The Terrifying Prescience of George Orwell’s 1984

Author’s note: This article contains spoilers.

First and foremost a magnificent novel, George Orwell’s 1984 is also a terrifyingly prescient political commentary. Written by an Englishman in 1949, it substantially mirrors the trajectory of American politics today.

We can see this by examining four main elements:

1. the story as a whole;
2. the political principles and policies that Orwell dramatizes—and his brilliantly original contributions to the language of political discourse;
3. his insights into the philosophy underlying totalitarianism; and
4. several instances of Orwell’s nightmare world becoming our reality.

The Story

1984 is a love story set against a background of brutal communist oppression (communists are referred to simply as the “Party”). After a nuclear war in the 1950s, the world was divided into three super-states: Oceania, consisting of North America and Great Britain (the latter renamed “Airstrip One”); Eurasia, composed of the European continent and Western Asia; and Eastasia, or the bulk of the Asian continent. The powers are constantly at war with each other. Allies and enemies change over time, but war is the way of the world: At times, Oceania is allied with one of the others, fighting the third; at other times, they are reversed. No one ever wins, nor is victory the intent.

Oceania’s goal is to keep its populace in a frenzied state of hatred against the nation’s enemies and therefore loyal to the Party. Strict obedience to the Party is enforced by several means.

One is the omnipresence of the secret police—the “Thought Police” who deploy an advanced two-way telescreen technology. Every building and home in the country has a telescreen, in virtually every room. The Thought Police can spy on you at any moment. They can see and hear you at will; “any sound . . . made, above the level of a low whisper would be picked up by [the telescreen].”¹

Further, the Party imposes a daily “Two Minutes Hate.” Every day, every person in Oceania is required to drop everything else, stand in front of a telescreen, and scream vitriol at Oceania’s foreign enemy—and at its domestic traitors, Emmanuel Goldstein and the Brotherhood, most likely invented threats supposedly seeking to overthrow the Party. The Thought Police monitor this procedure sedulously, imposing prison sentences or death for those suspected of insufficiently spewing hate.

The population is kept in a state of relentless indoctrination. The Party controls every means of communication and uses them to disseminate its lies. Its history books claim that the Party invented the airplane. The Ministry of Truth rewrites past newspaper and magazine articles to suit the propaganda of the moment; the past is continually rewritten. If a Party member is purged for treason—real or imaginary—he is “vaporized,” not merely killed but written out of recorded history. It is treason, punishable by vaporization, to state the “delusional” belief that he ever lived. When the Party switches from fighting Eurasia to Eastasia, it claims that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, all contrary writings are rewritten, and any opposing claim is considered treasonous.

The government is composed of four branches: the Ministry of Truth, which spreads the Party’s lies; the Ministry of Peace, which conducts relentless warfare; the Ministry of Love, which tortures and/or executes the Party’s enemies; and the Ministry of Plenty, which keeps the populace in perpetual poverty. The Party propagates three slogans: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.” The bulk of the citizenry receives little education and is kept in a state of ignorance in which the only absolute is: All truth comes from the Party.

The citizenry of Oceania is divided into two classes: the Party and the proles (proletarians or working classes). The Party is subdivided into two segments: Inner Party members, who rule the nation with absolute authority; and Outer Party members, who do their bidding unquestioningly but have a much higher social and economic status than the downtrodden proles. The proles perform manual labor, get little or no education, and spend most of their nonwork time drinking, gambling, brawling, and fornicating. As long as they work, serve in the military, and fume with hatred at Oceania’s enemies, the Party takes little cognizance of their licentious behavior; the proles are the only ones permitted free thought because the Party deems them incapable of thinking. “They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.’”² On the rare occasion that a prole shows signs of intelligence, he is “simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated.”³ Proles can marry or not at their own choice and couple for pleasure.

But Party members live under a strict puritanical code: They are expected to love the Party above all, especially its (likely fictitious) leader, Big Brother (whose description resembles Joseph Stalin). Sex, for them, is limited to married couples and only for purposes of procreation. The government sponsors a fanatical Anti-Sex League that spews relentless propaganda against romantic love and in favor of loving the Party. Young children of Outer Party members are drafted into an organization, the “Spies.” Clad in uniform and drilled to inform on any persons suspected of anti-Party sentiment, especially their parents, the Spies are honored as heroes when they do.

