There are two books that stick in my mind when I think about the year “1984.” One book (obviously) is the one by that very title, written in 1949 as a warning about where we were heading, both as a nation and as a planet. George Orwell gave us such wonderful phrases as “Big Brother” and many other dire warnings, but we have gone so far beyond his vision in spite of his clear and obvious warning, that I truly believe he’d be horrified by the world we currently live in. All the more so because it isn’t obviously a totalitarian world, because almost no one sees the global near-police state that has emerged in the 38 years since that (to Mr Orwell) ominous date.
The other book was written in 1984, by Anne Rice, and a portion of it paints a picture of a world so miraculous, so free, so aesthetic, intellectual, passionate, and forward-looking as to give one True Hope. The book is The Vampire Lestat (2nd book in the original Vampire Trilogy) and Lestat, the narrator, wakes up from a long sleep (beginning some 50 years previously) into the world of 1984 and spends a few pages describing the what he sees as the of the world in that moment.
That section of that book gave me hope and caused me to see the world we had created in a different light. Unfortunately, though I didn’t know it at the time, America was already entering into a great downswing: the rising incidence of AIDS causing a “morality” backlash through ignorance of the causes of that particular infection; the right-wing fundamentalist movement invading grass-roots politics with an agenda toward eventual national coup (seriously! — I’m not making that up); the backlash from Reagan-omics (deficit spending always has to paid for sooner or later); the growing computer industry with all it’s massive social and political ramifications which still haven’t been properly examined by society as a whole (ramifications both good and bad — the good mostly a promise only partly realized, the bad running rampant as, among other things, a way for a larger, more aggressive and more secure criminal class than was ever possible before in history, but that’s really another topic), over-population running unchecked (partly because of the right-wing fundies [a global movement, by the way, not just in America] making even discussion of birth control politically verboten), a long new series of wars about to erupt (the Gulf War, followed by the event known as 9/11 which was used as a reason [correctly or not] to then launch two separate war fronts: Afghanistan and Iraq, with further rumblings against Iran and North Korea [and the famous “Axis of Evil” speech, as ill advised and diplomatically disgraceful a speech as any American president has ever uttered], and so on.
But in 1984 things were different. Much of what Lestat (via Anne Rice) said was true, and it really was a glorious moment. Read the book; it’s the opening 20 – 30 pages, where Lestat is describing in his own terms the beauty and complete unexpectedness of late 20th century America. (And it wasn’t that Anne Rice was naïve about the rest of the world — she got to the rest of it in the following book, Queen of the Damned.)
So what happened?
I’ve already mentioned one part of it. The right-wing invasion of politics with a long term and literally diabolical (not that it was seen that way) effort at taking over American (and there after global) politics, religion and society as a whole, no matter the cost. (Look up Newt Gringrich’s career.) Enforcing their own version of ethics — excuse me, morality; they (as a culture) know little of ethics or the difference between the two — upon the rest of the country and eventually on the world as a whole. This was happening across so many fronts, in so many ways, it would take a heavily researched and rather obese book to describe it all.
Another part of it was the rise of the computer industry, forcing the NSA, and other “intelligence” agencies, to step up their own electronic fences and infrastructures, forcing other nations to match, and thusly marching the whole species into the long predicted era of super-surveillance.
We used to criticize the physicists of the 30’s and 40’s who went and made the A-Bomb possible “without any regard to consequences.” Not a true statement was that, not ever. Most of them were horrified by what they saw happening, but were (or felt) completely powerless to stop it, because it was the government and the Pentagon and a “World at War” driving it all, not the physicists. Still, it was popular to curse Einstein for his part in it [by those who ably ignored how hard he tried to get the government and the President to stand down on all that], while he actually had nearly no part in it at all. He wasn’t allowed any where near the project, being, as he was, a German immigrant with no security clearance.
All the same, “we” used to criticize folks for having invented the thing, the correct folks or not. Where today is the blame and outrage at all the cameras, surveillance, baby monitors(1), lapel cameras, cameras built into billions of “smart” phones, satellites that can read a car’s license plate, remote surveillance, not to mention several billion microphones connected at any given moment to the internet… where is the outrage and blame and burning in effigy around all of that?
Answer: there isn’t any. (Well, almost none; a very few folks do recognize the situation from the view point I just outlined, but only a few.) Partly because there is so much wealth being distributed among so many people (even while the middle class itself has shrunk alarmingly the last 20 years, especially since the mortgage meltdown — see below) as an outgrowth of all this “industry” that no one wants to notice how nasty it is turning out to be. Also because it’s been happening so gradually that it snuck on snuck up on most folks. And finally because all this technology one invests in is “protected” by layers of incomprehensibility for most people.
I knew one of the Great Visionaries of the computer industry (Ted Nelson — invented word processing, coined the words “hyperlink” and “hypertext” and many other such things) who, back around 1991, had a perfect and complete plan for how to make the (up and coming) Internet safe, secure, hacker-free, and automatically give credit and copyright where it was due. Unfortunately, the investors in the computer industry — impatient for extravagant returns on their investments in exchange for doing none of the work (which these investors couldn’t possibly have understood anyway) yet putting all kinds of pressure on people — said “no” to any more delays in their huge ROIs. So now we have an Internet that is at least as dangerous as any poorly lit back street in any big city in the world today.
