Episode 101 Transcript
Being the written record of a spoken conversation about a book, and a world, and the world of a book
Here’s the transcript of Episode 101 with Dorian Lynskey. This is the first episode, but with the Room 101 thing from Orwell’s novel, it seemed fitting to start from 101 rather than boring ol’ 1.
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Mike Freedman:
Welcome to 1984 Today, your one stop shop for all things dystopian. I'm your host, Mike Freedman. In this podcast, we explore dystopian trends in art and society and the impact of the novel 1984 on our culture.
Among other things, we'll be looking at surveillance, censorship, free speech, historical revisionism, the role of the individual in society, and group-led conformist thought. But don't despair. We'll try to keep our sense of humour along the way. Today we're joined by Dorian Lynskey, who's written an excellent book called The Ministry of Truth, a biography of George Orwell's 1984.
Dorian is a well known journalist and author from London, England. He co-hosts the podcasts Origin Story and Oh God, What Now?, and in the past he's written for The Guardian, GQ, and Mojo Magazine, often with a focus on music. His previous work includes a history of protest music called 33 Revolutions Per Minute.
And someone with a good eye for a pun is always welcome here. Dorian, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
Dorian Lynskey:
No problem.
MF: The best place I can think of to start is among the many wonderful turns of phrase in your book: You described the novel 1984 as the tallest building in the city of nightmares.
DL: Right. Yes, because the Ministry of Truth is the tallest building in Airstrip One. And it was based on the Senate House, physically. It was sort of based, to some extent, on the Senate House in London, which I think was the second tallest building after St. Paul's, and obviously a very modern one.
And that actually gets to why I was interested in writing the book in the first place, because actually it came from a curiosity about dystopian literature more than a curiosity about Orwell. Obviously I became absolutely obsessed with Orwell, the man, afterwards, but initially like what I've realized in the stuff that I like to write is a lot of the time tracking influence and tropes and where ideas come from. I realized I just get really obsessed with first citations. I've become like a real OED nerd, you know, working out “Okay, so where this word that we use all the time, for example, dystopia, you know, it first gets coined in the 19th century and then doesn't really take off until the seventies and eighties.” And it's really pushed by a couple of writers like Martin Amis and Anthony Burgess to start using it a lot. And for me, that kind of thing like “Oh, Orwell would not have called this book a dystopia,” I find really fascinating.
And so I was just trying to work out, we take so much from 1984, but what was Orwell taking from? You know, what was his reading? What was the kind of terrain of utopias and anti utopias at that time? And then also, where do we misunderstand 1984? So the Apple advert, which I write a bit about, well, it's from 1984 and it's called 1984. If you actually look at it, it's really not Orwellian so much as an H. G. Wells kind of dystopia in terms of its design. And it's really interesting how that is almost the perfect example of what you think 1984 looks like, maybe if you haven't read it, the way it's become sort of the generic dystopian touchstone and I thought I was going to try and track as much as I could like Orwell's thinking, Orwell's ideas.
How do you get to this after 50, 60 years of people writing what we would now call dystopias? How does he basically give us the template? Which remains the template to this day, even though there are all kinds of dystopian fiction and, you know, something like The Hunger Games or whatever is a completely different vision, really. It's not Orwellian, and yet, 1984 is the one - when things are going badly, people go “Oh, this is like 1984.”
So I love that contrast between the facts of a world's life, the facts of the writing, the ideas that went into it, the actual text of the book, which is much more complicated and sometimes enigmatic than people think, versus the huge reputation and what people think that it's about.
MF: Something that made a very strong impression on me in your book was that, at the beginning in the introduction, forgive me if I don't get the quote exactly right, but you say that it's a book that's more known about than truly known. I've read 1984 a few times over the course of my life. Like you, I discovered it when I was a teenager, and I was quite surprised, even after reading it a few times over the course of reading your book about it, spotting things you pick out from the novel and I was like, I don't remember that being in there. It's like it's morphing in my mind in relationship to my reality that I live in as I live with the book and I forget parts or I misremember parts. And you also said in your introduction that it's a damn sight more relevant than it should be.
So I was wondering if, as a kind of jumping off point then, when you say that it's a book that's more known about than known, the way you just described, so if we have someone joining us who isn't totally versed in the novel, and obviously it's not a required reading for this podcast, how would you summarize the book as you feel and understand it, based on what we're here to discuss?
DL: Well, the great thing about it, the problem is, it's a lot of different things at once. So it's partly a thriller. It's partly the kind of novel that Orwell was writing previous to that, whether that's Burmese Days or Keep the Aspidistra Flying, about a kind of fairly mediocre character who rebels against the system that he inhabits and the rebellion ultimately fails.
So this is the kind of novel that he'd written quite a few times before. It's also, I think, an essay, a kind of thesis about totalitarianism, which was still fairly new. There were a few books about totalitarianism, but they were quite niche. There weren't any bestsellers explaining the connections between Nazism and Stalinism.
And it came out just before Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, so for a lot of people this was the first explanation of what Hitler and Stalin had been doing that they would have read. And it is also a satire - he was really into Swift, and he described it as a satire in the tradition of dystopias or anti utopias as they would have been called.
He was a very funny writer and it's the least funny of his books, but there are still satirical elements in there that perhaps get missed. I never, until I was reading it for the umpteenth time, got the joke about it being somebody's job to organize the spontaneous demonstrations. That's a good satirical joke thrown in there. Very low key. So everything about it is more complicated than you think.
The basic plot is this guy, Winston Smith, who is a fairly unpleasant, mediocre character who works in the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old newspapers, and then gets this sort of rebellious spirit, but it's a very internal rebellion.
It basically consists of him writing a diary and trying to express what he actually thinks, because Orwell's point is in a totalitarian regime, it's not just your fear of being arrested by the secret police. It's like that fear gets in your brain. So there's certain things that you can't say and you can't write and therefore you sort of forget how to think those things.