Against this chilling background, the reader meets Winston Smith, the story’s thirty-nine-year-old protagonist, an Outer Party member and functionary at the Ministry of Truth. He “edits” past newspaper and magazine articles, rewriting the past according to Party dictates. He hates the lying, the authoritarianism, the intrusiveness, and the antisex agitation. He privately questions whether Big Brother is real. He secretly hopes that Goldstein and the Brotherhood exist; if they do, he yearns to join them. He remembers freedom and prosperity from his youth under capitalism, and he wants them. Winston resists the Party’s propaganda and seeks political revolution.

He meets Julia, an attractive, dark-haired young woman, also an Outer Party member working at the Ministry of Truth. She rewrites old literary works—such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton—ensuring that the great books of the past present stories and themes congruent with Party propaganda. She loathes the Party even more than Winston does.

They begin an illicit affair. In defiance of the strict laws, they meet often in a shabby back room that Winston rents from Mr. Charrington, a relics dealer in the proles’ section of town. They express in their lovemaking a consecrated dedication to a personal life, treasured values, and romance. Julia knows that the Party is evil but shows no interest in politics. “‘Who cares?’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.’”⁴

She expresses her individuality in intense private rebellion. Outwardly, she seems a fervent Party member: She screams loudest during the Two Minutes Hate, she is active in the Anti-Sex League, and she volunteers for every task the Party conceives. But she rebels against its authoritarianism by taking lovers (she’s had many) and by sharing genuine love with Winston, the last of them. When he asks her if she enjoys sex, she answers, “I adore it.”⁵

Winston suspects O’Brien, an Inner Party member with a penetrating gaze and rugged appearance, of secretly belonging to the Brotherhood. O’Brien invites the lovers to his home, turns off the telescreen, says that he belongs to the Brotherhood, and gives them a copy of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book. O’Brien asks them questions regarding their loyalty to the rebellion. Are you willing, he asks, to give your lives, to commit murder, to betray your country to a foreign power? Julia is silent; Winston answers, “Yes.” O’Brien asks if they are willing to split up and never see each other again. “No!” cries Julia. Winston, uncertain of his answer, finally says, “No.”⁶ Winston reads Goldstein’s book carefully. He reads parts of it to Julia; she falls asleep.

Winston knows that any revolution is many years in the future. Both lovers know that eventually they will be caught and executed. “We are the dead,” they repeat to each other. Eventually a grim voice from the telescreen hidden behind a framed picture in their rented room echoes this thought: “You are the dead,” it states. They are arrested by the Thought Police, of whom Mr. Charrington is now shown to be a member.

They are separated. For months, Winston is tortured, brainwashed, indoctrinated in the cells of the Ministry of Love. O’Brien, revealed now as a ranking officer of the Thought Police, heads the reeducation process. Winston is gradually coming to love Big Brother and the Party. But he wakes up from a nightmare one night screaming, “Julia!” He is overheard. O’Brien takes him to Room 101, a dreaded torture chamber in the Ministry of Love. Via constant spying, the Thought Police know everyone’s deepest terror. In Room 101, they make it real. For Winston, it is being eaten alive by rats. They surround him with starving rats hurling themselves against the steel of their cages, threatening to eat him alive. His last inner defenses burst. “Do it to Julia!” he screams. “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. . . . Not me!”⁷

He betrays his love for her and is willing to have her eaten alive rather than him. In so doing, he relinquishes his last and greatest personal value to the Party. Eventually, the two former lovers are released. The Party often takes its time in executing traitors; Smith and Julia know only that execution will eventually come. They meet inadvertently, but no spark remains between them. The story closes with Winston’s realization: “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”⁸

Principles, Practices, and the Language of Political Discourse

By 1949, National Socialist Germany had been vanquished in the bloodbath of World War II. But the Soviet Union had conquered and occupied most of Eastern and Central Europe. Stalin, one of history’s worst mass murderers, held total power over Russia and its satellite states. Stalin’s ally, Mao Tse-tung, had just seized power in China, and Stalin’s acolytes in North Korea were poised to invade the freer South. Brutal totalitarianism, in the form of communism, was engulfing the globe.

1984 projects that, within decades, North America and Great Britain would also become totalitarian states, and likely, the rest of the world, too. Orwell provides a chilling depiction of a world under communism, which puts 1984 in good company with other outstanding works, including Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Ayn Rand’s We the Living, and above all, her extraordinary novelette, Anthem. One thing that distinguishes 1984 is its brilliant prescience regarding communist policies and perversion of language. These include the following.

