Beasts of Luxury: A Polemic Against Orwellians
In this article, Roberts takes aim at the people who use the work of George Orwell as a prop for political activism.
I have recently been exposed to something awful; a 'famous' Twitterati jihadi. People are exposed to such diseased things in the same way you are exposed to any other virus; you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the people around you have bad hygiene--in this case, bad intellectual hygiene. But this is what I get for hanging around podcasters.
Jackson Hinkle is the name of this virus, and luckily I have been vaccinated from his particular nonsense by being well read. But there was a tweet of his that made it across my sight that truly made me grumble. In his attempt to justify his new trajectory to the Right--'moving right' in the way a Muppet is pulled by a cane off the stage--he tweeted the following:
"Who ever thought we'd be living in 1984 in 2022?"
Now, I must disclose a bias or two here; I dislike Eric Blair--better known as George Orwell. I think he is an interesting writer, but his reputation is overblown by a cycle of hysteria-buying that happens more and more often in America; every time people do not like some politician, they go buy 1984 and quote it, as if it is prescient. I agree with Will Self's assessment, in an article for BBC, who considered Orwell a 'supreme mediocrity', noting that his last gift to our world was to use his last hours to send a list of people he suspected of being Soviet agents to MI5. That is not even to begin with what I think of his fiction, which is interesting but about as prophetic as a psychic holed up in Branson.
But my biases are besides the point; after all, it is almost an iron law that writers tend to birth movements, fans, and book clubs. And these always become terrible cults of the chronologically uninspired. And since Orwell fans started at the bottom of the hill, they had to dig to get lower. Orwellians have forgotten what the sun looks like. Utterances about the book 1984 have become the battle cry of the half-witted, the half-baked, and the fully misinformed. You don't read the book, you evoke it. You whine about Animal Farm so people know that you are a 'freedom lover', while making it dubious to assume that you know how to read. Perhaps it can be argued that this is not something Orwell intended, but as my favorite doctor has said, reality is almost always wrong. And Orwell is not what he is, but he has become.
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What can we say about Orwellians? Well, most of the time, they use that very term as a label of alarm; people who misuse language--often in the process of talking about 'Gorge Owell' and 'libety'--believe they now have the authority to police that language, pointing out where they think language is being misused as a tactic of the ruling class. Or the Deep State. Or the Cabal. Or…well, it gets worse from there, doesn't it? They seem to treat the lexicon as a cryptic codex and we are to rely on these people, with only a faint grasp of this language themselves, to decode the evil plans of the secret conspiracy found in "Orwellian" doublespeak.
My use of the word 'Orwellian' is to note a phenomenon more than a movement. These people are not Randians or Stalinists, who tend to be the demi-monde of large movements, fringes that are more annoying than the bottoms of ill-fitted jeans. Often, two Orwellians, living in the same city, will not be on the same side of an issue, toting piecemeal ideologies and tentative grasps on reality. It is usually the case that they act like Christian sects, doing battle over a book that neither group understands.
The most ridiculous feature of the Orwellians, however, is their tendency toward dependency. The reason they will buy 1984 and not read it, or mindlessly quote Animal Farm from Wikiquotes to justify themselves, or shout "this is 1984!" every time they dislike something is because Orwell is not a thinker to them. He is not a writer. He is not a journalist. He is a security blanket. A pacifier. Where the Orwellian cries out that they are fighting for freedom, you are more likely to find people who have confused tyranny with discomfort. Nothing is more tyrannical to the bourgeois than that their lives of mediocrity are interrupted--or exposed--by the way of the world that provides their privilege. They are the bête de luxe, the beasts of luxury in this declining empire, and they refuse to be disturbed by reality.
What is Orwellian doublespeak, really, but a way to interpret uncomfortable ideas as linguistic gamesmanship? War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength…or, perhaps, that word, these events, those ideas can mean whatever I want them to mean. I might reveal to you that this system no longer provides freedom, or peace, or strength, and you say "no! you are trying to take these things from me!" There is no desire by these self-appointed decoders to protect language for clear communication, but rather to protect themselves from clear communication.
This is often a Muppet show; the detritus of a decaying, hemorrhaging empire is split into 'sides'. In this American spectacle, it is the liberals and the conservatives, wings not distinguished by what side of the plane they are on, but which one is set in front of the other. With something like Orwellian 'doublespeak', one can lazily cast this play. Everyone is saying the same thing, but with their assumption of skepticism about language, they must assume that some of these people are different. They are the villains, the devils, the 'libtards' and 'dRumpf' or 'Orange Man'. Like the patricians and plebeians of Rome, so we too have factions of our empire, who are against each other but for the empire. We attribute cynicism and malice to these factions, when in truth they only aspire to a comfortable stupidity that keeps this ship of fools floating towards the waterfall. We must maintain the hose that pumps in our laughing gas.
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All of this leads to a revelation that Orwellians cannot understand, nor stomach, but which Orwell's one time teacher Aldous Huxley maintained all too clearly; tyranny is not to be confused with discomfort. Tyranny, you see, is comfortable. It is not the jolt that shocks but the song that lulls. Society does not shift or change to accommodate tyranny; there are no dark clouds or century long winters or an unseen symphony to denote the coming of evil. Society is used, often as it is, to establish tyranny. Julius Caesar, after all, was a consul of the Roman Republic. Athens was home to the Thirty Tyrants, which its democracy produced. Venice, once called 'the Most Serene Republic', was under the thumb of a Doge and the Inquisitors. The Batavian Republic had its Uitvoerend Bewind and, eventually, a Grand Pensionary. While sometimes compelled by jolts or shocks, these tyrants were always brought in to put an end to discomfort, not to cause it.
In America, we are an entertainment complex held together by scams in a constant flux. As the Marxists chart out capitalism's 'late stages' and the Alt-Right chart out the decline in testosterone, there are attempts to interpret the oscillations of our capitalist system as something in support of some ideology. Economists, theorists, and podcasters watch the birds and talk about the future, assured their 'ideas' are something more than a search for omens; augury in a blindfold. Like they said of the Nile, one can say of capitalism; it giveth and it taketh away. And we are caught in between what it takes from one of us and gives to the others--often only to take that away later. We see the resurgence of unions, or the ascendancy of Republican politicians, or lethargy of Democrats, and we assume it has some tilt to our ideas. As humans are wont to do, they assume that this shift will continue in the same way, in the same direction, forever. But it doesn't, because it is not giving to anyone, and it is not taking from anyone. It is shifting scarcity among some of us, like bird feed among a murder of crows.
As capitalism sways our ship of fools back and forth, each turn alters the ever-paranoid Orwellians, who assume that tyranny has come upon us, like a groundhog's shadow. The tyranny is here, they gasp, to uproot what we have always known. To take away our freedom, our peace, and our strength. Nevermind that this is just the grinding gears of the system they love, they fight it with consumption, grabbing a book about the boot on their face. They whoop and holler, 'protesting' things and conceiving of the codes in our language meant to enforce tyranny. They do this until, of course, this ship of fools leans the other way, and they stop, while the other Orwellians take up screaming from the other side of the ship.
It can be said of Orwellians what Alexander Herzen said of liberalism in general; that in political trifles, they have learned the art of uniting a constant protest against government with a constant submission to it. Like the beasts they are, they wish for nothing more than to chase off the 'competition' from their narrow spit of land, fearful of the appearance of anyone or anything different or odd.
They wish for little more than to live, comfortably, in their own Animal Farm, where everyday is a bright day in April, and all the clocks strike 13 at the same time. May no one slaughter these beasts of luxury except for the pigs they love most.