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It's interesting how little improvement in the characterization of power structures heavily intent on limiting individual liberty has occurred over the last hal

It's interesting how little improvement in the characterization of power structures heavily intent on limiting individual liberty has occurred over the last half century. 1984 was written in 1948 and Brave New World in 1932. There have certainly been newer works in the same vein, such as V for Vendetta, but they generally have just used the same palette, the same terminology, the same ideological formulations. However, I think those formulations are out of date and their out-of-dateness is harmful to this critical discussion about the nature and importance of liberty and its relationship to governance. Our terminology, our mental models, even our archetypes are best-suited to the world of the 1930s and '40s, not to today. We throw around terms like fascism and tyranny and they lose a lot of their force because they are not really applicable. That's not to say that there is no danger of the industrialized, democratic nations slipping into forms of governance which are every bit as bad as tyranny or fascism, but we must recognize that when we use terminology that is not 100% applicable it makes it that much easier to dismiss or ignore. History is replete with examples of tyrants who have ruled harshly to further their own self-interests or out of a sense of megalomania. But I think we need to recognize that limitations to personal liberty need not be due solely to tyranny or fascism and so forth, there are other forces, other modus operandi at play. People have tried using the term "nanny state", but that has the opposite problem of lacking sufficient gravitas. There is a very real movement that has been underway for over a century to limit individual liberty in the service of the greater good. The war on drugs is an extension of this phenomenon, as are the worst excesses in the war on terror. But lacking good terminology makes this discussion that much more cumbersome and difficult.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
msg 13y ago
Stalin's Russia is no longer the touchstone it once was, in other words. I don't think that you can't apply the critique in 1984 to current events. There is just a generation gap. GWB is a kind of touchstone for the modern generation, helpless while events swirl around him, grasping for a measure of control at all costs. And what costs they were: torture, surveillance, war, a Manichaean division of the world into heroes and villains. Instead of intentions of powerful men, you have the psychoses of bureaucracies created by individuals for all the right reasons, full of unintended effects, ultimately achieving the opposite of their stated goals. In 1984, there is a malevolence at the back of Big Brother. In 2013, there need not be anything but a decentralized system, harnessing the latest technologies, manipulated by the knowledgeable, but ultimately storyless, aimless, and inhuman.
- unimpressive 13y ago
  >GWB Help with this acronym?
  - pvdm 13y ago
    George W Bush
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  I view it as sort of a zombified religion. There's everything there. Institutionalized morality. The concepts of "sin" as an absolute evil even when at best only self-harm is involved. The idea of individual needs and freedoms being subservient to the needs and even desires of the collective. The idea that everyone should live and be bound by the same moral and ethical code. And, of course, the ideas that true independence, heterodoxy, and privacy are threats to the established social order (they often are) and should be reined in as tight as possible. A lot of these ideas are still rattling around in the socio-cultural baggage of the west, even after their mooring to organized religion has drifted away and become less relevant. Yet all of these things are problematic for the same reasons they've always been, but without the wires tying it directly to a bunch of stories about an omnipotent sky-being suddenly people have lost the ability to understand or gauge their level of threat to essential personal liberty.
- crdoconnor 13y ago
  >In 1984, there is a malevolence at the back of Big Brother. 1984 made it painfully clear that the actual existence of big brother was superfluous. It wasn't his malevolence that made the system run as it did - it was the nature of the system itself.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    I found the excerpts from the fictional The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism some of the most interesting parts of 1984 as although straight infodumps about, as you put it, the nature of the system.
