Emotion, control, and political anxiety in Orwell, Huxley, and Akerlof

¶ … turned on the television any time during the last year or so to watch the news and it is likely -- all too likely -- that you will have seen public displays of people quivering with hate and anger. On the edge between a crowd and a mob, the Tea Party protests have brought a range of strong human emotions to the fore: Anger, hate, fear, righteousness have moved across the faces that have moved across our televisions and computer screens. Even on the floor of Congress emotions that we rarely see expressed so strongly in public life (the ones listed above along with hope and pride and joy and smugness) have time and again been on display. People have clearly been acting as they have pushed by strong emotions.

These emotions stem from all the usual sources -- the sweetness of first love, the grief of losing a parent, the pride in a child, courage in battling in the hospital ward on in the mountains of Afghanistan. But there is in the current moment another element that tends to raise people's emotions: the ongoing specter of financial meltdown on both the personal and the collective level; the changing demographics of changing racial relations that have seen a black family in the White House and the governor of Arizona sign into law a draconian dictum against Latino immigrants; the rise of China as a potential new superpower. Emotions run high and close to the surface.

Sometimes it almost feels that we, as Americans, as a nation, are living in the pages of a novel in which symbols have become increasingly important. Sometimes it feels as if we were living out a story written by a novelist rather than a moment of history unfurling without any authorial predetermination. But while we are living in history rather than in fiction (or even in non-fiction, which is always tidier than reality), it can be helpful to look to what wise writers have written about the same kinds of emotions and human dynamics that we are surrounded by in an attempt to come to greater clarity this moment in history. This paper examines three books -- George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Akerlof and Robert Shiller's Animal spirits: How human psychology drives the economy, and why it matters for global capitalism -- and what their authors have to say about the ways in which human emotions can push people to act in ways that can make them appear dangerous to the government, which can at times then move to control its citizens.

Worlds That Have Such People in Them

George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (also written 1984), was published in 1949 in the lingering embers of World War II and the barely suppressed threat of pan-European fascism. The novel can be read in at least some ways as a sort of "what if" novel, a novel that can be read to be a speculative history of what the world would be like if a British Hitler had won. The novel is told in fragments for neither Winston (the protagonist) has only a fragmentary sense of what is going on in his world for in Oceania (one of the remaining three nation-states) the government of Big Brother keeps such a tight control on information, and disseminates so much false information, that there is no consensual truth.

Nothing that the government says can be trusted, and nothing that any individual citizen says to each other can be trusted either. The government has conjured up a world (or at least has woven a sufficiently good story that people think that it might be true) in which there is a constant war going in some far place, a war that demands constant influx of more and more resources and deeper loyalty by a people who in fact have no reason to be loyal to a government that demeans and dehumanizes its people at every turn. The government even tries to deny people any control over their lives. Any joy, or play, of sexuality on the part of the citizens in frightening to the government because citizens who feel such emotions are more likely to demand greater chances to pursue their own form of happiness.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World shares a number of important similarities with Orwell's world in the way in which the government seeks to control every possible pleasure, as we see in this quote in Chapter Three from the Director: "Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. it's madness." The government ensures that any new game will continue to create profit at the same level because such new games must require "at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games." This is an absurdity to us, for play and games are one of the arenas that we believe should be most free. Play is what we do to get away from the control that is imposed on us in so many areas of our lives.

Huxley wrote this novel in 1931, before the first terrible drummings of World War II could be heard. His world, although uninformed by Hitler and Mussolini, is marked by control over sexuality that are even more extreme than those depicted by Orwell. Both authors take up this theme because it is such a potent symbol: A government that wants to control people by limiting their natural emotions and their ability to connect authentically with other people will always seek to limit people's sexuality. Huxley's world is one in which people are force-fed certain ideas while they sleep: even their unconscious is not their own. Not only are their conscious thoughts liable to be colonized but their unconscious thoughts and even their nightmares can be seized.

Huxley describes the terrible reality of a world in which even sleep cannot provide an escape when he describes a long-ago and far-away England in which Parliament had prohibited "sleep teaching," the form of brainwashing used. Liberalism allowed real freedom in England, he wrote: "The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole." Freedom not to fit in is also freedom to be unhappy. The freedom, in other words, to feel. Once again we hear the same message in Huxley and Orwell: Oppressive governments maintain power by stripping their subjects of the opportunity to feel anything because people who feel strong emotions will seek to empower themselves. And change.

Orwell presents us with a list of all of the things that will not be allowed in his version of a brave new world: There will be no orgasms; no loyalty; no love "except the love of Big Brother"; no laughter "except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy"; no art, no literature, no science; "no distinction between beauty and ugliness"; no curiosity, "no enjoyment of the process of life." There will only be "the intoxication of power" and "a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."

One of the reasons that 1984 is such a great and enduring book is that it makes us step back and question our own society. When Orwell makes us shake our heads in disbelief (and smugness and mockery) over such a limitation, we may also be prompted to think about the ways in which our own pleasurable activities are also limited. For of course, we are limited. There are age limitations on alcohol and tobacco. If we are women, we cannot sunbathe topless, and if we are human we cannot sunbathe without covering genitals. We cannot use cocaine, at least legally, and we certainly cannot sell it to other people. We can only marry certain people. We cannot make wagers in most places on most events. We cannot drive as fast as we want and even when we drive slowly we cannot drive without our seat belts.

But, one might say, these are good laws and regulations. Not like those in Huxley's world. Not those in Oceania. But Orwell's voice niggles at us. Isn't this the way that it starts? he asks us. With these small carvings-away of pleasure and liberties? As the Director says in Chapter One, "the secret of happiness and virtue" is "liking what you've got to do." This is the major business of the government in this book: "All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny." This is an important truth -- although not a universal one. Or at least it is not one that is universally accepted.