So his rebellion is really internal. Then he meets Julia, who's also rebellious, but in a completely cynical hedonistic way. And then between them, the coward and the cynic, end up getting this kind of real courage, and this is fed by a character called O'Brien who works for the Party, who says he's in contact with the underground, the Brotherhood, this revolutionary secret organization led by Emmanuel Goldstein, who was this Trotskyist figure. And then there's this great betrayal at the end of part two, where you realize that actually, spoiler coming, O'Brien was never working with the Brotherhood. He is a pure Party loyalist, and both Winston and Julia are arrested. And then in part three, we get O'Brien interrogating Winston in the Ministry of Love. They've obviously all got these very ironic names. And it's how he gets broken. It's how he gets thoroughly mentally destroyed by O'Brien.
But the weirdness of the book is how much you don't know and you cannot confirm. And the key to me was when he's trying to write his diary, he doesn't know that it's the year 1984. And I think that's such a key fact that we don't know for sure that the book 1984 takes place in 1984, that you can't even know exactly what the date is.
And so people can argue, you know, well, was Julia just a plant all along, just working for the Party all along. So much that we were told about what is really going on in Airstrip One, we're being told by O'Brien and the whole point of O'Brien is that he's this tremendous liar. So why do you believe him? Sometimes he's saying something which we know is a totalitarian lie. And yet other times he's going, well this is actually the truth of, you know, the identity of Big Brother or Goldstein or the Brotherhood or Julia, and the first time I read it, I just believed all of that.
I was like, oh, okay, this is explaining what's been going on. But then you think, but hang on, the explanations are in the mouth of the biggest liar in the whole book. And once you get to that, and then you look at the way that it's full of memories and dreams and mysteries and confusion.
And if you're doing a plot summary, there's very little that you can say without qualification: This is who this character is, this is what they think, this is what definitely happened - which of course makes sense because Winston's whole job is rewriting what happened, creating characters that didn't exist, deleting people that did exist. And so I think the thing that people miss, and I'm not being condescending here because I definitely missed it, probably the first couple of times I read it before really, really thinking hard about it, is that the whole book is basically challenging you to work out what is definitely true, and what is definitely a lie, and what is deliberately ambiguous. I don't think we're ever meant to know. Was Big Brother a real person once? Is he now? Is he still alive? Because we see pictures of Big Brother, or something purports to be Big Brother, but he's not really a physical presence.
And so once you realize that, that it might not be 1984, Big Brother might not exist, those are really basic things, and so when it comes down to going “What are Julia's motives?”, we're not meant to be able to say for sure. I'm not just talking about people who use phrases from it on Twitter, never having read the book, and literally just getting it wrong, but you make certain assumptions, and I think part of Orwell's technique is really showing you that these assumptions could be entirely false.
MF: If I'm remembering it correctly, in your book you say that Orwell's aim was to evoke the nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of objective truth.
DL: Yes, and that has to come across to the reader, where you just don't know who to trust. But it's more sort of existential because, with the betrayal, he's betrayed by the guy that runs the junk shop which is his sort of haven because it represents the past and it represents a world outside the Party. [Orwell] was reading thrillers, he was influenced to some extent by just really exciting spy thrillers.
So obviously don't trust O'Brien, don't trust Mr. Charrington, the junk shop owner, but it's so much deeper than that. It's like, well, what information can you trust? And there's very, very little in that. And this is where the mental collapse comes in, because O'Brien basically just chips away everything that he thinks he knows. And if somebody is under interrogation and they've got a very solid sense of who they are and what is real, they can resist more easily, whereas if you just don't know anymore...A lot of this comes from Stalin's show trials and a book, Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, who became one of Orwell's friends.
And in that, a party member gets accused of treachery against the party. And after a certain point, he doesn't know if he's guilty or innocent. He's like, yeah, maybe I am a traitor. Like, if I believe in the party, and if the party says that I'm a traitor, who am I to disbelieve the party who I'm so loyal to. And so his loyalty makes him believe that he just must be a traitor. So this is stuff that was actually happening. This is not just a thought experiment from Orwell. This is based on the nightmarish disintegration of reality that happened under Stalin, in a different way to how it happened under Hitler.
MF: And as you say very eloquently in your book, and as is clear now, it's effectively a hallmark of totalitarian regimes in general, that the first hill that must be conquered in a way is the human mind, the way we see reality, the way we use language, the way we see our own history, our own ideas about whatever society we live in, all of that has to be kind of fully captured and twisted to the goal of whatever party is taking control.
DL: Well, one of the crimes in Putin's Russia at the moment is describing the war in Ukraine as a war. So to say in Russia that there is a war in Ukraine or that Russia invaded Ukraine can get you put in jail. I mean, it's not sophisticated. It could not be more blatant.
The state says that this is not a war and therefore it is criminal to say that it is. Now Putin's Russia is not strictly totalitarian, but it uses a lot of the same techniques. And that's why Russia is so famous for disinformation. I'm sure you'd want to get onto this later, but you know, in the online era, you can see how so much of the technique is not necessarily even imposing a new truth on you, but demolishing the very idea that there is a truth.
And in that case, you believe what it is easiest to believe. So it's not necessarily like you have to believe that there isn't a war in Ukraine, but to all intents and purposes you do, you know, because of the information environment, because of the threat from the authorities. And this is what happened in Soviet Russia is that people went around believing, well, they weren't fully believing, but they went around basically acting as if they believed that certain things were true without any real commitment to the truth of those things. It's a kind of midway space. And that's where it's nightmarish. It's not just like there's truth and there's falsehood. It's like there's this middle ground where, and Orwell wrote about this in some essays, where those categories just simply don't exist.
MF: And in fact, if I understood it correctly, something that blew my mind that I found out from your book was that the formulation, which is central to 1984, and which is used and misused nowadays as well with very frequent effect, 2 plus 2 equals 5: You pointed out that it was Eugene Lyons who found that that originated when Stalin was trying to achieve the outcome of a five year plan in four years. And so he was in Soviet Russia seeing people with banners or placards that said 2 plus 2 equals 5, meaning in four years we'll reach the five year plan.
DL: Yes, the interesting thing to me is that 2 plus 2 equals 5 as a formulation to sort of represent something absurd and obviously untrue is something that I knew had been in Dostoyevsky. I recently found it in a letter to Thomas Jefferson from 1813. It's obviously been around for a long time.
