Turned on the Television Any

¶ … 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.

The Goal of Power is Power

Orwell has presented us a view of the world in which "the goal of power is power." The government "seeks power entirely for its own sake." Not power for "the good of others," not power to obtain "wealth or luxury or long life or happiness." His government is "different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing." Other oligarchies, other terrible regimes, were "cowards and hypocrites." And here is the most important part of this quote: "The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives."

All dictators want power, Orwell tells us, because power is itself good. Those who govern who are honest know the following: "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." And the corollary of these last statements is that the object of control is control. So the initial statement of this paper should be elaborated: Governments try to control their populations by limiting the ways in which people are both moved by and act on their emotions because they fear what people may do when people are given more freedom. But they also try to control their people because they want to retain power. Thus the greatest fear that governments have is that people will seize power back from their government.

If this thesis of Orwell's sounds familiar, then there should not be a surprise: It is the dialect in which militia and Tea Party members speak. The flag-draped rallies resound with constant cries of "We want our country back" and variations on this theme. The leaders of this movement are speaking as if the current administration were acting in precisely the way that Big Brother did. They seem to feel that Obama, like Big Brother is "not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission." The only surrender that a truly totalitarian government will accept is one that a person does with free will. "We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us," Orwell's Big Brother tells us, "so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him."

This is what happens to Winston, at the end of 1984. After he has made a desperate attempt to escape his government and a world in which his love and longing and hopes and mind are being stolen from him, reprocessed and then returned, he comes to believe that the government was right all along. He submits to his own oppression, he becomes the instrument of his own limitation. The government that is most secure in its dictatorial power is the one that has created citizens who will police themselves, who will not think or -- especially feel -- anything without the government's position.

One of the most compelling images in the book is Orwell's description of the Two Minutes Hate that everyone is required to participate in. Acknowledging that it is impossible to wipe away all emotion from human interaction -- and from human nature -- Orwell's government allows a brief break in the control of human emotion so that every person can scream out against a probably imagery traitor. The only emotion allowed is the one that the government selects and it can be expressed only when and as long as the government allows.

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.