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wingedbeastAs a teaser for this week (because I like to pretend I have a wide audience that would spend the week anticipating the next installment), I said that I will ask if Oceana can last.
Dragoness_E immediately responded with a resounding "no" on the basis of unforeseen externalities. The externalities included a new disease a la Black Death, an extinction level asteroid (such as is found in late 90s movies and the far better done "You And Me And The End of the World"), a much more advanced civilization coming to conquer and colonize, etc. The phrase for the whole category is "Outside Context Problem".
I will agree with this. For one thing, some of those problems are problems that would and could destroy any nation without needing to kill all or most of the people within. There's an Italian movie about a world-wide outbreak of crippling-to-lethal agoraphobia. (It's on Netflix with the title "The Last Days", if you don't mind reading the subtitles.) The affliction doesn't even kill anybody. It's the isolation and the breakdown in communications that causes civilization to break down.
Any such Outside Context Problem can destroy a nation that either does not or cannot adapt quickly enough. And, The Party will not allow Oceana to be adaptive. It cannot survive a world of changing people. It can only enforce a status quo that, given enough of an Outside Context Problem, cannot last.
That said, Orwell doesn't seem to consider anything like an Outside Context Problem. According to O'Brien and The Book, of which he is part author, the only external issue is another nation, but that is handled by Doublethink Agreement among the three extant nations. This leaves, under Orwell's examination and O'Brien's belief, only the internal matter of controlling the individuals within Oceana.
In a world without Outside Context Problems and externalities, could Oceana last as it is?
Let's take a look at what Oceana is. O'Brien will tell us, in fact.
The Party, much like Orwell himself, has noted the sins of power-structures past. Orwell even, in the names of his ministries, puts in a jab at the BBC with "The Ministry of Truth". The Party engages in more attempt at control than ever before and the members, noting that this sin is inescapable, have taken that sin and made it into its own purpose. No attempt to eliminate the sin or manage it (and I view Democracy as an attempt at managing this impulse), but merely a wholesale embrace of it.
That is the philosophical core of The Party. I bring that up, again, because the philosophical core is where you can convince a group or organization to change, where there is one. Morality might not do the job, but putting it straight to them that their quest for power sacrifices that core philosophy is your best bet at a non-violent changing of behavior. Even if the quest for power has taken over, at least some image needs to be maintained.
The Party has no such breaks. Therefore, there's no non-violent means of dissuading The Party from seeking ever more power. And, even the desire for power cannot be used to convince them to use non-oppressive methods, as the power they seek is expressed most fully in cruelty. Make someone suffer, more and more and more, and that is more power.
For the individual, and that being the individual within the Party, the Proles seem to be beneath notice, save for efforts to eliminate the smartest among them, what is the role? What do they do?
O'Brien tells us.
Within The Party and within Oceana, your goal is to sacrifice yourself utterly unto submission to the Party.
To all appearances, Parsons has done just that, to such a degree that even the Party torturing him into confession is superfluous. He treats the victory of the Party over himself as his own victory. Yet, where does that get him? He's still going to be tortured. After all, the purpose of torture is torture.
We can skip past a lot of text about Doublethink and the full expression of power. It all winds up being the very reasons that the Party cannot adapt to any kind of Outside Context Problem.
So, where does this causing people to suffer for the simple sake of expressing power for its own sake lead?
Again, O'Brien tells us.
Okay, in the real world, neurology is making leaps and bounds in terms of understanding how the brain works and, in terms of emotions, we know that serotonin is calming and oxytocin is related to a number of emotions, including love. And, we're thirty years after this book was set. So, reaching a point of eliminating the sex drive, let alone any emotions that might be inconvenient to the Party's cruelty plan isn't going to happen for Oceana.
Even if the science within 1984 were such that it was possible to do such a thing, the reality is that The Party can't do science. Doublethink eliminates the possibility. Science requires that the past remain immutable so that one hypothesis can have made one prediction that tested out one way. The very records needed to know that you've eliminated one wrong hypothesis are impossible given the needs of Doublethink. The only alternative would be to exempt not just something, but the Neurologists' entire lives from Doublethink.