And so it just seems, almost, you know, almost ridiculous. It was hard to believe that Stalin literally put that up as a slogan. It's like having a slogan like “the sky is green”, or something that even a child would go: “but this isn't true.” Unless, you know, Eugene Lyons was making it up, that does seem to be what happened, and because Orwell wrote a review of Eugene Lyons' book, that does seem to be, you know, probably where he got it from, or certainly something that would have been in his mind. And one thing I try and insist on in the book is that, when people go: “Oh, things are becoming like 1984,” as if he just invented all of these bad things and you know, and now the real world is becoming like that, he really invented very little. Most of what he was putting in there was based on stuff that he had read about Russia and Germany. Virtually everything that takes place in there had happened. Like Margaret Atwood says about The Handmaid's Tale, it's like she didn't put in there anything that had not happened somewhere in history or indeed was not happening at the time, so it was either Salem witch trials or it was happening in Iran. It's the same principle with Orwell, that pretty much everything in there is true.
And that to me makes it more shocking, that it was not a prophecy of how badly things could go wrong. It was a sort of satirical account of what had already happened.
MF: And interestingly enough, referring back to what we were saying earlier about it being illegal to call the invasion of Ukraine an invasion or a war in Russia: There was a trial that recently finished in which Vladimir Kara Murza was convicted and sent to prison for I think 20 or 25 years and among the charges were exactly that, that he referred to it using the wrong nomenclature and he was allowed to give a kind of final address to the court before they bundled him off in the back of a van and in his actual speech to the court, I believe he says, almost verbatim or words to the effect that, one day in Russia two plus two will equal four again. So even now, even in these disparate places, even in these countries where as you cover in the book, 1984 was banned for the best part of half a century, we see this coming up again and again, that there are these basic examples of what represents reality or something we can all agree on. And when someone turns up and seizes the reins of power and takes a hammer to that, or begins the process of pouring acid in the gears of seeing the world as it is, there's something almost elemental, at least for me, almost physical in terms of revulsion that I feel when I see that happening. It's, it's an offence in a really deep way to my idea of living in a world, right?
It's only when that's under attack that you realize how fortunate you are to live in a country where there are, you know, political lies and there are arguments about things, but there is a general understanding of what is and isn't true. Now, obviously there are so many online ecosystems and filter bubbles where people can convince themselves of something that is entirely untrue, and that is the scary thing for people in, I think, Britain and America. Now I don't know. I mean, obviously I say, because it depends if you get, for example, another Trump presidency, or whether there would be more of a state assault, but then what's interesting in that surely is there was an understandable and perfectly reasonable resistance to a sitting president being so overtly dishonest. And that created, in a sense, a much more obvious kerfuffle in the media about things like truth and the necessity of journalism. But then when Trump was defeated and replaced, it was a Biden White House that tried to establish the Disinformation Governance Board, right, with the so-called Singing Censor. And so what was interesting is that the politics changed, but the underlying trajectory or the underlying logic, which is that the machinery of the state is reaching the point where it cannot permit unaudited statements to be made public seems to be continuing and ongoing, right?
DL: Well, I think they're really different things, but obviously, you know, there's a perspective question. So for example, I think in the book, I talk about when there were calls for Facebook to do more about disinformation. This is a few years ago, and they have, in fact, done more about it.
And a guy who worked there went: “Well, I don't think we want to set up a Ministry of Truth, you know, where we decide what is and what isn't true.” Now, of course, the whole point of the Ministry of Truth is that they're deliberately replacing things that are true with things that are not. But it's all a matter of perspective.
I mean, the truth should not be a matter of perspective, but everybody says they believe in the truth. So, you know, conspiracy theorists, they absolutely, they're always, you know, they will quote Orwell and they will say the truth is being hidden from us and all we want is the truth and we want the truth about, you know, say vaccines or truth about the war in Ukraine or truth about any political issue, the truth about the authenticity of the 2020 election results, and so it's not as if you can just go “Oh, I am pro-truth and Orwell is on my side” and they go, well, this is just about how the government is always lying to you.
1984 has a lot of fans on the right in the Trump camp. It has fans among conspiracy theorists. It has, you know, sort of fans everywhere because they all think “Well, the truth is great, and we have the truth now.”
Orwell's writing about truth in his essays, which are attached to the book in some editions, and I almost think should appear in every edition. There are certain essays that really should come with every edition of 1984 because he really gets to articulate some of those ideas more fully. And, you know, he does really make a clear distinction between how always there's going to be disagreements in politics, but when you start demolishing the actual basis of reality and when it becomes beyond evidence, so for example, there is no evidence that the 2020 election was stolen.
There just, there just isn't, it does not exist. So when people keep insisting on that and go, well this is the truth and it's, you do have to come back to, you know, really the scientific method. It's like, what is your evidence? And there are things that are true and untrue.
The abortion debate: I appreciate there are different opinions on that. And if you are a Catholic, for example, you're going to believe that, you know, life begins at conception. And there's no scientific, you can't say “Oh, no, it doesn't” because that really does get into the realm of sort of faith and belief and, you know, I support abortion rights, but I at least understand where the other people are coming from.
But when there's people that are just saying, insisting something is true for which there is no evidence, then I think you can draw more of a clean line. And I would not presume to speak for Orwell, but, you know, I think he would have been pretty clear. It's like, well, the 2020 election result was not stolen, please do not quote 1984.
MF: But then I think two things that come from that for me is that first of all, and it might just be what I see, it may not be a fact about the media landscape, but there is a kind of over-emphasis on credentials that has led to a very deep and abiding, and in certain cases perfectly justified, mistrust of certain media organs and certain journalists or types of journalism. And so, although I'm not arguing with what you said because I disagree with it, when we get to the point of, and this is in a way what's so worrying about the world as it is right now, when you get to the point of, okay, well, where's the evidence? How are you backing up your position? We have a world where there are some people that just don't accept on both sides evidence because of who it's coming from or where that person got it.
So in a sense, there's a tendency to, as we say in football, there's a tendency to play the man and not the ball a lot of the time where debunking or dispute comes in. I don't know the ins and outs of the 2020 thing, but in my mind, it speaks to a deeper point that you make very clear in your book and that you just touched on here, which is that when Orwell was talking about what worried him, and what was at the root of totalitarianism, he was really focused on power.
