2011: A Brave New DystopiaBy Chris Hedges
The two greatest visions of a future
dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New
World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards
corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell
wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that
used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley
envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by
technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own
oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw
the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.
We have been gradually disempowered by a
corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us
through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless
credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the
regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were
dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were
impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working
class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find
ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state,
crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is
sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from
Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We
are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies
and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.
Orwell warned of a world where books were
banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books.
Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a
culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where
every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally
punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by
trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell
saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into
submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to
Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in
our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the
corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning
to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated
capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human
beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own
sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of
others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long
life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you
will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of
the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those
who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. 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. They
pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power
unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there
lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not
like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of
relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not
establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes
the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of
persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object
of power is power.”
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin
uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy
Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would
make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated
technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation,
which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are
effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer
society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually
surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the
public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry
materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It
owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.
The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or
charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of
the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like
Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and
mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television.
And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to
bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes,
“block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity,
or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of
their creation, to its total impression.”
The result is a monochromatic system of
information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts
and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the
parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are
dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left.
Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are
banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under
the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a
world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal
optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our
lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are
steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we
receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly
news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow.
And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites
corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but
always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by
“continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies
of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery,
actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding
control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because
the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”
Our manufacturing base has been dismantled.
Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen
billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement
or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from
warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services,
including public education and health care, have been handed over to the
corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of
dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided
by the corporate establishment as freaks.
Attitudes and temperament have been
cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant
characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx,
turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.
“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time.
Everybody’s happy nowadays.”
He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been
giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to
be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in
everybody else’s way.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.
The façade is crumbling. And as more and
more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move
swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public,
at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The
good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human
history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be
used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social
protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has
devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these
truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed
cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where
some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of
millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of
credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and
bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will
no longer work.
We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania,
not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by
Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the public
face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence
dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on
Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of
Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state,
Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in
the titanic fight against evil personified.
The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley
Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being
convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston
Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody
detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He
spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have
a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with
antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been
replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by
government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into
vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now
we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and
harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed
on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned
under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The
techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our
black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our
maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our
most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages
the shift from Huxley to Orwell.
“Never again will you be capable of
ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.”
“Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of
love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or
courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty
and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
The noose is tightening. The era of
amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions
of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the
government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human
history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security
cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our
profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at
airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car
inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge
us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.
Those who do not comply with the dictates
of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are
brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple
protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly
disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear
message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian
activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis
and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy
the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized
phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to
appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The
subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or
resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even
for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt
instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.
“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of
world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the
stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of
fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled
upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines
itself.”
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is
“Death of the Liberal Class.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2011_a_brave_new_dystopia_20101227/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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