The Thought Police. Although it is unlikely that, in real life, a totalitarian state could develop a two-way telescreen technology, enabling its agents to spy on every person every second of the day, there is no doubt regarding the fundamental point: Communist secret police have that intent. For example, by 1989, the East German Stasi had 91,000 full-time agents and a staggering 173,000 informants in a nation with a population of barely 16 million. More than one person in one hundred was an informant. If someone interacted with, say, two hundred people on a weekly basis, on average, he was known and watched by two distinct informants of the secret police.⁹ As in 1984, this included children spying on their parents.

In the novel, the most ominous persecution of innocent citizens is for the charge of thoughtcrime. A thoughtcrime is any idea that clashes with Party principle, and it is punishable by death. For example, Winston begins a diary. If caught, he will be killed—the desire for intellectual privacy is a thoughtcrime. Winston’s neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Parsons, have two children, a son aged nine and a daughter aged seven, who are members of the paramilitary youth group the “Spies.” Winston describes them: “Another year, two years, and they would be watching [their mother] night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. . . . It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”¹⁰

Eventually, Winston meets Mr. Parsons, a loyal Party member, in prison. Parsons was turned in for saying “Down with Big Brother!” in his sleep. Winston asks who denounced him. Parsons replies, “It was my little daughter. . . . She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day.”¹¹ There is also the transgression of “facecrime.” If you look insufficiently enraged during the Two Minutes Hate, or you appear momentarily skeptical of Party propaganda regarding economic production, or the like, you will be arrested and punished—with death, if it persists.

Doublethink. This is a process of coming to repudiate a truth that you once knew and of gradually accepting that, as the Party proclaims, it is but a pernicious lie promulgated by Goldstein and his supporters. In time, the truth becomes regarded as a delusion, and delusions become accepted as truth. How? Winston reflects on a piece of his own knowledge that the Party denies. “But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness. . . . And if all others accepted the lie that the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.”¹² When all are terrified of execution for contradicting the Party, when all records of a truth are expunged and everywhere the propaganda enshrined, when you daily regurgitate the Party’s version of events, it is both dangerous and difficult to cling to the truth; it is easier to let it fade and accept the Party’s claims.

Newspeak. The Party systematically shrinks the language, expunging and banning any words that facilitate heterodoxy. Syme, an intelligent linguist working on the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary, explains the Party’s intent:

We’re destroying words . . . hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. . . . Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we will make thoughtcrime . . . impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. . . . Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished?¹³

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.” But men think in words. When the words “liberty, freedom, individual, rights,” and so forth are extirpated from the language, expunged from discourse, then, in time, men lose knowledge of these words; and when they can’t conceive of liberty, they cannot fight for it. Ironically, in knowing this, Syme understands too much. Winston recognizes that because the Party does not trust intelligent persons, Syme, too, will eventually be vaporized.

Memory Holes. In its relentless attempt to alter the historical narrative, the Party continuously sends directives to Winston and its thousands of other editors rewriting past newspaper stories, magazine articles, transcriptions of public speeches, and the like. If left intact, these instructions would form a paper trail showing the Party’s pervasive dishonesty. Therefore, the missives must be destroyed and, under pain of death, never discussed. In the wall of every office and hallway of the Ministry of Truth exist orifices known as “memory holes.” When an “editor” completes his task, he lifts the lid of one and drops in the incriminating paper, “whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.”¹⁴ When a piece of paper went down the memory hole, its material manifestation was destroyed, its content denied, and its mention a death sentence for the transgressor.

The Ministry of Truth. This is the most pernicious of the ministries: the agency of mind control. It is the government bureau that rewrites the narrative of the past, enforces the policy of doublethink, creates Newspeak, marks independent thinkers for execution, and engages in ruthless suppression of speech. The Ministry of Truth, by elevating propaganda over knowledge and repressing anyone sufficiently independent to challenge Party orthodoxy, is the agency most vital to maintaining the Party’s totalitarian rule.

Freedom of speech is freedom of intellectual expression—it is freedom of the mind. The right to freedom of speech includes the right of revolutionary thinkers such as Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Pasteur, and Rand to state controversial truths, to support these with evidence, and to offend people, including powerful leaders of state and church. The advance of human knowledge requires it. Government properly has no role to play in the truth business; it is not its function to decide between truth and falsity, or between those whose speech is permitted and those whose speech is suppressed. Its indispensable role is to protect the right of individuals to speak, including the right of freethinkers to challenge state and church. Via the Ministry of Truth, Orwell shows the nature and consequences of government committed not to freedom of the mind but to its suppression.