And power, and the way it's exerted, and the way it's held onto, and why people do that, is at the heart of these kind of control systems. I think it's your words in the book: “It is power that removes the possibility of challenging power.” And so to return to the point, I think when you said, yes, well, the Ministry of Truth was engaged in erasing facts about the past and replacing them with lies, that's true, but it was a legal or political infrastructure that allowed there to be any type of institution with the power to amend anything that allowed them to exert that power. So in a sense, you could say, well, as long as there's a Ministry of Truth, that's making sure all the lies are taken away and rewriting or preventing the publication of provable untruths, then in a sense, we're kind of back to the 2001 Patriot Act point where it's like, everyone was going, well, as long as the guns of the anti-terrorist state are pointed outward at the world and not inward at American citizens, then there's no problem. And then where are we 23 years later?
DL: But I mean, but this is, I mean, this is obviously so much bigger than 1984, but this is the enormous, you know, this is the enormous challenge that if you are generally in support of free speech, and you don't want too many sort of controls on what people say, and state controls, the challenge is, how do you respond to the willingness of so many people to believe things for which there is no evidence, because it suits them?
Now I would cite Orwell here, because a lot of the things he believed did not suit him. He made a lot of enemies. He was often quite lonely, like he didn't have a tribe. If you were on the left as he was, and you really hated Stalin, and you wrote Animal Farm, then it was very hard to get published. Or you fought in the Spanish Civil War and came back and went, it's unbelievable what the communists are doing, obviously I oppose the fascists, but there are all these crimes that the communists are committing, and the orthodox left in Britain was like, well, this doesn't suit us at all. This is an existential battle between the left and the right, and we really don't want to hear about bad things that the left are doing. But he was going: “I've seen it, this is literally what is happening.” And so, you know, his position, and it's a position that I try and follow, which is that it's not always about both sides looking for things that confirm their beliefs. So if I, for example, take the sort of chat of climate change and climate denial, I would very much, I would probably be a lot happier if I did not believe in manmade global warming. You know, it just wouldn't be a thing that I need to worry about. Now, the assumption, I think, from climate deniers is that someone like me, who does, like, 90-odd percent of, you know, scientists believe that it's real, we're doing it because actually we just want to sort of take people's cars away, or, you know, control people, and, you know, there has to be, there's like a conspiracy, and we only believe in it in order to get this power.
MF: I agree, I agree completely with what you're saying, but in a sense you've touched perfectly on what really is potentially the heart of the question we're looking at, which is, at least in my opinion, it's one thing for you to say “When I say I would prefer if we did X, Y, and Z to combat climate change, I get accused of being on the side of doing all these things that I don't want to do to people and I'm not believing what I believe because I want to do them to people,” but it would be disingenuous, just as it would be disingenuous for someone to look you straight in the eye and be like, “No, you're doing this because you do believe this” even if you don't, it would be equally disingenuous to deny that, you know, a great deal of the proposed mitigation strategies and solutions do involve things that a lot of people are understandably concerned about, like centralization of power, supranational authority interfering in domestic affairs, and actually reducing mobility of people and the level at which they can live in terms of their consumption and their emissions. So it's not that it's true you would wish that on anyone, and I don't think you'd be the type of guy to deny that a lot of the strategies are based around doing things that would, but when people say “No, we have no plan” and people who are arguing against them think that's dishonest, then there is this mutual suspicion, right?
DL: For me, it's about, well, is there a problem? Is the problem demonstrable? We've known this, the evidence has been there, since the late 1950s, you know, since the Keeling curve, like we know this, Lyndon Johnson talked about it. So, like if somebody just goes, do you know what? Yeah, there is manmade global warming and it's going to cause all kinds of problems, but I am such a, you know, libertarian or whatever that I refuse to do any of these following things to do anything about it. Like that's a position, but often because there's a sort of cognitive dissonance and that just sounds like you're very selfish and want things to get very bad, you know? Climate-wise then so many people turn to a denial position because then the dissonance is relieved and they go “Oh, well, we don't have to do this stuff because the problem doesn't exist.” Now that is you know, coming back to Orwell here, it's like of course the reason why a lot of communists didn't want to believe all this stuff about Stalin was because it was super inconvenient since they believed in socialism. There was only one socialist or country that called itself socialist in the world at that time. Therefore, to be a socialist meant that you had to, in their logic, support Russia. It meant that you had to, therefore, deny, make excuses for, or deny what Stalin was doing. So that you then had to build the truth around your assumptions. Now, I don't think, a lot of the time, climate being a good example, you know, most people are quite into personal liberty and they don't particularly want to make sacrifices and everybody would like to be able to sort of fly as much as they like and consume as much as they like and all of that, but you do have like a large section of the public that goes, well, there is a problem but I'm really not keen on a lot of the solutions. That's understandable. What to me is not legitimate, is not sort of forgivable, is people that just go, as a result: “I'm going to deny all this evidence that there is a problem.” Like, it's totally fine to be angry that you've lost an election. But that's different to resolving that angst by going “Ah, yeah, but actually we didn't lose the election. It was stolen.” You know, those, those kind of things. So for people like that to sort of cite Orwell, if you're bending the truth simply to suit your political priors, then that is in no sense in the spirit of, you know, the writer, or the book. You almost know that you are in the sort of edition of Orwell when there's things that come up that are actually quite politically difficult for you or, you know, psychologically difficult.
MF: I completely agree with you and I think in a way in your book, I think we can put a name on this thing that we're both feeling our way around. In your book, you talk about a play, interestingly enough, called Take Back Your Freedom, I think it's called. And so, in there, you quote a character named Clayton as saying a line I'll share in a moment.
So I think maybe we could call this the Clayton fallacy, maybe, right? Which is where the character says, “It is necessary, therefore it will be true.” Yeah, exactly. Right? Which really gave me the heebie-jeebies when I read it, right? Because it was so perfectly formulated. And the thing is, I've heard that fallacious way of looking at things on all sides, right?