  - 13y ago
taproot 13y ago
Good post on a mobile and cant post on every point easily. But i think most of those terms can and will be used to describe what we are and have been seeing the last couple of decades. I think yes while a bit of context has muddied the water but in no way has the players or the game. The terms your bringing up never meant the same thing over all history in all instances but for the most part they all describe the same game to me.
strlen 13y ago
To paraphrase a famous quote, I have no idea what fascism in US would look like, but I know it will involve the stars and stripes, and not brown/black shirts, Nazi uniforms, Confederate battle flags, Swastikas, or shaved heads. The essence of fascist and other totalitarian thought transcends this simplistic "shell". Thing is, in the 1920s and 1930s fascism did not carry a strong negative connotation. Mussolini's regime was mostly viewed in a positive light by democracies until the invasion of Ethiopia and adoption of racial laws. This was social context when Brave New World was written (note the "Benito Hoover" character). I'd suggest reading these pieces: 1) "UR-fascism" by Umberto Eco http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html -- attempts to define salient features of fascism across the different regimes. 2) "Three New Deals", http://www.amazon.com/Three-New-Deals-Reflections-Roosevelts/dp/0312427433 http://www.amazon.com/Three-New-Deals-Reflections-Roosevelts... -- title speaks for itself
- thangalin 13y ago
  Here is a short page on common attributes of fascist regimes: http://en.atheismfacts.org/fascism.html http://en.atheismfacts.org/fascism.html
conradfr 13y ago
Spot on. Everything is more insidious, which does not translate well in the form of movie, books ... or political agenda. And why arguments like "I have nothing to hide" are harder to dismiss than "jews control the world".
PavlovsCat 13y ago
To me Nineteen-Eightyfour is mostly about power for the sake of power, and the role language plays in that (which extends to the ability to think), and I think in that sense it is sadly timeless. If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
netcan 13y ago
Fascism, Nazism and the dominant, authoritarian forms of Marxism grew quickly, in a short time span and had similar philosophical and cultural roots. Modernism, industrialism, internationalism, the Great Wars, etc. Their symbolism and many aspects of their modus operandi were very similar to each other. A "holy book" a founding figure, paternalism, revolutionism, populism, ideology, enemies, uniforms, monologues, youth groups. By 1948, Hitler in 1938 looked like a caricature of a dictator. Orwell was incredibly sharp in seeing the commonalities between that generation of dictators and seeing it as early as he did. The relationships between the ideology and control, the axis of cultural control. I think starting with a literal parody was useful approach. But, in 1948 he was describing something that had happened and had largely already (though he didn't know it then) reached its peak. Even though he was clearly skeptical, critical and wary of authoritarianism going back to his days in the Spanish civil war a decade earlier, he didn't have that sharp, simp effective vocabulary that exposes and characterizes the thing until it had passed its peak. The authoritarian states that did survive were/are tended to be descendants of those 1920s-1940s systems, often in cultural backwaters. Orwell's terms hold up pretty well for describing North Korea, Baathist Iraq/Syria, Nasarist Egypt, Maoist China, Central Asain Former Soviet Countries or Ghadafi. Remarkably well. My point (poorly made) is that whatever authoritarianism is/will rise out of this data gathering, corporate-government surveillance euthorotarianism model is only now taking shape. It hasn't peaked yet. It isn't fully formed. We don't yet know what its central themes are or how it works. We don't know how it maintains power or dampens opposition. It may never even come. I hope it won't. We won't have the right vocabulary until its too late. The Romans were on the lookout for potential Kings. They didn't know to watch out for Caesars. I can make some guesses but I really don't know what the symbols of this new tyranny are. I don't know how to parody it.
- popee 13y ago
