Robert Tulip wrote:It is the sixth day of Hate Week, quivering toward social orgasm in mindless rage toward Eurasia, when in the middle of a great public frothathon, the foaming orator is handed a slip of paper and without missing a beat switches the object of his hatred to Eastasia, at which the vast exulting crowd exhibits barely a moment of cognitive dissonance before reordering the world against the new myth, tearing down posters and such like. Winston spends ninety hours at work to rectify the past, and takes quiet pride in his loyal performance, despite his apparent perfidious treachery of private attitude.
As I read this I could not help but be reminded of the remarkable turns on a dime executed by the Republican Party with respect to economics, in the last 12 years. They were busy frothing about deficits for eight years when Obama was president, bubbling over with dire predictions about the results, until Dear Leader took office and the tax bill became their objective, after which deficits became no problem. Even more remarkable, we have two proposed nominations for the Fed who considered the low interest rates chosen by the central bank to be terrible harbingers of inflation (one of them claimed to believe in the Gold Standard) when a Democrat was President, but have discovered in the last two years that the Fed is not too loose with money but too tight (despite every self-consistent doctrine of monetary policy saying quite the opposite, that the time for loose money is when there is significant slack in the economy, which has now more or less disappeared). (One can make a case for backing off interest rates, as the Fed has done in the last 3 months, based on a changing reading of economic conditions, but the theory behind it is the same as the one that correctly predicted no inflation from the dramatically loose policy of the first 5 years of the Great Recession).
The incomprehensible about-faces look like nothing so much as the pivots exercised by the Communist Parties of the West in response to Stalin's shifting policies and alliances. Fascism was the enemy to be slain, then after the Ribbentrop Pact it was a reliable ally to be left alone, then it was an enemy again when, to the surprise of no one, it seems, except Joe Stalin himself, Hitler decided to invade Russia. What Leninism brought to the Socialist movement was iron discipline, the willingness of the party enforcers to shoot any lieutenant who failed to follow the order of the moment. The SS brought the same process to the Wehrmacht, making it a fearsomely disciplined instrument of policy up til the last few months of the war.
This kind of disregard for consistency or any underlying mental model of the world is the result of a worldview which sees the world as a matter of ceaseless conflict for power, a distorted spinoff of Nietzsche embraced explicitly by Newt Gingrich and congenial to the plutocrats who believe their good fortune entitles them to direct the lives of others and proves they are the ones fit to do so. Never mind that it cannot be sustained by reality - those who think that is how the world works will forever strive to deny to others the ordinary pleasure in life that is the obvious antithesis to their obsessive, consuming struggle for status and power.
If you think every principle of truth is simply a rhetorical device to be used in the business of lying and bullying by which the bottom levels are kept under control, then you lose touch with the factual matters that actually make modern society possible. It is no accident that our Dear Leader, with no more concept of how the world works than Kim Jong Eun has, appeals almost exclusively to people who hold a mainly conflictual view of the workings of the world and are unable to open their minds to evidence or simple cause-effect propositions.
Robert Tulip wrote:Some major points here about mass psychology reflect the trauma Orwell had observed as the orators of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia displayed similar feats of rhetorical gymnastry. The sense of blind loyalty to the state was so intense that the mass audience were swept up into a sacrificial bond, an emotional acceptance of patriotic national duty that must exist for totalitarian systems to operate. Against the critical ironic scepticism that is Orwell’s natural habit of mind, such fervour is repugnant and incomprehensible, and yet is observed as a major social phenomenon. So his frightening description of the orator as a blend between Goebbels and Rumpelstiltskin serves well to explain how even rather psychotic language can be convincing and then maddening when given a state platform, evoking uncontrollable rage in the audience.
I can't help but think the rage and the psychotic loyalty stem more from a sense of the previous received wisdom having failed people, easily lending itself to paranoid fantasies of betrayal and manipulation by secret cabals of elites. There is heavy, heavy irony in the German people buying a story of betrayal by Jewish industrialists, and proceeding to renewed militarism, when it was quite evidently militant nationalism that led to their impoverishment and defeat. The same irony is in operation today, with a broad swath of society doubling down on de-regulation as policy when it was quite evidently the banksters set loose by de-regulation who nearly brought the world economy to its knees.
Robert Tulip wrote:Winston was not troubled that all this massive effort was a comprehensive and deliberate lie. A secret sigh goes through the organisation as the great imperial psychotic task is accomplished, so no one will ever be able to prove that the war with Eurasia had ever happened.
An exploit, one might say. A proof of the golem-like implacable power of the Volk bonded into an instrument of force. But without an iota of actual common purpose to motivate them, serving only the will of the dominant few against the upstart self-assertions of the Party members.
It's worth considering the strange history of the Third Wave, the experiment in regimentation and enforced self-discipline which turned out to be unexpectedly popular among its young subjects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(1981_film)
We are each a hot mess of anxieties and aspirations, of tentative strategies and lethargies and manias, waiting for reality to tell us what we need to do to fend off death. When someone charismatic comes along to tell us what to do, we experience a kind of triumph over the disorder within. Combine that internal structure with the social strength seemingly enabling "us" to defeat "them" and you can begin to understand the appeal of regimenting nationalism by comparison with the bloodless abstractions which usually make up political programs.
There is one piece of the puzzle missing to understand the appeal of populist authoritarianism. As Eric Hoffer pointed out in "The True Believer" (in a memorable chapter entitled "And Slime They Had for Mortar") those most desperately attached to the authoritarian system tend to be people who lack their own personal program of successfully engaging life. The aimless, the faithless, the self-perceived failures. We tend to think of such people as searching for a persuasive narrative, but the astonishing irony is that they are much more powerfully attracted to hierarchy itself, to a system that lets someone else do the thinking as long as they are supplied with a narrative with which their anxieties can be held at bay. Precisely because theory has failed them, they would rather have Belief. Someone who fills the role of Director, and someone else who can stand in as Enemy or Threat (even if that will change next week when the Director realizes who the true threat was all along) is much more valuable than a cause-effect proposition that comes with caveats about how your mileage may vary.