So I agree with you. That's “I don't like the things people say we need to do about climate change, therefore there is no climate change.” So, you know, what needs to be true is that there is no climate change because what is necessary is that I give up things I don't want to give up. Right. That's totally legit.
But I've also spoken with environmentalists where, when we discuss the real nuance and subtlety of what's happening worldwide and who is making emissions and where cuts need to come from for them to really be meaningful, and I point out that that would mean either relying on people who transparently have said, or obviously won't do things to do them, the response I got was literally exactly the same. In fact, the exact line I heard from one lady I was speaking with a few years ago, and this was a woman that worked with a department in government writing guidelines for climate action, after talking about the fact that, you know, it's an international effort, it's an international problem, it requires international actions that can't necessarily be counted on when you look at emissions trends and consumption and everything. And I was just trying to get her to admit that it was true, what I had said. And in the end she went, “Well, of course it's true, but it's not very helpful, is it?”
And that was the Clayton fallacy right there as well, right? Yeah, it's necessary. We make changes. Therefore it cannot be true that there are obstacles to those changes. Do you see what I mean?
DL: This is why I'm not, I'm not a great joiner. I'm not particularly drawn to ideologies and groups and projects. And sometimes I wish I was more of an activist and somebody that could sign up to political projects. But, I do, you know, I obviously get turned off. I definitely know where my sympathies lie. But I, of course, I do get turned off by the denial of certain things just because they, just because they don't fit, you know, and I think, I mean, this is why it's a myth.
This is why thinking about politics is really hard and why it's just a giant mess and always has been. And it's why I like writing history books. One of the consolations, one of the things that makes me feel better is reading about an argument in the 1930s or the seventies or the 1890s and going like, “Oh, right. It's the same. It's the same thing. It's the same cognitive errors. It's the same clashes.”
It would be very, very easy if you really could just go: “Well, here are the true things and here are the false things, and I'm only going to believe in the true things.” That's the idea that there is this really obvious solution to politics and to human psychology that just nobody's found yet, and it's of course nonsense.
And where I sometimes worry about the popularity of 1984 versus the popularity of all of the world's nonfiction is that he totally gets into the nuance. If you want to know what he thought about, you know, the limits on the principle of free speech, where should the limits of free speech be? Like, it's in there. He's writing about it. He's writing about in wartime, what is justified propaganda, you know, what is justified for the war effort against a greater evil, and what is not. There's all of these ideas he's exploring in really complicated ways. And the idea that it's just like, well, here's the big bad state telling lies, which is true of totalitarianism, and here's everybody and here's all those sort of good people trying to tell the truth. But of course, you know, where are the other good people in 1984? Like how good a person is Winston Smith? He's really not that heroic. There isn't some great rebellion brewing, you know, it's not like oh, if only we could remove Big Brother, we would all be free, like the whole book is about how mentally compromised everybody is, how living in that regime sort of breaks you in different ways, you either go along with it, which is like a lot of his colleagues, you know, you fully believe, so you fully believe in it, like O'Brien, or you believe in it enough to be a loyalist, like a lot of the people who work with the Ministry of Truth, or you are an extremely pragmatic cynic, like Julia, who pretends that she believes in it, but doesn't believe in any of it, or you have this incredibly painful dissonance that Winston has, where there's no way for him to live in, you know, in that society.
So there's no kind of, there isn't a sort of, I suppose, Katniss from Hunger Games figure, who is just sort of leading the rebellion and here come the good people. And I don't want to knock The Hunger Games, because actually that concludes by going, actually the leader of the rebellion could just be another tyrant in waiting.
So, you know, this sort of sophistication is there in a lot of dystopian stories, but it's not often there in the way that people talk about 1984. And the great challenge that you're perhaps bringing up there is what do you do with, for example, disinformation about vaccines because there's, a project to destroy faith in vaccines. There is also, there are some side effects. You know, it's a tiny percentage of the time, but there are some side effects, sometimes there's a, you know, there's a, there's a problem there. So what do you flag as disinformation? Like saying, I don't think there should have been a lockdown is not disinformation.
It's an opinion. I don't think it's a, you know, smart opinion. Then there's a completely legitimate opinion saying: “Oh, I think the schools should have been opened earlier.” You know, that's absolutely fine. But then you have the more sort of conspiracy theorist: “Okay, well, it's all a plot by Bill Gates and the World Economic Foundation.” And you can go, well, that's, you know, that's obviously like disinformation, but there's a, there's a bit in the middle. There's a sort of crossover bit where it does become really difficult. And you think, well, what should a government or what should Facebook, you know, where do you draw the line between just having a kind of an unorthodox opinion and something that is blatantly untrue and you can look at either end of that line and you go, well, this is very clearly a legit opinion, this is very clearly a dangerous conspiracy theory, you know, which actually makes people, you know, paranoid and potentially sort of violent. If you think that you're being oppressed, if you think you're living in this sort of terrible oppressive state, then you would be justified in striking back at it.
And so that gets very dangerous. Then there's the sort of danger of basically discouraging people from taking vaccines that would, you know, COVID vaccines and therefore leading to unnecessary deaths. Like it's not, there isn't a clear line. This is what everybody is wrestling with when it comes to disinformation, because there's obviously dangerous disinformation.
And then there's obviously stuff, which is just an opinion that you don't like, and there is no, there is no perfect solution. I just found it absolutely mad when someone like Elon Musk, for example, comes along and goes: “Well, I'm just going to do free speech.” And you're like, as if there have not been centuries of debate about free speech, as if there's not been like, you know, all this, you know, First Amendment jurisprudence about where do you draw the line and what's acceptable.
He just goes: “Yeah, I'm just going to do loads of free speech.” And then of course, he's doing censorship on behalf of the Turkish government. So it's actually not, it's not that simple, is it? And it's never that simple. And sometimes I cringe when somebody is talking absolute nonsense on Twitter and they're calling themselves like Winston Smith, or someone is quoting Orwell to me.
And I'll get these people going, well, clearly you don't understand Orwell because, and then they'll just give me this incredibly simplistic thing. And he goes, and Orwell was just entirely into a hundred percent free speech. No, he wasn't. I probably do know, I don't want to be the “I know more” guy, but I did spend quite a lot of time reading it.