The Party Slogans. “Freedom is Slavery.” “War is Peace.” “Ignorance is Strength.” What is the purpose of such nonsense? Two of these are direct self-contradictions, and the third is an absurd falsehood. But there is method in this madness.

Regarding the first slogan, the message is: If you try to live independently in Oceania, you are doomed; but if you submit to Party control, you will survive. The second is: If you acquiesce to endless warfare abroad, you can live at peace in Oceania. The third is: Don’t question the Party’s dictates; just obey.

Presumably, the slogans arose early in Party history; they predate the policy of doublethink, which can be imposed only when the Party is entrenched. The slogans warn the most intelligent citizens: Let Party dictates fill your consciousness, fear execution for thoughtcrime, and replace your rational conclusions with Party commands, regardless of their irrationality.

Big Brother is watching you. This is depicted throughout the novel, beginning on page 1. As Winston climbs the stairs of his building, he observes: “On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.”¹⁵ The dictator holds life-and-death power over you, and, via his ubiquitous Thought Police, scrutinizes you relentlessly. The Stalin-esque face and eyes following you add a chilling visual to the realization that you are relentlessly surveilled.

Emmanuel Goldstein is the arch-villain. Goldstein and the Brotherhood likely are fictions that the Thought Police created to keep the populace in frenzied hatred. Why the Jewish name? Orwell knows that Jews were long persecuted in Europe, that the Nazis fought a race war, and that communists wage class war. Nevertheless, although communists theoretically are not racists, in practice many leading communists, including Stalin, were deeply anti-Semitic. Orwell was insightful: A totalitarian state needs scapegoats upon whom to blame its incessant failures—and communist ideology enshrines an envy-riddled hatred of the successful and affluent. Therefore, what better scapegoat than a member of a minority long accused of being greedy exploiters of the poor? This was the exact accusation that Hitler hurled against the Jews. Also, is it an accident that the villain’s name is Gold-stein, denoting wealth? After all, it could just as well have been Weinberg or Brownstein or some other Jewish name.

In sum, Orwell brilliantly predicted communist methods for imposing totalitarianism. He contributed invaluably to the language of political discourse. After Orwell, if a government agency spies on its citizens, freedom lovers breathe ominously: “Big Brother is watching you.” If an independent thinker is tormented (or “canceled”) by a powerful organization, governmental or private, we point out sardonically that he committed a “thoughtcrime.” When the U.S. government recently established a division of disinformation at Homeland Security, free speech advocates screamed, “Ministry of Truth!” These and other of Orwell’s intellectual/linguistic insights are conceptual tools, empowering us to comprehend political issues more clearly.

The Philosophy of Totalitarianism

Orwell’s insights go still deeper. As O’Brien oversees Winston’s torture, he tells his victim, “There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. . . . We make the laws of nature.”¹⁶ O’Brien adds, “Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”¹⁷ O’Brien’s point is: The Party controls reality.

The claim that the Party or state controls reality is a claim of metaphysics, the branch of philosophy studying the fundamental nature of the universe. Metaphysics asks such questions as: What, in essence, is the universe composed of? Is it matter, spirit, some combination of the two? Is the universe created or eternal? Does it depend on a consciousness, or does it exist independent of consciousness?

Novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand argued that a fundamental principle of rationality is the “Primacy of Existence”: “Existence exists.” The universe exists independent of consciousness, which is dependent on it. We can perceive and understand—but not create or alter—the laws of nature. Gravity, for example, exists regardless of whether anyone is aware of it. It is impossible to create something from nothing, so a consciousness could not create the universe. The universe, the sum of all that exists, is eternal; the configuration of its parts can change, but those parts can neither be created nor destroyed. No mind or collection of them can, by a sheer act of will or thought, alter such truths as: The Earth revolves around the sun; 3 x 3 = 9; a thing is what it is—A is A. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff puts it this way:

Existence . . . comes first. Things are what they are independent of consciousness—of anyone’s perceptions, images, ideas, feelings. Consciousness, by contrast, is a dependent. Its function is not to create or control existence, but to be a spectator: to look out, to perceive, to grasp that which is.¹⁸

