.
The organization of a political society by the establishment of a constitutionally limited government based on the principles of liberal democratic capitalism offers a well reasoned and demonstrably successful model.
The unfortunate situations that so many countries in the world struggle with, and so many people literally die from, could be resolved if the basic structure of the political and economic systems they operate within were to be renovated to include respect for individual rights and due process protection for private property. If anything has been vindicated by the horrors of the 20th century, it is that the Bill of Rights was a singular, blazing flare of political and philosophical genius far beyond anything written by Marx or Heidigger, or any other of the failed apologists for statism.
No system is perfect. No ideology ever lives up to its billing as “the road to utopia”. But if a society wishes a liveable system, with human beings at the center, instead of dreams and nations and peoples and folkes, and gods, then there is a model that can be adapted. Go and ask an elderly German, or Japenese, or South Korean, someone who remembers the “Old Days”, if they would trade their current society for that of 1940.
Too much blood has been spilled. The state is not your friend, your nanny, or your saviour. It can protect you if you hold the leash tightly, as with a well trained attack dog. But you never trust it. And you never let go of the leash.
Another Orwell text that can speak to us now, if only halfway, is “The Lion and the Unicorn”, his reflections on socialism and Englishness.
On the subject of what to read – anything by PJ O’Rourke, but especially Holidays in Hell. An extremely funny antidote to the ‘we are all the same’ orthodoxy.
Question – why the farg doesn’t PJ O’Rourke, who is one of my favourite writers, have a blog?
Books, Andy Duncan, good choices, all of them, especially Heinlein. Also can recommend anything by Neal Stephenson, such as “Snow Crash”, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Peter Hamilton, Greg Bear, Venor Vinge.
A good book to give to intelligent leftist friends is Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, or Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.
And of course Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty is one of the must-reads, along with David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom.
Andy,
Man, Economy, and State is a great book, which IMO surpasses even the ever-heralded Human Action in its readability. Once my blog gets more readers, I am going to start posting regularly about applications of MES chapter by chapter.