And Orwell was somebody, the great virtue was that he was somebody who was very aware, intensely aware of the complexities, of all of these issues, and I think people should perhaps read more of his, you know, essays and articles where he's really wrestling with this stuff and not treat him as just the sword of truth guy.
Because everybody thinks that they're on the side of truth. It's like, it's too easy. It's like good and evil. It's like when everybody thinks they're good, even the evil people don't think that they're evil. Like even, you see it in Marvel, Marvel super villains now are written in a way where they're just like, well, no, but look, if you see it from my point of view, what I'm up to is actually for the best, you know, for the greater good. It's just, I have to kill a lot of people. So the, the idea that Orwell in 1984 would be used to represent this very, very simplistic moral binary is a bit of a shame. And it's a great disservice to him because I often refer to him when trying to work out these really complex situations that we face now.
MF: So what you just said is a perfect lead into a distinction you make in your book that I found really useful, where effectively you described three different ways of living in 1984, in Airstrip One, and by extension, living in a totalitarian regime.
The first way of living is O'Brien's way, that there is no such thing as truth. Truth is whatever the party says it is. And that's it. The second way is that there is such a thing as truth, that it's worth finding out what it is, and that being prevented from finding it out is a bad thing. And that's Winston's way. And then the third way is, it doesn't really matter in the end, because even if you found it out, it might not be the real truth anyway, so you might as well just enjoy yourself. And that's Julia's way. And you say in the book, totalitarian states depend on the Julias.
DL: Yeah. And that, it's an amazing book, “The Future Is History” by Masha Gessen, where she writes about, I forget his name now, but a Russian sociologist who interviewed a lot of people in the eighties, the dog days of the Soviet regime, but then ended up also interviewing people later in the nineties and beyond. And what he found is that most people were not really ardent believers. They were not fanatical believers because they sort of knew, as you would, if you're told that you're living in a kind of glorious worker's state and you have to, you know, you have to queue up for food and things aren't that great. And, you know, you do have television. You are aware of the, there are other countries in the world and there are other societies and they seem to have things that you don't. It's very hard to then just be an ardent communist and go, well, this is obviously the best possible society we should have, and yet you think, well, what, you know, what am I going to do about it?
And so you just sort of go along with it. And so you turn up to the parades or the spontaneous demonstrations, you know, you, you sort of mouth the words. It's a bit like, I remember going to church and I essentially didn't believe in God, but I was too young to sort of realize it. And you're just going through the motions and you get up and you sing the hymns and you say the prayer, but it doesn't mean anything. It didn't mean anything to me, but if you'd seen me from the outside, you'd just go, well, you know, I'd look just the same as somebody who believed deeply in God because I was in a space where I'm like, well, this is, I suppose, what you should do.
And that became, the psychologist found, like, a way of life. This is how people got by. And this is a lot of the time why, when the power of the state collapses, you don't have loads in Russia and in East Germany, I mean, probably Russia is such a complicated case, but if you say, look at Eastern Europe, where most of those countries have not relapsed into authoritarianism, you know, you did have people that missed communism, but an awful lot of people were instantly like, oh good, I don't have to pretend that anymore.
And that I thought was really fascinating, and I think that Julia is an overlooked character. Because actually, that's most people. They just want to get through life. They don't want to be political prisoners but they can't be true believers. So they find a path, and that I think is what most people have done in those regimes. And I think it's what most people would do if suddenly Britain was to become a totalitarian state. I think people would just get, you know, do what they need to do to get by without, you know, making too many foul moral compromises, without completely abandoning the sense of themselves.
But you do get into that space, and Hannah Arendt described this as well, where it's like it just doesn't really matter what's true.
MF: I mean, something that's quite touching in the way you laid that out is that... in a way, the Julia position is the most reasonable one. It's the one that is the least extremist.
It's the one that is the most geared towards an individual human's actual enjoyment of their daily life. But it also happens to be the one that offers the least resistance to a damaging or a dangerous regime, right?
DL: But this is what we wrestle with all the time. This is why people still talk about Nazi Germany and they go, Why?
Why would so, so many people go along with it? You know, were they ardent Nazis? You know, you often find that, for example, a political figure and it turns out that they were kind of a member of the Nazi party, obviously, from our perspective, not great. But, you know, you do have to make a distinction between someone who was like an ardent Nazi, you know, whose writing is just full of the most kind of like crazed antisemitism, and somebody where I was like, oh well, otherwise I'm kind of like a social pariah. Now, we all like to think that in such a situation, we would be members of the resistance. There is no way we would sign up to this. We would, you know, throw our bodies in front of the trucks that are taking the Jewish people to the ghettos and, and so on. And yet history shows that that is just not true. That that is not the majority. And so that's the insight that Julia carries. She's not, the point is that she's not morally admirable, but it's kind of maybe more, it's closer to what we would be.
It's, it's closer to what most people would be. Because, you know, in no repressive society ever has your average citizen been part of a kind of a courageous resistance in which they put their life on the line rather than go along with a regime that they opposed. Because if that were the case, then all these regimes would basically, you know, collapse on day one.
MF: Yeah, the Hannah Arendt quote, do you mind if I read it?
DL: Sure.
MF: Because it's only a short paragraph. It's from your book and it really connects all this. She says in The Origins of Totalitarianism, right? Is that the book?
DL: Yes.
MF: “In an ever-changing incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would at the same time believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times. To believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived, because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”
And so that's kind of the portrait of the ultimate blend of surrender, indifference, and cynicism because what she describes is a rational position.
If you think that you're being lied to, you don't fight the organs that are pumping out, the babble machines or whatever they are, you don't fight it because even fighting it seems credulous in some way, right?
DL: There are quite a lot of situations. I've been writing a book about stories about the end of the world at the moment and the psychologist, Robert J. Lifton observed this really strange way in which people lived with the reality of nuclear bombs. And again, they ended up in this situation where they were both, it was kind of denial, and cynicism, and despair, and disassociation, and these weren't even separate people.
It was all these things, because they basically just thought, well, if I think about it, it really could destroy everything, but I don't feel like I've got any power to do anything about it, so it's going to drive me mad if I live with that fact for too long, and therefore I have to find other strategies.
