The Goldstein Machine

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell (1949)

When you think of 1984 you probably think of Big Brother.

Depending on how long it has been since someone assigned it to you in high school, Big Brother may be all you remember. But perhaps you remember other features of the story, too. Maybe Newspeak rings a double-plus-ungood bell in your memory as the novel's invented language of efficiency and political control. Perhaps you recall Room 101, a personalized torture chamber in which the state subjects its victims to their darkest, most private fears. Even if you don't remember the role they played in 1984, you probably remember the thousand derivative dystopian stories they spawned. The irony, I think, is that none of these features of Oceania's system of authoritarian control alone is necessary, much less sufficient to explain what it is that makes 1984's imaginary state so powerful and stable. Indeed, there is only one indispensable practice, only one tool upon which Ingsoc's stability depends:

The Two-Minute Hate.

Men can, after all, resist the image of an all-powerful leader like Big Brother. I mean, of course they can - these are some of our best stories! There are real stories, like Spartacus, the Decembrists (St. Petersburg, not Portland), the American Revolution, or the French Revolution. There are also made up stories, where in many cases this human resolve in the face of an all-powerful antagonist is an even greater force! Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Katniss Everdeen, Antigone, Prometheus - they all poke the gods of our world in the eye without a care for what happens to them.

Men can find freedom within the confines of restricted language like Newspeak, too. Shostakovich's great Fifth Symphony ends with a hollow triumph, a plausibly deniable send-up of forced patriotic joy. The Island escaped the heavily censored confines of Apartheid South Africa by means of deep symbolism and simple subterfuge. Bei Dao and the Misty Poets rebelled against the oppression of the Cultural Revolution with both hidden meanings and hidden activities, penning their verses in the secret places of the countryside.

Neither is it certain that men will be cowed by the threats of violence and deep, dark fears of a Room 101 alone. Solzhenitsyn and many others kept forbidden ideas and thoughts alive through Samizdat. Burmese juntas could never fully suppress subversive back-room thangyat performances. Many of Paul's most famous epistles were penned from a prison cell. MLK's too. There is Luther, who could do no other. There is Bruno, who was in less fear upon learning that he would be burned alive than those who pronounced his sentence. And there is Jan Hus, who died singing the words that condemned him.

No, the thing that makes Ingsoc work, the thing that makes any control over what is allowed in any society work, is the transformation of external compliance into internal conviction.

Men cannot be controlled by mere violence, oppression, or tyranny. We must be compelled by our very nature to rush to the defense of those who would control us.