Rand argues that the reverse of this principle—the “Primacy of Consciousness”—is the fundamental error that people can make in metaphysics, whether the religious belief that God created the universe from nothing, or the communist belief that the will of the people controls reality, or the personal version that whatever I feel is true is true for me. Speaking of the primacy of consciousness error, Peikoff writes, “In this view, the function of consciousness is not perception but creation of that which is. Existence, accordingly, is a dependent; the world is regarded as in some way a derivative of consciousness.”¹⁹

Through O’Brien, Orwell voices the theory Rand dubs the “social version” of the primacy of consciousness: the belief that the collective will can bend reality to its command. It has been a popular theme in totalitarian politics—including communism. One real-life example is the case of Lysenkoism. Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976) was a Ukrainian agronomist and scientific fraud who denied the existence of genes. In contradiction to the scientific knowledge of his time, he held that acquired characteristics of animals and plants can be biologically transmitted to subsequent generations. In human beings, this is akin to claiming that if mom and dad, via extensive weight training, bulk up from slender to heavily muscled frames, then junior will inevitably inherit the powerful musculature of his parents. In reality, he won’t. Nor are acquired characteristics biologically transmittable in plants. Lysenko was opposed by leading Soviet scientists who established that, in fact, the laws of genetics could not be abolished by Lysenko’s say-so. American journalist Eugene Lyons writes, “But the greatest scientist of all, Comrade Stalin, was thoroughly captivated by Lysenko’s half-baked and flamboyant claims.”²⁰

And although Soviet farming was in a desperate condition, Lysenko promised dramatic improvement. The dictator placed Lysenko in charge of Soviet agriculture—and leading scientists who denied his crackpot claims were incarcerated or shot. “[Lysenko] refused to be frustrated by the slowness of nature and would bend it to his will.”²¹

Lysenko’s “award of priority to environment” was in accord with Marxist ideology.²² Marx was a philosophic determinist who argued that the economic class in which one is reared, not his biological inheritance, shapes his personality and character. In the Marxist view, nurture, not nature (and certainly not volition) is all-important. The new “Soviet man,” therefore, could be developed by intensive social conditioning. Lyons explains: “Mendelian principles of genetics were ‘abolished.’ Genes were turned into a counter-revolutionary word.”²³ With genes removed from study, environmental conditioning became all-important; Lysenko claimed that under the right conditions, plants could be manipulated to do as the Soviets willed.

The American scholar Bertram Wolfe summarizes this madness: “Laws of heredity were passed by the Politburo.”²⁴ Except that, in reality, they were not—and Soviet agriculture tanked. Why did Stalin cling to this quackery despite all evidence and resulting failures to the contrary? Was it from “a godlike feeling that they could dictate to nature as ruthlessly as to man?” asks Lyons.²⁵ It was.

The social primacy of consciousness theory is a secular version of religion, with the Party as a stand-in for God. The social version is just as irrational and destructive as the religious version. In 1984, when O’Brien tells Winston, “We [the Party] make the laws of nature,” Orwell showed perfect understanding of communist philosophy.

But communists are slow learners. Years after Lysenko’s debacle, and subsequent to the publication of 1984, Chairman Mao instituted a similar policy in China. Mao was an irrational, anti-intellectual thug who also claimed that human will could command nature. Eminent historian Paul Johnson writes: “[Mao] did not believe in ‘objective situations’ at all. It was all in the mind. . . . On ‘the basis of the tremendous energy of the masses’ . . . ‘it is possible to accomplish any task whatever.’ ‘There is only unproductive thought,’ he said, ‘no unproductive regions.’” So nonarable land could be brought into viable production if only the people believed it. This, writes Johnson, was an indication of Mao’s “contempt for objective reality.”²⁶

The Communist contempt for objective reality led to disastrous consequences. Mao, like Stalin, believed that Marxist ideology could be imposed on nature—and the attempt to impose it led to horrendous famine in which millions of innocent civilians starved to death. Jean-Louis Margolin, in The Black Book of Communism, writes, “Mao had proclaimed his belief that ‘in company grain grows fast; seeds are happiest when growing together’—attempting to impose class solidarity on nature.”²⁷ Dutch historian Frank Dikotter echoes this in his authoritative book, Mao’s Great Famine: “Seeds, too, it seemed, shared a revolutionary spirit, those belonging to the same class sharing light and nutrients in a spurt of equality.”²⁸