And so I, I think that these kind of, these, these really psychologically complex and contradictory states are quite common when you're confronted with something that seems both horrific and beyond your control.
Because it gets this huge dissonance and it's like, well, how do you, how do you resolve that? How do you, how do you live day to day? And how can we be kind enough to each other to accept the truth of that and to not judge each other for the way we deal with it? Right?
Well, I mean, yeah, but the problem is you can't get away from judgment, really, in a totalitarian regime, because it's like, well, what are the accommodations that you're making? You know, that's, that's why this is still such a moral problem about, about how to judge people who went along with the Nazis, because you can go, Oh, well, it's sort of understandable.
And it's like, Oh, but did they maybe report a Jewish neighbour, you know, is that what they did? Okay, they didn't kill anyone, but maybe they did that. And, and so that's that idea that Orwell gets across, is that there is literally no way to live in that society and be pure and safe. Almost the only purity is suicidal.
If you just stood up in the middle of the Two Minutes Hate or whatever in Victory square and we said down with Big Brother, okay, that would be very courageous and very pure and you would die. And this is why, this is why we kind of really admire people like these young Germans like Sophie Shalom, that was the White Rose movement. But you know, they died when they were 20. So, okay, that is a morally unchallengeable position. But they did die as a result of those actions. So anything short of suicidal bravery is morally compromised. And there's sort of no way of resolving that and going, well, “Who did Nazi Germany right?”
You know, who went through it, you know, it's almost a bizarre question to ask, you're right, without a stain on their reputation. And yet the reason why we keep asking it is because we're all like, well, what would we, what would we do? And we all pretty much fantasize about being like the good people, the people, the people that worked it out.
And the point of those regimes is you can't be. That's why so many Russians, after the invasion of Ukraine, there were so many kind of liberal Russians who had tried to find a way to you know, to respond, to live morally under Putin. And they just left. They were like, it is impossible to live morally in Russia, you know, after the invasion.
And I totally sympathize with them. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm going to sort of wag my fingers at everybody who is still in Russia, who bites their tongue and doesn't say the, you know, doesn't call it a war and so on, but nor can you just be completely sort of forgiving and go, well, you know, what can you do?
That's why these regimes are so monstrous. Because everybody, pretty much everybody is compromised. Everybody becomes, everybody either leaves or dies or becomes complicit.
MF: In Kevin Smith's film Clerks, there's the famous bit of dialogue about being a janitor on the Death Star, right?
That, you know, when the audiences cheer for the explosion of the Death Star, it's like all the contractors on there who are just screwing a panel to a wall and they get killed too, right? And the argument is, well, if you're working on the Death Star, chances are you're implicitly responsible, right?
There's a maintenance guy who works on the tanks that are blowing up people's houses. There's, you know, an I. T. person who is making sure that the servers that pump out whatever crap is being shared online are are kept running, you know, someone's buying the antivirus software from a procurement office somewhere, right?
It's like you said, all of us are compromised. Even when you try in, even in countries that are not totalitarian, like our own, we have our problems, but they're certainly not totalitarian, and if you want to have your own version of a moral life, you go to the, you go to the clothing store, and are you buying clothes that were made by some eight year-old in Vietnam?
You know, there's no “non-sweatshop” section of a clothing store. In our own ways, all of us are in some way compromised even without the totalitarianism. So it's almost a kind of permanent base load of tension in all of us, maybe.
DL: Yeah. And this is why we return to novels and art, and the best writers are, you know, any really kind of worthwhile writer is about the complexities and the compromises and the ways in which you fall short of who you want to be. It's, it's like, it's the oldest challenges you imagine, like how to be a good person, you know, if you're politically engaged, it's like, well, how to be a good person within the context of your society? And I think in order to try and live only as a good person, it's so extremely hard.
Because, you know, to live without any compromises, because either you just go completely, you know, I suppose you can't just go completely off grid, or you have the situation that a lot of the 60s radicals had, you know, they were very noble and brave and principled, but they burnt out, and some of them just spun off into, you know, terrorism, and some of them became, you know, just kind of liberals or even conservatives.
And people are always trying to work this out. All you can do is try and do, you know, do the least damage, you know, it's like the Google slogan, which they ended up dropping: “Don't be evil”, as if that was just “Oh, we just won't do the evil things, just don't, there's a basket of evil things, you just don't touch that basket.” But of course, it's not possible. So all you're trying to do is do the least harm and do these things that compromise you the least. But that depends on the society and how much pressure is being ratcheted up. And I feel like generally in Britain, it's not so hard.
Obviously, yeah, you think, well, in what conditions was my iPhone made, or whatever, but it's certainly easier, and so, I suppose this is a side note, but, it does bother me when people talk about, Britain, well, this is 1984, and it's like, you know, Orwell was very aware, challenges that he faced in Britain, were different to those faced in Germany or Russia, and that you always have to remember that, however much you might hate your government, however awful you think this is and have all these very valid criticisms about the surveillance and the new anti-protest laws et cetera, et cetera, just to remember as he did, that there are people living in situations which are almost unimaginably worse, where the moral choices they have to make are so much worse.
And so that's the way I always think that's quite important people go, this is like 1984, it's like, yeah, it touches on something and it's good to have those thoughts and it's good to know what to look out for, but when people go, “This is 1984,” as I think I say in the book, it's like, well, if you're allowed to read 1984 freely, it's probably not, you know.
MF: And there are countries today where you are not permitted legally to read it, right?
DL: Yeah, I mean my book, I could just say here that my book was meant to at one point have Russian and Chinese translations and the political situations changed and that was no longer, so my book cannot be read in Russia or China.
I think you can read 1984 in China, but it's a very, there's a great, I read a great article about it. It's a much more complex situation there because China's often quite careful about what they repress and what they don't repress.
MF: They understand the Streisand effect.
DL: It can be a little bit like that. We go, well, we let people read 1984. It's like, we can't mention Tiananmen Square, but we let people read 1984. So it's not quite, it's not quite clear cut. But I think that all I was very aware of like, okay, look, what are the things to look out for? What are the things that can erode a democracy? That does not mean that your democracy is already in that state.