So, I can take all this prediction of a world without love or loyalty for anything but Big Brother and place it in the same category as the predictions of, some day, eliminating the other two nations. It's a fantasy, a wistful notion of a future that will never come because such a future requires change that the Party cannot risk.
That doesn't mean that O'Brien doesn't believe it. But, this is one of the problems of Doublethink. All the time spent choosing the more convenient belief for the moment has left him with no ability to note when he doesn't have that choice.
Or, he might just be saying that as a means of intimidating Winston. It doesn't have to be true outside of his head, he just has to believe it right now and can believe something else later on.
But, the basic idea of the Party is doing all it can to eliminate as much as possible to stand between the Party and its use of power to express cruelty. Like many a nation, Oceana will not achieve this ideal, but it's good to let your reach exceed your grasp.
This is all an examination of what the Party is and the effect of its power. This is the intended goal of the Party and the intended life in Oceana. And this leads me to believe that, on its own terms, the Party will fall.
Now, I see two ways that the Party may fall.
The first way for the Party to fall is through failure. And, the mode of failure is small, basic, and does not require moral virtue. Winston tries to appeal to some moral virtue, some spirit of man and O'Brien responds to show Winston himself, what the tortures have done to him, but even that may be too high-minded for what this would take.
A long while back, I wrote a "scene I'd like to see" regarding The Joker in Winston's same situation.* It's very short it's about the fact that the Party has a big weakness that's fairly easy to hit. And, the reason anybody would is because there's just not anything in it for you in going along with the what the Party wants.
Sure, you get to feel powerful... sometimes. But, the Party will turn on you. There is no question of that. A world where there is no laughter save the laughter at the defeat of a hated enemy means that all your loyalty to Big Brother buys you nothing. You will be that hated enemy and you know it.
It doesn't take moral superiority. Good old fashioned selfishness will do. The Party demanding ultimate submission will no more achieve the perfectly submissive Party member than Christianity demanding ultimate submission to God comes anywhere near creating perfect Christians.
People will realize that all this power doesn't achieve, for them, a moment of happiness and they'll use the Party's greatest strength, Doublethink, as its greatest weakness. The Party will fall because people will weigh all the value of the Party in one hand and the all the value of a halfhearted wank in the other and be willing to destroy the former in the name of the latter.
The other way for the Party to fail, as you can probably guess by my naming the first way "failure", is through success.
No friendship, no fraternity, no love of parent or child, and no joy save the thrill of destroying a hated enemy means that everybody, every single person you will ever meet, is an enemy, a hated enemy, someone you hate and fear and would destroy given half a chance.
Now, sacrifice for that person. Go ahead. You don't have to die to save them. Just let them in front of you in line because you have a large cart full of items and they only have the one thing.
Oh, they won't do the same for you. Remember, they hate you, they fear you. If they see you let them cut in front of them, they will wonder what the trick is. What are you planning?
Our species has managed to work together because we can manage to look upon each other and not see a hated enemy. We don't have to love each other. Strictly speaking, we don't even have to respect each other (although that does help us all get more out of the arrangement). We just have to have the barest amount of trust to use each other without the motivation to destroy at the most decisive opportunity.
If the Party is successful in creating a world wherein the only possible joy is the joy at power as expressed through cruelty, it leaves the people of Oceana, in the Party and in the Proles, absent any reason not to destroy the Party. Sure, some will see the Party as a tool for the destruction of others, but it'll also be clear that the Party protects people you want to hurt.
The Party cannot help but fall, and pathetically so at that.
None of this is of help to Winston, of course, as we will continue to see.
* http://wingedbeast.dreamwidth.org/8990.html
Dragoness_E immediately responded with a resounding "no" on the basis of unforeseen externalities. The externalities included a new disease a la Black Death, an extinction level asteroid (such as is found in late 90s movies and the far better done "You And Me And The End of the World"), a much more advanced civilization coming to conquer and colonize, etc. The phrase for the whole category is "Outside Context Problem".