Mao was disappointed to discover that seeds did not share his Marxist predilection for togetherness; they were apparently individualistic, preferring a degree of privacy to grow healthily. The peasants knew that when seeds were planted close together, the roots grew to strangle each other; plants need space between them for flourishing growth. Dikotter conveys the peasants’ response to the communists: “‘You plant the seedlings too closely, there is not enough breathing space between them, and then you add ten tonnes of fertilizer per field. It will suffocate them to death.’”²⁹ This is exactly what happened. Mao, based on his social primacy of consciousness premise, sought to impose Marxist philosophy not just on men but on nature; predictably, what followed was massive crop failure and unfathomable suffering as millions of Chinese citizens starved to death.

What is the purpose of proclaiming that the Party is akin to a God on Earth? Recall again what O’Brien told Winston: “We make the laws of nature.” What is the only recourse for mere mortals confronted with god-like power? To obey. O’Brien also told Winston, “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.”³⁰ O’Brien concludes his chilling confession: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”³¹ This is the essence of communist totalitarianism. This is not merely the result of a primacy of consciousness metaphysics; this is the intent of those who push it.

The Ominous Similarities

Contemporary America is devolving into a totalitarian state with parallels to that depicted in 1984. Consider the signs.

Big Brother is watching you. In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a contractor for the National Security Administration (NSA), shocked the nation by exposing a bitter truth: The U.S. government was—without warrants or even suspicion of wrongdoing—spying on millions of innocent Americans, monitoring their text and telephone records.³² Days later, it came to light that the U.S. government had also tapped into the servers of nine Internet companies—including Apple, Facebook, and Google—to spy on people’s audio and video chats, photos, emails, documents, and connection logs.³³

This government spying program was reportedly shut down in 2015. But recent Twitter Files show that government surveillance of innocent Americans continues. For example, the FBI “suggested” that Twitter suspend the accounts of six satire sites; Twitter then searched for reasons to do so and suspended four of them. Apparently, this is widespread; the FBI has continuously flagged accounts for Twitter’s moderators to inspect more carefully. The FBI reportedly paid Twitter $3.4 million of American taxpayers’ money to process such “suggestions.” Indicating the depth of the FBI’s intrusiveness, it flags even accounts with few followers. One such account was @Lexitollah, who replied to the news, “My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A [First Amendment] violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?”³⁴

Thoughtcrime. The Twitter files show the FBI and other government agencies repeatedly “coaching” Twitter employees regarding whose accounts and posts to promote and whose to suppress. Twitter is a privately owned company; as such, its owners have a right to stipulate what can or cannot be said on their property, just as I do in my living room or backyard. However, when the government works to suppress certain views and voices, that’s censorship. And that’s precisely what the FBI and other intelligence agencies did. Although they were not so bold as to try literally criminalizing particular ideas, they prodded private companies to treat those ideas as anathema, effectively outsourcing their dirty work of policing “thoughtcrimes.”

Which ideas did the FBI “coach” Twitter to suppress? Among them were claims conflicting with government narratives regarding COVID lockdowns and vaccines.³⁵ The Twitter files exposed revealing notes from Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s head of U.S. public policy: “Culbertson said in her notes that the administration was ‘very angry’ that Twitter had not taken more aggressive action in silencing vaccine critics and wanted the company to do more.”³⁶ Under intense government pressure, Twitter banned numerous physicians; one of the most distinguished was Dr. Martin Kuldorff, an epidemiologist at the Harvard Medical School.³⁷ Dr. Andrew Bostom of Rhode Island was permanently banned from Twitter after “tweeting the results of negative studies about the vaccines and highlighting data that coronavirus was less dangerous in children than the flu.”³⁸

The suppression was not limited to physicians. For example, Jesse O’Neill writes that “in June 2021, hours after Biden publicly raged that social media companies were ‘killing people’ for allowing purported vaccine misinformation to propagate, former New York Times reporter and noted vaccine doubter Alex Berenson was suspended from the site and was ultimately banned.”³⁹ Biden used the bully pulpit of his office to pressure private companies to suppress claims he regarded as false, misleading, and/or dangerous. In other words, the president decided what was true, then pressured private companies to shut down the speech of dissenters.

(Consider a related example from abroad: In 2020, during the COVID pandemic, then-New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stated, “We will continue to be your single source of truth . . . Unless you hear it from us it is not the truth.”⁴⁰ Ardern, of course, sounded more like Stalin or Mao—or Big Brother—than the leader of a supposedly free nation. This statement is jaw-dropping in its open assertion of government’s authority to dictate truth and falsity.)

