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From Truthout… 2011: A Brave New Dystopia - by Chris Hedges
The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s
“1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those
who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was
right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive
surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of
control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by
entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by
profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out
Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our
enslavement. Orwell saw the second.
We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as
Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual
gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political
theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that
once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws
that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now
that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone
forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves
transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by
massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding
toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from
Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We
are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies
and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a
world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of
permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless
pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought
was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a
state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer
cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into
submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are
discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the
process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell
understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we
stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl
Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and
revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world
until exhaustion or collapse.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in
“1984.” “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
power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently.
We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know
what we are doing. All the 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 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 the
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.”
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted
totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our
political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In
inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate
control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those
employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the
glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political
participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The
corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public
relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry
materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It
owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.
The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or
charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of
the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like
Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and
mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television.
And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to
bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes,
“block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification,
ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the
holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”
The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity
courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists,
identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those
who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant
cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social
critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable
opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of
these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of
cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism.
We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives,
make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily
stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive
through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or
talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And
this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate
executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a
sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous
technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of
individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery,
actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of
ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to
fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little
scientific knowledge.”
Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers
have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small
shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil
liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless
wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public
education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to
exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to
engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate
establishment as freaks.
Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the
corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New
World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to
his girlfriend Lenina:
'Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?' he asks.
'I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.'
He laughed, 'Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the
children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in
some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody
else’s way.'
'I don’t know what you mean,' she repeated.
The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they
have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave
New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to
face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming
back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in
a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to
eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens,
including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist
democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent,
anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The
bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million
Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category
called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families
from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical
bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.
We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State.
Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.”
Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil
machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly
news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television
screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And
without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will
kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil
personified.
The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been
imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any
crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of
“1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the
brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every
24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or
sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with
antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been
replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by
government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into
vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now
we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant
and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly
imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was
imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to
trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of
detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form
of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state
makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans.
It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.
“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston
Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside
you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of
living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will
be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with
ourselves.”
The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the
era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails
and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most
monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our
daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities
and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are
electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and
filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection
stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to
report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.
Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war
which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The
draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20
gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for
the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY
THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which
in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is
a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s
official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones,
computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear
before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas
cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources
to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those
who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used
by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.
“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell
wrote. “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.”
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”
All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.
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