It really could have been avoided. The Internet could have been made totally safe for all Humans to play in. (That, also, is another discussion, for another time.)
Therein lies another part of what has led us to the world we are in now: simple greed. The rise of the computer industry (and HMO,s and BioTech firms, and others) “taught” people to expect extravagant returns on their investments (ROI) and that’s become all that way too many people are interested in. Investing in an industry you don’t understand, and can’t possibly contribute to but expect Massive Money from, makes you at least as guilty for the outcome as Oppenheimer was for the H-Bomb (Oppenheimer, not Einstein). The growing lower end of the so-called upper class became way too powerful, mistaking possession of money for correctness of judgement, along with the rest of our (so-called) society.
Money is money.
The Wisdom to use it correctly is something else altogether.
The two are completely unrelated, and only on rare occasions they do overlap.
Very rare occasions.
Another part of what happened was the mortgage meltdown of 2007 / 2008. Some believe that this was actually engineered to keep President Elect Obama tied up in a permanent emergency and thereby unable to enact his real agenda, which would have been a great empowering of the middle class (at least, that was his plan). The mortgage meltdown, besides keeping him tied up also greatly reduced the middle class in America. And the excessive squeezing of the middle class is considered one of the big factors in the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of any prosperous society. A free economy and a prosperous citizenry, under our system of economics and politics, requires a healthy and prosperous middle class / merchant class. Instead America’s middle class is now the smallest it’s ever been, and our “merchant class” has been largely replaced by global corporations who care only and solely about profits and quarterly returns and who owns whom and what higher pinnacles of power might we climb to today?
Not all, not by any means, but a very great many of the current corporations have utterly forgotten they exist to serve their customers and their clients first, the stock holders second, their employees third and their CEO’s and executives last.
Last, I say.
The fact that the principals in the Mortgage Meltdown were never really called upon to make amends (to each and every person harmed, account for each and every dollar that was destroyed by their petty and lavish misuse of their trusted positions, address and fix every ripple of that debacle) actually adds credence to the notion that it was engineered for political reasons rather than that it happened simply because of Executive Bankers’ misuse of trusted position (such as, overselling mortgages to people who couldn’t possibly maintain them, among other things). Oh well… Can’t really say whether that’s true of not, and for purposes of this discussion it doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that the Meltdown happened.
Interestingly, the news kept referring to the consequences of the Meltdown as a Recession and studiously avoided that awful “D” word — Depression. But trust me, it was a Depression. Dominos fell and kept falling, and to a small extent are still falling here and there today, over something that should never have happened in the first place.
The economies of nations move very slowly, with great inertia. There is nothing, for example, that the President of the US can do to affect that nation’s economy in less than about 3 – 6 years, yet he gets all the blame lavished upon him almost instantly on taking office, and if the economy is picking up from what the last President did, he also gets all the credit for what he did not do.
Wrong. Just Wrong.
Which is another one of the contributing factors to this post-1984 world: Ignorance. Growing, rampant, enthusiastic ignorance, anti-intellectualism backed (even promoted) by a failing education system. When passions are not mediated by facts, you create a Herd that is really easy to manipulate, easy to bring to a boil any time you need them that way, and *very* easy to distract from what ever is really going on.
The purpose of the Presidency is to distract
the People from the real source of power
~ Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Alright, silliness aside (no matter how accurate it might or might not be)… One way to put forward a happy Totalitarian Regime in this so-called modern world is to do so without making it obvious. Keep the Herd in ignorance about what it doesn’t actually have. Manipulate the Herd, keep them distracted, keep them needy and in pursuit of what they’ve been told they need or don’t have, and keep the Herd talking about things that don’t really matter (or matter but actually have simple solutions, only never, ever, mention those simple solutions), keep them distracted in every possible way, and be sure to make some money from those enforced, trumped up emergencies, while you’re at it.
A basic rule of modern consumer commercialism:
create the problem, then sell the solution to it.
1984: a world the Vampire Lestat (200 years old at that point) looked upon with awe as a place of fabulous riches, positive passions and a definite forward-looking attitude. Thirty-six years later, a world even George Orwell would run screaming from.
*IF* one were to do that, I mean. You know, bring about a Totalitarian Regime, concentrate the world’s wealth into the hands of very, very few, put up fake sources of power to be raged at by the Herd while hiding the real sources of power, and other such things. Though, of course, no one would do that. Not in any rational, sane society. And, of course, a sane and rational Herd would never permit such nonsense in the first place. So, I guess we have nothing to worry about. Only the most incredibly insane, pathological mentality could even consider such a thing.
Right?
Right?
What do you call a society that’s run by the Insane? I mean, other than stupid. There must be some Latin phrase that means “government by the insane and pathologically greedy.” Any one know what it is?
More on this topic later… Right now I have to get back to my Surveillance and Listening Post(2).
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(1) Baby monitors… it’s subtle, but a very powerful influence. We raised an entire generation of kids who were monitored by remote from the very moment of birth. To them and their kids who have been monitored even more so, “privacy” is an obsolete concept, they don’t even know what their Elders mean by “privacy” really. That way lies madness, trust me.
(2) Just to be clear, that’s sarcasm. (And so is this footnote.)