I will agree with this. For one thing, some of those problems are problems that would and could destroy any nation without needing to kill all or most of the people within. There's an Italian movie about a world-wide outbreak of crippling-to-lethal agoraphobia. (It's on Netflix with the title "The Last Days", if you don't mind reading the subtitles.) The affliction doesn't even kill anybody. It's the isolation and the breakdown in communications that causes civilization to break down.
Any such Outside Context Problem can destroy a nation that either does not or cannot adapt quickly enough. And, The Party will not allow Oceana to be adaptive. It cannot survive a world of changing people. It can only enforce a status quo that, given enough of an Outside Context Problem, cannot last.
That said, Orwell doesn't seem to consider anything like an Outside Context Problem. According to O'Brien and The Book, of which he is part author, the only external issue is another nation, but that is handled by Doublethink Agreement among the three extant nations. This leaves, under Orwell's examination and O'Brien's belief, only the internal matter of controlling the individuals within Oceana.
In a world without Outside Context Problems and externalities, could Oceana last as it is?
Let's take a look at what Oceana is. O'Brien will tell us, in fact.
'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had just seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
The Party, much like Orwell himself, has noted the sins of power-structures past. Orwell even, in the names of his ministries, puts in a jab at the BBC with "The Ministry of Truth". The Party engages in more attempt at control than ever before and the members, noting that this sin is inescapable, have taken that sin and made it into its own purpose. No attempt to eliminate the sin or manage it (and I view Democracy as an attempt at managing this impulse), but merely a wholesale embrace of it.
That is the philosophical core of The Party. I bring that up, again, because the philosophical core is where you can convince a group or organization to change, where there is one. Morality might not do the job, but putting it straight to them that their quest for power sacrifices that core philosophy is your best bet at a non-violent changing of behavior. Even if the quest for power has taken over, at least some image needs to be maintained.
The Party has no such breaks. Therefore, there's no non-violent means of dissuading The Party from seeking ever more power. And, even the desire for power cannot be used to convince them to use non-oppressive methods, as the power they seek is expressed most fully in cruelty. Make someone suffer, more and more and more, and that is more power.
For the individual, and that being the individual within the Party, the Proles seem to be beneath notice, save for efforts to eliminate the smartest among them, what is the role? What do they do?
O'Brien tells us.
'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present power is only a word as far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone-free-the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.
Within The Party and within Oceana, your goal is to sacrifice yourself utterly unto submission to the Party.
To all appearances, Parsons has done just that, to such a degree that even the Party torturing him into confession is superfluous. He treats the victory of the Party over himself as his own victory. Yet, where does that get him? He's still going to be tortured. After all, the purpose of torture is torture.
We can skip past a lot of text about Doublethink and the full expression of power. It all winds up being the very reasons that the Party cannot adapt to any kind of Outside Context Problem.
So, where does this causing people to suffer for the simple sake of expressing power for its own sake lead?
Again, O'Brien tells us.
Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will or his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy-everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. 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. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. ALl competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always-do not forget this, Winston-always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-for ever.'
Okay, in the real world, neurology is making leaps and bounds in terms of understanding how the brain works and, in terms of emotions, we know that serotonin is calming and oxytocin is related to a number of emotions, including love. And, we're thirty years after this book was set. So, reaching a point of eliminating the sex drive, let alone any emotions that might be inconvenient to the Party's cruelty plan isn't going to happen for Oceana.
Even if the science within 1984 were such that it was possible to do such a thing, the reality is that The Party can't do science. Doublethink eliminates the possibility. Science requires that the past remain immutable so that one hypothesis can have made one prediction that tested out one way. The very records needed to know that you've eliminated one wrong hypothesis are impossible given the needs of Doublethink. The only alternative would be to exempt not just something, but the Neurologists' entire lives from Doublethink.
So, I can take all this prediction of a world without love or loyalty for anything but Big Brother and place it in the same category as the predictions of, some day, eliminating the other two nations. It's a fantasy, a wistful notion of a future that will never come because such a future requires change that the Party cannot risk.
