There Are Five Lights

Rereading 1984 recently reminded me of driving out to Vancouver Island as a child. We camped on the beach. I hid a starfish in the trunk of the car to take home with us. My father was not pleased three days later when he found the source of the bad smell.

Then the Trans-Canada was single lane, undivided highway. Once on the island, it was a dirt road to get to Tofino and Long Beach. I was aware of ‘draft dodgers’ from the Vietnam war we met along the way. Our valley in the East Kootenays has its share of them now, even 50+ years on.

‘Salt of the earth’ types, distrustful of government, fully bought into the QAnon conspiracy theory and its cousins. I made friends with such a guy when we bought our place in the valley. Out there, you don’t get to pick your neighbours, so you try to get along. Even with people you don’t agree with on most things. But we both like working with our hands, and had a lot in common that way.

I spent a lot of time wondering how he and I had such diametrically opposed world-views. He wasn’t stupid, he was well-read, and there was a lot we agreed on. I was of the view that there was enough fuckery in the world¹ that we didn’t have to make more up.² I ended the friendship after his actions put me, my staff, and my business in danger. Turns out he was a racist as well as an anti-Semite.

I thought of him again while rereading George Orwell’s 1984:

….the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

The Star Trek episode were Picard is captured and tortured seems to be inspired by Orwell as well. His torturer wants him to say there are five lights when there are really only four. He does not consent, despite the isolation, sleep deprivation, starvation, and torture. Wouldn’t it just be easier to say there are five lights, even though everyone knows there are only four?³

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make the claim sooner or later….And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable–what then?…

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.⁴

Which also made me think of brainwashing, and cults, and basic training. Anyone that’s been through basic will realize that it’s a mild form of brainwashing. One, like all other forms, we ourselves are complicit in. We need to consent at some point for it to work. A little physical hardship, sleep deprivation or starvation, social isolation, occasional positive reinforcement, and though-stopping cliches that shut down critical thinking and voila, we are in. Veteran, cult survivor, whatever. It becomes and always will be part of our identity.

I now appreciate George Orwell’s genius, and how he was able to capture the gestalt of authoritarianism so so many years ago, and how it still reads as if it were written yesterday.

Two final thoughts: In 1984, a necessary condition of the Party’s control was its ability to keep most of its population under surveillance most of the time:

By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient….Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.

Which is a little disturbing now that we all carry the means of surveillance with us everyday in the shape of a phone. Combined with advances in AI providing the means to sort through all the data thus collected at a speed at which humans just couldn’t. And lastly,

Even if and when the current political crisis passes, no matter what the outcome, there will always be a residue of the former identity for the next set revolutionaries/reactionaries. Those who do not consent. One way or the other. Thus history continues to repeat itself, or at least rhyme.

Or as Benjamin Franklin said:

[We have] a Republic. If we can keep it.

1. For a taste of post-war American nonsense, I recommend David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard. The first half is well researched, and a good read for anyone interested in Cold War politics or the history of secret agencies. The CIA recommends it to its own staff.
   If I went back and reread it today I could draw a straight line from American pre-WWII fascism to today’s political environment, and how the interests of the rich and powerful have undue influence in our politics. ↩︎
2. In the end QAnon turned out to be just another lazy retread of the blood libel. Do I think there’s a set of rules for the rich and powerful, and another for us plebes? Yes. Do I believe “the Jews” are behind it? No. And neither should you. ↩︎
3. Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Chain of Command, Part II” (Season 6, Episode 11), aired on December 19, 1992 ↩︎
4. If you haven’t read 1984, about half the book takes place with the protagonist under arrest and torture. ↩︎