Ministry of Truth. In April 2022, the U.S. government announced that it would establish a disinformation governance board at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).⁴¹ Assailed with blowback, it quickly scuttled the program; but months later, The Intercept examined a leaked draft of DHS’s “2022 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review,” which confirmed that “DHS [still] views the issue of tackling disinformation . . . as a growing portion of its core duties.”⁴² Fulfilling this duty would require that it decide truth and falsity in regard to important matters and, at the very least, “coach” gatekeepers (such as social media companies) on what is “true” and permissible and what is not. As we’ve already seen, with or without a disinformation governance board, government agencies are already doing exactly that. In other words, overtly or covertly, the U.S. government is progressively adopting the functions of the Ministry of Truth that Orwell portrayed.

The brazenness of an attempt to establish a Ministry of Truth in America should scare every American. It should also be noted that government censors repeatedly employ the word “disinformation,” a term that Joseph Stalin coined.⁴³ Is this a coincidence—or a shameless admission of allegiance to Stalin-like policies of suppressing dissent?

The communist primacy of consciousness premise. Today, the government school system is a shambles, and millions of American students score poorly on academic tests.⁴⁴ This is because the schools are far more concerned with indoctrination than education. They push leftist views regarding man-made climate change, systemic racism, and the bigotry of white people, the evils of capitalism, and more. ⁴⁵

Consider, for example, the Orwellian nature of the indoctrination of children with “gender identity” theory in government schools. In reality, few things are as immediately evident as a person’s sex or gender. It is visibly obvious that there are two sexes and that an individual’s gender is decided by nature, not by individuals or society. But today, leftist “educators” teach children that there are dozens of genders and that they can be any gender they choose, that boys who identify as girls must be allowed to use girls’ bathrooms and compete in girls’ sports, and vice versa.⁴⁶

What is the purpose of this insanity? Look at its results: It confuses children by placing their direct perception of reality in opposition to the claims of their teachers. What is the lesson? The teachers’ claims supersede nature, and the child’s claims can, too. This is an example of the personal version of the primacy of consciousness theory: An individual’s claim or desire is preeminent; reality is subordinate. Once children learn to reject laws of nature and to enshrine the primacy of consciousness, it is a short step to the conclusion that the most politically powerful collection of consciousnesses, the state, controls reality.

Newspeak. This primacy of consciousness philosophy bleeds into language. If human consciousness controls reality, and the state is the supreme consciousness, it follows that the state controls the meaning of words. For example, take the economic term “recession.” The facts that give rise to the need for the concept are the instances in economic history and reality in which the gross domestic product (GDP) declines for more than two consecutive quarters. This definition arose from the need to identify such events because of their substantial economic implications, and economists have long used the concept of “recession“ for this purpose. But in July 2022, the Biden administration decided in the middle of an economic downturn that the definition of the term needed to be revised. “Thursday’s Commerce Department data might well confirm that gross domestic product shrank for a second straight quarter,” wrote Charles Lane. “In anticipation, the White House issued a statement noting that there is nothing ‘official’ about the oft-cited rule of thumb according to which a two-quarter losing streak defines a recession.”⁴⁷ The facts clashed with the government’s desires, and the government redefined terms to “fix” the problem.

***

From “Big Brother is watching you” to “thoughtcrimes” to the “Ministry of Truth” to “Newspeak,” Orwell’s 1984 brilliantly dramatizes the mind-throttling tools that statists use to control people and destroy human life. The book is as timely now as ever.

Combined with an understanding of what Ayn Rand called “the primacy of consciousness” and how statists employ this fundamentally false assumption toward their nefarious ends, Orwell’s work becomes even more powerful in the fight for a culture of reason and freedom.

The fundamental facts of reality are that existence exists, that things are what they are, and that the purpose of consciousness is to identify and understand existence—not to create it.

Let’s embrace these fundamentals, relegate 1984 to the past, and create a future of human flourishing.

About Andrew Bernstein

Andrew Bernstein holds a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York and taught philosophy for many years at Marist College. He is the author of Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights (2010), Capitalist Solutions (2011), Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters (2020), and, most recently, Why Johnny Still Can't Read or Write or Understand Math.

View all articles by Andrew Bernstein →