Burma Makes Oceania Look Tolerant

Whether or not one believes that the government is attempting to control a person depends primarily on two facts. The first is the government itself: It matters a great deal whether one is a Jewish writer under Stalin or an environmentalist working for Obama -- or Teddy Roosevelt. Some governments are fundamentally repressive. Some governments are terrified of their people: The military government that is running Burma (the junta calls the country Myanmar: Many of those who oppose the brutality of the regime refer to the nation by its former name of Burma) murders Buddhist monks who protest its policies.

The longer one thinks about this fact, the more clearly one summons up the image of the slaughter of young holy men, the clearer it will be that this is a government that will do anything that will increase its power, its control over the population, and the longevity of their regime. When one reads Orwell and thinks about Burma, one thinks that Orwell was a jolly optimist about human nature and the role of government.

And Orwell's vision of government is indeed grim one, and it gets grimmer over the course of the novel as Winston -- the protagonist who is nothing at all like Winston Churchill -- works for the Ministry of Truth, which is (inevitably) the ministry of propaganda. Winston's job is constantly to review all historical records and change them to accommodate whatever the government wishes to be the truth that day. He is one of the mechanisms through which the government controls its citizens. For this is one of the most important truths in the novel: People serve their government by oppressing themselves every day and often in terrible ways.

Again, we can turn from Orwell's world in which the government exerts nearly all of its energy (and we can assume its intelligence, for evil can be just as intelligent as goodness) in controlling every aspect of its citizenry, including the way in which they think to our own world. Christine Todd Whitman, for example, helped suppress key scientific information about a wide range of subjects, including the vital one of climate change, when she headed the Environmental Protection Agency. She helped the government (of which she was a part, of course) to control the way in which the American people would think about incredibly important topics.

The fact that Whitman was not as successful as Big Brother should be heartening as well as alarming: The state of America under the George W. Bush regime was not as effective as controlling the ways in which people think was due perhaps to a difference in philosophy, but perhaps more due to the fact that the Framers of the Constitution put in such powerful protections for our freedoms that they have not yet been entirely corrupted or corroded.

Irrational Exuberance, and Its Cousins

Akerlof and Shiller's Animal spirits: How human psychology drives the economy, and why it matters for global capitalism takes us down a very different path than those that Orwell and Huxley drag us down. The novels both present a world in which governments are terrible and revel in their ability to do great and lasting damage to each person, because their power is inversely related to the power that each person has. People in these novels are never heroic. They fight back in very small ways, and at times we as readers find this admirable. We say that any resistance is valid and admirable. We each do what we can and that must be enough.

But this is precisely one of Orwell's and Huxley's points: Governments may be terrible because they want to control people. But people are terrible because they allow themselves to be controlled. The authors have the most horrible ideas about governments because they have such low opinions about people. Both the people who make up governments and the people who make up the citizenry. They fail each other because while one is willing to strip away the humanity of its people, the other is willing to be dehumanized.

Akerlof and Shiller are economists rather than artists. They are also rather more sanguine than either Orwell or Huxley about the human condition, which is a little odd on the face of it given that artists are generally those designated by a society to celebrate the heights to which humans can rise. Economics are designated by their societies to be rational and to defend rationality. Human beings, according to mainstream economic theory, are fundamentally rational. They consider situations and take the option that will benefit them the most. Sometimes these benefits will be long-term rather than short-term, or calculated in terms other than simply monetary. But economists believe in a world in which people make well-informed, rational decisions.

In important ways, this hyper-rationalist world of economists is one that would be supported by the governments in both of the novels. A world bound by rationality and based in facts is -- although it might seem to be the opposite -- a world that can be relatively easily manipulated because (as Orwell shows us) facts can be erased and new ones placed into the record. We have a recent example in our own history: How much of what was know five or six years ago (or even today) about the truth of what propelled the United States into Iraq? If the government presents its people with what look like facts, people are all too often likely to believe them guilelessly.

Emotions can be of course be manipulated as well: Watch any charismatic leader address any crowd and you will see this happen. But there are levels of emotion that cannot be manipulated or falsified. People know whom they love, for example. A mother may believe what the president and his cabinet members state are the reasons for going to war and later come to disbelieve them. But she can never be persuaded by her government -- even through torture -- that she does not cry for her fallen daughter.

The title of Akerlof and Shiller's book refers back to a concept introduced by the uber classical economist, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes used the term to refer to the spectrum of human emotions that the governments in the two novels are so determined to suppress. Keynes argued for a science of economics that can cut out all of the irrational exuberance that Alan Greenspan talked about. Enthusiasm, fear, hope, guilt -- none of these have any place in an economic analysis, Keynes argued. People should be rational when they make choices. And a rational science of economics will help people cast off these "animal spirits," these emotionally governed impulses. Keynes "rooted out almost all of the animal spirits -- the noneconomic motives and irrational behaviors -- that lay at the heart of his explanation for the Great Depression."

Except, of course, that he did not in fact perform any such exorcism. People still act in ways that are driven by emotion. They buy houses that they know that they cannot afford, for example. They elect candidates who shelter companies that cause economic collapses. They feel despair and give up when the rational choice would be to keep showing up at their jobs. They beat their children because of salary cuts and go to jail....

There is no way, the two economists write, that they behaviors -- and the emotions that impel them -- can be erased. People are creatures of emotions. People cannot be controlled. And democracy will only be saved when governments (and economists) celebrate this fact rather than try to find some way to make to negate it.