I do not think, even with Suella Braverman as Home Secretary or whatever, you know, I don't think that we are on the verge of becoming Nazi Germany, but it's always legitimate to kind of look at certain things and go, well, this is a little, you know, there are some, there are some echoes here, if not of the Nazis, then of other, you know, authoritarian regimes.
So I suppose I kind of like, I resist the hyperbole.
MF: Absolutely. I mean, I, I remember when the Conservative Party removed their online archive of all the speeches that had been given over the course of however many years, just overnight, that whole online archive was scrubbed from the internet as if it had never been there. And one immediately thinks of the memory hole. That doesn't make it the same thing. You know, like you said, you can have these shadows, these touchstones, these parallels, and it's always good, in a way, it's, if we are still in the position of being able to comment on and point out where these parallels exist, there is still hope, right?
DL: All these analogies should be like, they're the start of a conversation. And, you know, it's an opportunity to be more sophisticated about this stuff. So saying something is just like 1984 is no better than going, well, this is just like Nazi Germany, you know? It's like, okay, what is the comparison that is bothering you?
That's totally legitimate to talk about, but that's the beginning of a conversation. It's not just a slapping a name on people, which way you have to be careful about who you describe as fascist, and, you know, who you compare to Maoists and, and so on and so forth. And unfortunately we're in this sort of, now, maybe it's always been this way, but it seems particularly now in this sort of rhetorical arms race where like everybody is, I'm just, you know, you just see people saying “woke is a mind virus” and it's far-left fascists, which, obviously some people on the right think that fascism is a far-left movement. Anyway, so you just get into this whole kind of, and then you actually do feel that disintegration of reality. Because you're just like, do any of these words mean anything? Does anybody really know the history that they're invoking here?
You know, for me, the whole point of history, you know, literature and the podcast called Origin Story where we try and, you know, look at the, the origins of certain terms, the whole point is that things are always more complicated. They're always, always more complicated. And that was something that Orwell found as well.
And unfortunately the pressure of discourse, particularly when emotions are very high, is always to make things less complicated and go, well, it's the good guys and the bad guys and the, this is, this is simply true and this is simply not true. And outside the realm of kind of, you know, science and, and evidence-based stuff, you know, there's a load of things that are neither true nor untrue, not in a Hannah Arendt sense that doesn't matter, but they are, they are legitimately contested.
And that's what makes things so hard. That's what makes politics and political discourse just so difficult and maddening sometimes, because it's complexity upon complexity. But that's why I suppose I'm very hardline on the things that literally are not true. Because I'm like, look, the world is very complicated, shades of grey and all that, and sometimes you've just got to go, no, no, no. This, this is just a thing that definitely, definitely happened. This is definitely what the evidence says. And this is definitely untrue because we can't, not everything is a gray area. And there's always hope until there isn't.
There's always hope. I think if you just think, you know, if people just think about stuff a bit more and are more aware of, I mean, not, it's not just about being informed, it's being aware of your cognitive biases. That phrase would have made no sense to Orwell. He would not have understood it at all. But if you read Nesse, like Notes on Nationalism, he's talking about cognitive bias. He's talking about all this stuff that psychologists over the, you know, the decades since have outlined and gone, okay, this is how your brain leads you astray, particularly when you want something to be.
And so Orwell, even though he didn't have that psychological apparatus to describe it, he knew what was going on. He was like, this is all the ways in which you can trip yourself up. And he included himself in that. And his self-criticism is, I think, so underrated. People that don't know enough about his life and work and they only know 1984, it's that kind of... he didn't think he was a hero. He didn't think Winston Smith was a hero. It's like, you've got to look inside yourself, and your own biases, and your own weaknesses and sins, whatever the secular term for sins is. You can't just look out, you can't just always just go, oh, it's, you know, it's, it's those guys, sometimes it is those guys, sometimes those guys are, you know, white supremacists with tiki torches, that's okay to criticize them, but you also have to be aware of, well, what are your, what are your tendencies? What are your mistakes? How could they go sour or, or even become dangerous? And that, that is the hidden lesson of Orwell that I wish people were more aware of, is that it does start with you and self-awareness.
MF: Dorian, I could not imagine a better note to end on. That was beautifully put. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. And if you have a moment, you mentioned in passing you were working on a new book, I know you also host a podcast, if you want to shoehorn in a couple of shameless plugs, I'm all ears.
DL: I do.
Okay, so I'm writing a book, it's going to be out in 2024, called Everything Must Go, which is a book about stories both in fiction and in politics and in science about the different versions of the end of the world and how they're relevant now. And I also do a podcast with Ian Dunn called Origin Story, third season coming soon, where we take a term or an event or a figure from history who is extremely contested and misunderstood and do a ton of research and then try and explain, you know, what is true, what is a myth, and the nature of the argument about them.
So it's all part of a very, all well inspired project.
MF: Wonderful. I hope that whomever's listening checks everything out and your book, the one we were discussing today, of course, is The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984, which is a great Ronseal book, it does exactly what it says on the tin and it does it with panache and excellent prose.
I mean, that's one of the things that really I loved was it's not just about a good writer. It's a well written book about a good writer. And in fact, no, I mean, for real, I'm not just blowing smoke. And there was a line that gave me chills when I read it, where you wrote, “in Oceania, there are no laws, only crimes,” and no distinction between thought and deed. There are no laws, only crimes, I found to be such a perfect formulation of the ultimate nightmare.
DL: Yeah, oh, well, I'd forgotten that line. I'm very glad to hear it. Well done me from five years ago. Well yeah, but what, maybe one day I'll be a good enough writer that I can afford to forget my best lines too. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mike. Cheers.
MF: Well, that's a wrap for today. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to tune in for our next instalment.
We'll be continuing our exploration of dystopia in art and society, hopefully with a few laughs. If you're inclined to support us, please check the show notes for ways to contribute. All blessings are gratefully received. Well, to quote the late great baseball legend Yogi Berra, the future ain't what it used to be.
But Orwell himself said about his most famous book, the moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one, don't let it happen. It depends on you.
Until next time, keep the fire burning, we'll be back with more fuel in a week.