That doesn't mean that O'Brien doesn't believe it. But, this is one of the problems of Doublethink. All the time spent choosing the more convenient belief for the moment has left him with no ability to note when he doesn't have that choice.
Or, he might just be saying that as a means of intimidating Winston. It doesn't have to be true outside of his head, he just has to believe it right now and can believe something else later on.
But, the basic idea of the Party is doing all it can to eliminate as much as possible to stand between the Party and its use of power to express cruelty. Like many a nation, Oceana will not achieve this ideal, but it's good to let your reach exceed your grasp.
This is all an examination of what the Party is and the effect of its power. This is the intended goal of the Party and the intended life in Oceana. And this leads me to believe that, on its own terms, the Party will fall.
Now, I see two ways that the Party may fall.
The first way for the Party to fall is through failure. And, the mode of failure is small, basic, and does not require moral virtue. Winston tries to appeal to some moral virtue, some spirit of man and O'Brien responds to show Winston himself, what the tortures have done to him, but even that may be too high-minded for what this would take.
A long while back, I wrote a "scene I'd like to see" regarding The Joker in Winston's same situation.* It's very short it's about the fact that the Party has a big weakness that's fairly easy to hit. And, the reason anybody would is because there's just not anything in it for you in going along with the what the Party wants.
Sure, you get to feel powerful... sometimes. But, the Party will turn on you. There is no question of that. A world where there is no laughter save the laughter at the defeat of a hated enemy means that all your loyalty to Big Brother buys you nothing. You will be that hated enemy and you know it.
It doesn't take moral superiority. Good old fashioned selfishness will do. The Party demanding ultimate submission will no more achieve the perfectly submissive Party member than Christianity demanding ultimate submission to God comes anywhere near creating perfect Christians.
People will realize that all this power doesn't achieve, for them, a moment of happiness and they'll use the Party's greatest strength, Doublethink, as its greatest weakness. The Party will fall because people will weigh all the value of the Party in one hand and the all the value of a halfhearted wank in the other and be willing to destroy the former in the name of the latter.
The other way for the Party to fail, as you can probably guess by my naming the first way "failure", is through success.
No friendship, no fraternity, no love of parent or child, and no joy save the thrill of destroying a hated enemy means that everybody, every single person you will ever meet, is an enemy, a hated enemy, someone you hate and fear and would destroy given half a chance.
Now, sacrifice for that person. Go ahead. You don't have to die to save them. Just let them in front of you in line because you have a large cart full of items and they only have the one thing.
Oh, they won't do the same for you. Remember, they hate you, they fear you. If they see you let them cut in front of them, they will wonder what the trick is. What are you planning?
Our species has managed to work together because we can manage to look upon each other and not see a hated enemy. We don't have to love each other. Strictly speaking, we don't even have to respect each other (although that does help us all get more out of the arrangement). We just have to have the barest amount of trust to use each other without the motivation to destroy at the most decisive opportunity.
If the Party is successful in creating a world wherein the only possible joy is the joy at power as expressed through cruelty, it leaves the people of Oceana, in the Party and in the Proles, absent any reason not to destroy the Party. Sure, some will see the Party as a tool for the destruction of others, but it'll also be clear that the Party protects people you want to hurt.
The Party cannot help but fall, and pathetically so at that.
None of this is of help to Winston, of course, as we will continue to see.
* http://wingedbeast.dreamwidth.org/8990.html
no subject
Date: 2017-08-24 02:24 am (UTC)Breaking the fundamental bond between mother and child, and subjecting the child to an upbringing of loveless cruelty and abuse we now know is one of the ways to create serial killers. They will not love Big Brother instead; they will hate everyone. I don't think The Party is ready for a generation of Jack the Rippers and Jokers.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-24 02:47 am (UTC)The Party would be that massively dysfunctional work-place. Sure, desperation can keep people working there, but it won't make up for the lost productivity that comes from getting key people fired because, again, them or you.
Sure, it wouldn't fall as fast. But, the same result would happen, either way. Everybody has to ask the question "what the hell am I getting out of going along with this" and enough people would answer "not nearly enough".