  Symbols of this new tyranny are highly sophisticated propaganda/subversion and bureaucratic repression. So, unlike standard totalitarian systems which are, in a sense, straight and clean, this system is not - you could say it's opportunistic. Bureaucracy is just formal execution of their will inside legal system (some people call that justice, but it's just tool of repression towards people). As you can see they are so strong that they can even play with constitutional rights.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
4891 13y ago
Thanks for posting this. The most obvious point (to me) is that it would be very hard to install a 1984-style regime in a nation where almost every educated person has read 1984. Anything that even has the slightest overtone of old-school totalitarianism gets mocked and derided by the media and the educated classes. No-one intelligent takes the "war on terror" seriously, for example. In a democracy, whoever influences public opinion is basically in charge. We live in a weird society where most media outlets are controlled by big business, and yet most people who work in media are very progressive (you might not believe me, but it's true: Fox News/the Daily Mail/etc do not have some secret source of right wing humanities graduates, and so most of their reporters are typical young, metropolitan, educated liberals). That makes the media a weird Rorschach test where from one perspective it's under the thumb of big business and from another it's under the thumb of the "liberal elite". The best model I could come up with to understand Western society is that there are basically two power structures that rarely openly compete but continually grind against each other like tectonic plates. One power structure consists of large corporations, finance, the military, and so on. The other consists of the media, academia, many government agencies (most government workers are again, progressive) and various international organisations. Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, is considered a left-wing outpost in right-wing capitalism, which is why Marc Andreesen was condemned for coming out as Republican, and why tech employees can be fired if they offend the enforcers of "social justice". The best evidence I can give of this is one paper that studied the policies of right-wing and left-wing governments. They found that right-wing policies favoured the top 2% of society. Left-wing policies tend to favour the top 5%. This post http://www.macroresilience.com/2013/04/08/radical-centrism-uniting-the-radical-left-and-the-radical-right http://www.macroresilience.com/2013/04/08/radical-centrism-u... explains the paper and how our current system basically gives us the worst of both worlds: "Where the government was the sole operator, such as prisons and healthcare, “pragmatic” privatisation leaves us with a mix of heavily regulated oligopolies and risk-free private contracting relationships. On the other hand, where the private sector was allowed to operate without much oversight the “pragmatic” reform involves the subordination of free enterprise to a “sensible” regulatory regime and public-private partnerships to direct capital to social causes." I have no idea how this will end, but I'm not optimistic about the future of democracy. Too many people squabbling over deckchairs while the Titanic keeps sailing towards the icebergs (whether or not Sesame Street retains its government funding is irrelevant, when both military and social security spending keeps going up and up). The successful governments of the twenty-first century will probably be a mix of corporate nationalists, like China and Russia, (basically Fascism with some self-control) and pragmatic city-states like Singapore.
FilterJoe 13y ago
Chomksy's book, Manufacturing Consent, goes a long way to explaining how U.S. mainstream politics works in conjunction with the media, even though it was written over 2 decades ago. 20 word summary: Carefully study incentives throughout every part of the system, and it becomes clear why individuals do what they do. So - it's not that we have a small or even large number of individuals doing bad things. It's that we have thousands of incentives, some obvious, some not, that collectively produce systemic behavior whose end result is in many cases not desirable. If your choice is between doing something that plagues your conscience a bit, or getting fired, which do you choose?
porter 13y ago
The movement that limits individual liberty in the service of the greater good also creates a system that could provide turnkey tyranny. Today is different than the 1930's and '40s, but human nature hasn't changed one bit. Is it worth the risk?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

