Memetic Superorganism for Dinner, Again?:The Ouroboric Nightmare of George Orwell’s 1984

Aidan Harrington

I wander thro’ each charter’d street, 

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet 

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man, 

In every Infant’s cry of fear, 

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

—William Blake, “London”

   And one frigid day, my son digs into me with hungry eyes and whispers, “Why?” I say, “I was afraid,” and he says, “Me too.” 1984 is not merely Orwell’s nightmare, but the suffocating horror of man’s greatest conceivable fears, sculpted into an obsidian cage. It is all the leprotic pixies that wade around in the recesses of our mind, made manifest and grafted onto the 20th century. That life’s dreariness is immutable. That there is no escape from the social and economic hell of our own creation. That there is no tweaking or tuning the political systems to lift us out of our cyclical suffering. That technology has devoured privacy and freedom. That history is both deliberate and accidental fiction. That we’ve forged an immortal leviathan outside of ourselves that will devour us forever, with its jaw unhinged and its eyes frenzied but cold. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a game of Hungry Hungry Molochs—forever. And it is no mistake that it took a man living in Britain to describe hell so intuitively and precisely. Orwell’s cloudy, pupilless, Tiresian eyes shot open, and he croaked out a simmering concoction of gloomy prophetic sludge that fuses to all of our boots and holds us captive. The doctrine and implementation of “Ingsoc” in George Orwell’s 1984 is unbeatable and inescapable, on an individual or collective level, or in the noble, rebellious “long game.”

   Conquering the masses is easy, conquering the individual is hard. When Winston was our guide, we could hold on to the hope that “the few cubic centimetres inside [our] skull,” [1] were still our own. At least, in the case of Winston, the party had not annexed his mind. His senses were his own, and he could connect the evidence in his memory and see the contradictions of The Party. But when we are given into the hands of O’Brien, he brutally demonstrates that The Party has found a forceful method of taking your mind from you as well.

   The nature of The Party is to organize everything outside the mind in a way that makes it nearly impossible to quell the bombardment of propaganda, social conformance, and physical threat. Winston describes the power of Big Brother, “It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you — something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses.”[2] The weight of Big Brother’s glare is crippling.

   This, however, is not always enough for some. When someone’s mind remains intact, The Party must take on those matters directly, with finely tuned and tried torture techniques. O’Brien seems to take special care with Winston. I am not so sure he would take the time to explain the intricacies of The Party’s ideology and philosophy to everyone he breaks. When Winston resists, O’Brien retorts, “We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.” [3] Any internal philosophy an individual might try to develop in their head can be melted away eventually. Ingsoc’s methods destroy “the self,” leaving only innumerable blobs that can be influenced this way or that and molded into whatever the nebulous inner party decides. 

   Thus, the Party’s control cannot be resisted or destroyed collectively either. There is no free association with others, not even in the family. There is no hope for propagating ideas or sentiments, let alone revolution. O’Brien tells Winston, “We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.” [4] One cannot take a step into any vista without trust, and The Party has taken away the possibility of trust or confidence in others. Winston tries to associate, to revolt, and his safe place and antiquarian connection to it are swept from under his feet, if they ever existed in the first place.

   A possible revolutionary action for the “long game” might be to hoard and hide books. However, the chance that this affects anything positively down the road is thin. One could have a sliver of privacy from the telescreen in their room, but telescreens and recording devices can be hidden behind walls. And it is possible Winston’s telescreen situation was artificial in the first place. If a “prole” develops the idea and desire to collect books, he might end up like Charrington, relegated to being a steward of a few pieces of “rubbish.” If a “prole” could gather books, Charrington would have been doing it, if he was ever real when we knew him. Any collection, by party member or “prole,” would eventually be eviscerated. Perhaps the terror of The Party is contained only within Britain, but I have no solid evidence of this, and that is the point.

   Orwell’s sculpting of humanity’s fears and weaknesses into the form of a novel demonstrates how we could be impaled on our own sword. Through an entirely grounded and realistic slew of missteps and negligence, we could give birth to our own Trojan horse. In the all-consuming political quest for utopia, in the churning of communism, fascism, or any other ideology that sets itself as the harbinger of what is truly “north” or “south,” what rough beast will be born, its hour come round at last? [5] Human narcissism, in some inverted Promethean disaster, can plug in some “anti-human, disembodied, memetic superorganism” that can never be unplugged. Perhaps it can only be “beaten” through some kind of nuclear holocaust, but that is not defeating this daemon, only wiping the slate clean to reset the cycle. Man devours his own tail, forever.

   Like Dante, Orwell leads us into Hell. But unlike The Inferno, we do not get to walk the red carpet and meet all the dead celebrities. Orwell presents an entirely realistic scenario of Hell on earth that haunts and gnaws at the conscience. And the only way I felt I could free myself from Orwell’s finely crafted nightmare was by conceiving of a realistic way out. And for a while, I labored under the delusional and childish ember of hope that there was. How do you kill the unkillable?

   The first note I wrote in the development of this essay, a week before I had anything else, was: “I understand why, I don’t understand how.” I still understand why Ingsoc needs to be fought, but I realize there is no “how.” Maybe that is the only freedom to be found, the freedom of knowing how it ends. It is viscerally apparent to anyone who reads 1984 that it should be avoided, but it cannot. The only hope of the devouring cycle ending is that the sun will explode. The only victory would be a crackling pyre of 1984 copies; these are the only lights twinkling at the end of the black tunnel. George Orwell, through his perception, made himself a specter bobbing up and down around our heads. He whispers of Ingsoc and its inescapable claws.

   Orwell’s 1984, in the form of The Party and Ingsoc, gives flesh to the magnetic nightmare scenario where an ideology becomes disconnected from humanity and enslaves it, with no way out on any level.

Notes

 [1] Orwell, George. 1984, Chapter 2

 [2]Orwell, George. 1984, Chapter 8

 [3] Orwell, George. 1984, Chapter 20

 [4] Orwell, George. 1984, Chapter 20

 [5] William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”