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Why do half of us want a dystopian society, no strong-arm necessary?




Under today’s gathering dark clouds, a reread of Nineteen Eighty-Four shows how the otherwise prescient George Orwell was wrong to think people were going to have to be tortured into submission. Half of America (still psychologically locked down, vexed and vaxed) wouldn’t have it any other way.

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is grim in a way 2022 would understand. The people of Orwell’s future want to be controlled. They have come to prefer it. Freedom from choice makes them feel safe. People accept being monitored, and their media being censored. They think of it all with a sense of the inevitable — the only way to stay safe if they think of it at all. The all-seeing telescreens in their homes and the snitches and spies embedded in their lives are for the better, really. Language itself is changed not just to stifle dissent but to make it impossible.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the government controls and modifies all media, sending events from the past that are no longer politically correct down the memory hole. Today, we have the legacy media to do that for us. We can no longer read a newspaper or watch a documentary with any expectation that any part of it is true. Americans relish fake news. To take only one example, the truth is that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. It was all made up, doublethink embellished with lurid “details” like the pee tape so absurd they wouldn’t make it into a B-movie script. Michael Cohen never went to Prague. The FBI had to lie to obtain FISA permission to spy on Trump associates. Yet vast numbers of Americans still believe it all to be true, and seek out media that clings to the edges of the story. 2+2 can equal 5, if you believe it does.

To take another example, Hunter Biden financially benefited from trading off his father’s position. He made millions from China and Ukraine selling influence. Yet the media acted with the full support of about half of Americans to disappear the story and influence the 2020 election. Once pushed underwater, the story never came back in time, and maybe it won’t for the 2024 contest either.

When I Google Hunter’s name I find sympathetic replacement stories about his battles with various addictions. Most Americans welcome the sleight of hand. They don’t want another scandalous administration. They want censorship to clean that up. The government doesn’t have to police it; in America, journalists demand the suspension of other journalists’ First Amendment rights based on ideology if things go off-message. ...

In 2022 America, we not only voluntarily accept surveillance, but we want more of it because it makes shopping easier. We spend thousands of dollars to buy and maintain 24/7 devices on our person that track our locations, record our communications, and study and analyze our personal habits from porn preferences to fashion choices, all so Amazon can recommend products to us. Tracking us was sold first as a way to keep us safe from terrorist attacks that never came, then to catalog our associations to keep us safe from a Covid-19 crisis kept on the boil as long as possible. We want Big Brother to know where we’ve been so he can warn us not to associate with the “diseased” people there. Vaccine passports to label and reward the compliant? Yes, please, if it means we can go to ballgames.

We love surveillance technology when it helps arrest the “right” people. We fetishize how cell phone data was used to place people onsite during the Capitol riots, coupled with facial recognition run against images pulled off social media, aided by loved ones snitching, to arrest them. There is even a do-it-yourself version of facial recognition progressives used to help law enforcement ID rioters. The goal was to jail people if possible, but most loyalists seemed equally satisfied if they could cause someone to lose their job.

As a young man, I visited Soviet Eastern Europe. I lived in China and in Taiwan under dictatorship. I spoke to survivors of the Cultural Revolution and torture victims from Seoul’s years of military control. I’m much older now, and know when I’ve seen something before. Orwellian? Orwell was an amateur.