msg 13y ago

Stalin's Russia is no longer the touchstone it once was, in other words. I don't think that you can't apply the critique in 1984 to current events. There is just a generation gap. GWB is a kind of touchstone for the modern generation, helpless while events swirl around him, grasping for a measure of control at all costs. And what costs they were: torture, surveillance, war, a Manichaean division of the world into heroes and villains. Instead of intentions of powerful men, you have the psychoses of bureaucracies created by individuals for all the right reasons, full of unintended effects, ultimately achieving the opposite of their stated goals. In 1984, there is a malevolence at the back of Big Brother. In 2013, there need not be anything but a decentralized system, harnessing the latest technologies, manipulated by the knowledgeable, but ultimately storyless, aimless, and inhuman.

unimpressive 13y ago
>GWB Help with this acronym?
- pvdm 13y ago
  George W Bush
InclinedPlane 13y ago
I view it as sort of a zombified religion. There's everything there. Institutionalized morality. The concepts of "sin" as an absolute evil even when at best only self-harm is involved. The idea of individual needs and freedoms being subservient to the needs and even desires of the collective. The idea that everyone should live and be bound by the same moral and ethical code. And, of course, the ideas that true independence, heterodoxy, and privacy are threats to the established social order (they often are) and should be reined in as tight as possible. A lot of these ideas are still rattling around in the socio-cultural baggage of the west, even after their mooring to organized religion has drifted away and become less relevant. Yet all of these things are problematic for the same reasons they've always been, but without the wires tying it directly to a bunch of stories about an omnipotent sky-being suddenly people have lost the ability to understand or gauge their level of threat to essential personal liberty.
crdoconnor 13y ago
>In 1984, there is a malevolence at the back of Big Brother. 1984 made it painfully clear that the actual existence of big brother was superfluous. It wasn't his malevolence that made the system run as it did - it was the nature of the system itself.
- arethuza 13y ago
  I found the excerpts from the fictional The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism some of the most interesting parts of 1984 as although straight infodumps about, as you put it, the nature of the system.
- 13y ago

taproot 13y ago

Good post on a mobile and cant post on every point easily. But i think most of those terms can and will be used to describe what we are and have been seeing the last couple of decades. I think yes while a bit of context has muddied the water but in no way has the players or the game. The terms your bringing up never meant the same thing over all history in all instances but for the most part they all describe the same game to me.

strlen 13y ago

To paraphrase a famous quote, I have no idea what fascism in US would look like, but I know it will involve the stars and stripes, and not brown/black shirts, Nazi uniforms, Confederate battle flags, Swastikas, or shaved heads. The essence of fascist and other totalitarian thought transcends this simplistic "shell". Thing is, in the 1920s and 1930s fascism did not carry a strong negative connotation. Mussolini's regime was mostly viewed in a positive light by democracies until the invasion of Ethiopia and adoption of racial laws. This was social context when Brave New World was written (note the "Benito Hoover" character). I'd suggest reading these pieces: 1) "UR-fascism" by Umberto Eco http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html -- attempts to define salient features of fascism across the different regimes. 2) "Three New Deals", http://www.amazon.com/Three-New-Deals-Reflections-Roosevelts/dp/0312427433 http://www.amazon.com/Three-New-Deals-Reflections-Roosevelts... -- title speaks for itself

thangalin 13y ago
Here is a short page on common attributes of fascist regimes: http://en.atheismfacts.org/fascism.html http://en.atheismfacts.org/fascism.html

conradfr 13y ago

Spot on. Everything is more insidious, which does not translate well in the form of movie, books ... or political agenda. And why arguments like "I have nothing to hide" are harder to dismiss than "jews control the world".

PavlovsCat 13y ago

To me Nineteen-Eightyfour is mostly about power for the sake of power, and the role language plays in that (which extends to the ability to think), and I think in that sense it is sadly timeless. If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

netcan 13y ago

Fascism, Nazism and the dominant, authoritarian forms of Marxism grew quickly, in a short time span and had similar philosophical and cultural roots. Modernism, industrialism, internationalism, the Great Wars, etc. Their symbolism and many aspects of their modus operandi were very similar to each other. A "holy book" a founding figure, paternalism, revolutionism, populism, ideology, enemies, uniforms, monologues, youth groups. By 1948, Hitler in 1938 looked like a caricature of a dictator. Orwell was incredibly sharp in seeing the commonalities between that generation of dictators and seeing it as early as he did. The relationships between the ideology and control, the axis of cultural control. I think starting with a literal parody was useful approach. But, in 1948 he was describing something that had happened and had largely already (though he didn't know it then) reached its peak. Even though he was clearly skeptical, critical and wary of authoritarianism going back to his days in the Spanish civil war a decade earlier, he didn't have that sharp, simp effective vocabulary that exposes and characterizes the thing until it had passed its peak. The authoritarian states that did survive were/are tended to be descendants of those 1920s-1940s systems, often in cultural backwaters. Orwell's terms hold up pretty well for describing North Korea, Baathist Iraq/Syria, Nasarist Egypt, Maoist China, Central Asain Former Soviet Countries or Ghadafi. Remarkably well. My point (poorly made) is that whatever authoritarianism is/will rise out of this data gathering, corporate-government surveillance euthorotarianism model is only now taking shape. It hasn't peaked yet. It isn't fully formed. We don't yet know what its central themes are or how it works. We don't know how it maintains power or dampens opposition. It may never even come. I hope it won't. We won't have the right vocabulary until its too late. The Romans were on the lookout for potential Kings. They didn't know to watch out for Caesars. I can make some guesses but I really don't know what the symbols of this new tyranny are. I don't know how to parody it.

popee 13y ago
Symbols of this new tyranny are highly sophisticated propaganda/subversion and bureaucratic repression. So, unlike standard totalitarian systems which are, in a sense, straight and clean, this system is not - you could say it's opportunistic. Bureaucracy is just formal execution of their will inside legal system (some people call that justice, but it's just tool of repression towards people). As you can see they are so strong that they can even play with constitutional rights.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

4891 13y ago

Thanks for posting this. The most obvious point (to me) is that it would be very hard to install a 1984-style regime in a nation where almost every educated person has read 1984. Anything that even has the slightest overtone of old-school totalitarianism gets mocked and derided by the media and the educated classes. No-one intelligent takes the "war on terror" seriously, for example. In a democracy, whoever influences public opinion is basically in charge. We live in a weird society where most media outlets are controlled by big business, and yet most people who work in media are very progressive (you might not believe me, but it's true: Fox News/the Daily Mail/etc do not have some secret source of right wing humanities graduates, and so most of their reporters are typical young, metropolitan, educated liberals). That makes the media a weird Rorschach test where from one perspective it's under the thumb of big business and from another it's under the thumb of the "liberal elite". The best model I could come up with to understand Western society is that there are basically two power structures that rarely openly compete but continually grind against each other like tectonic plates. One power structure consists of large corporations, finance, the military, and so on. The other consists of the media, academia, many government agencies (most government workers are again, progressive) and various international organisations. Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, is considered a left-wing outpost in right-wing capitalism, which is why Marc Andreesen was condemned for coming out as Republican, and why tech employees can be fired if they offend the enforcers of "social justice". The best evidence I can give of this is one paper that studied the policies of right-wing and left-wing governments. They found that right-wing policies favoured the top 2% of society. Left-wing policies tend to favour the top 5%. This post http://www.macroresilience.com/2013/04/08/radical-centrism-uniting-the-radical-left-and-the-radical-right http://www.macroresilience.com/2013/04/08/radical-centrism-u... explains the paper and how our current system basically gives us the worst of both worlds: "Where the government was the sole operator, such as prisons and healthcare, “pragmatic” privatisation leaves us with a mix of heavily regulated oligopolies and risk-free private contracting relationships. On the other hand, where the private sector was allowed to operate without much oversight the “pragmatic” reform involves the subordination of free enterprise to a “sensible” regulatory regime and public-private partnerships to direct capital to social causes." I have no idea how this will end, but I'm not optimistic about the future of democracy. Too many people squabbling over deckchairs while the Titanic keeps sailing towards the icebergs (whether or not Sesame Street retains its government funding is irrelevant, when both military and social security spending keeps going up and up). The successful governments of the twenty-first century will probably be a mix of corporate nationalists, like China and Russia, (basically Fascism with some self-control) and pragmatic city-states like Singapore.

FilterJoe 13y ago

Chomksy's book, Manufacturing Consent, goes a long way to explaining how U.S. mainstream politics works in conjunction with the media, even though it was written over 2 decades ago. 20 word summary: Carefully study incentives throughout every part of the system, and it becomes clear why individuals do what they do. So - it's not that we have a small or even large number of individuals doing bad things. It's that we have thousands of incentives, some obvious, some not, that collectively produce systemic behavior whose end result is in many cases not desirable. If your choice is between doing something that plagues your conscience a bit, or getting fired, which do you choose?

porter 13y ago

The movement that limits individual liberty in the service of the greater good also creates a system that could provide turnkey tyranny. Today is different than the 1930's and '40s, but human nature hasn't changed one bit. Is it worth the risk?