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1:00

In our world, there will be

1:02

no emotions except fear, rage,

1:06

triumph, and self-abasement. The

1:09

sex instinct will be eradicated. We

1:12

shall abolish the orgasm. There

1:15

will be no loyalty except loyalty to

1:17

the party. But

1:19

always, there will be

1:21

the intoxication of power. Always,

1:25

at every moment, there

1:28

will be the thrill of victory, the

1:31

sensation of trampling

1:33

on an enemy who is helpless. If

1:36

you want a picture of the future, imagine

1:40

a boot stamping on

1:42

a human face forever.

1:46

The moral to be drawn

1:48

from this dangerous nightmare

1:51

situation is a simple one.

1:55

Don't let it happen. It

1:58

depends on you.

2:09

I'm Andrew Heaton, the thinking man's

2:11

nerd. And

2:19

today you and I are going to sit

2:21

together and drink victory gin underneath

2:23

the spreading chestnut tray where

2:26

I sold you and you sold me.

2:31

You know who else I sold? My good friend Josh

2:33

Jennings. Hello, welcome back Jennings. Hey

2:36

Heaton, how's it going?

2:37

Going very well, how are you?

2:40

You know I can't complain too much. It's

2:42

been a good few weeks. Good,

2:44

glad to hear that. Before

2:47

I forget, the voice you all just

2:49

heard at the beginning of the program was not Josh Jennings.

2:52

He played the voice of George Orwell. So

2:54

if you're curious as to who the British person was that was

2:57

George Orwell, this is now Jennings

2:59

that you're hearing. Yeah, we're

3:02

almost the same person. Yeah,

3:04

in many ways. Did you know George Orwell wasn't

3:06

his real name? I just found that out. Yes, yeah,

3:09

I literally just found that out today as well. Eric

3:11

Arthur Blair. His name was Eric. Yeah,

3:14

Eric. Eric. Eric. What

3:16

a name. Eric Arthur Blair. And

3:19

yeah, okay, another fun fact I learned. Did you know that

3:21

David Bowie wanted to make it 1984 the musical? I

3:26

feel like I did know that, but I'm

3:28

not positive I knew that. But

3:31

yeah, I feel like at one point I heard that. By

3:34

the way, did you ever see the movie that they did make

3:36

with John Hurt? I did not

3:38

see it. How is it?

3:41

It's good. I want to say they made it

3:43

in the late 70s, possibly

3:45

early 80s. Right

3:48

around the time when John Hurt either

3:50

is famous for or is about to become famous

3:53

for the chestburster scene in Alien.

3:58

But yeah, he plays Winston Smith. I

4:00

mean, they did a good job for the time frame.

4:05

So the book 1984 will

4:07

enter the public domain in the United States in

4:09

the year 19, no excuse me, 2044.

4:12

So we're about 20 years away from

4:14

them taking another whack at it unless they get

4:17

permission from the estate

4:19

of George Orwell. Orwell's widow did

4:21

not permit David Bowie to make a musical

4:23

about it, which normally I would be like,

4:26

that bitch. But I listened

4:28

to a couple of the songs and it was like, yeah,

4:30

I don't think David Bowie should be the guest. Because

4:32

David Bowie literally described it as

4:35

a glitter

4:37

apocalypse. That was how he described what

4:39

he wanted to do with my career before, with

4:42

glitter

4:42

apocalypse. I mean, the talks are very

4:44

David Bowie.

4:46

There's nothing anymore

4:49

to me, it's

4:52

not in any way, I love the

4:57

book.

5:07

It's

5:12

not a like, fun book. It's

5:14

not like, you know, rock stars

5:17

getting up and singing about stuff. It's

5:19

a much more just

5:22

relentless horror

5:24

to it. Like I don't think David Bowie is the person

5:27

to sing about 1984, even though

5:29

I appreciate him wanting to. Yeah, I think if

5:31

you were going to make a musical out of it, you should have

5:33

gotten with Steven Sondheim

5:35

before he died. Yeah, because

5:38

there's no way around this. I think David Bowie

5:40

does is kind of going to sound like Labyrinth. So

5:43

imagine Labyrinth as a

5:46

chilling prelude to totalitarianism.

5:48

I can't do it. I can't do it. But George

5:51

Orwell is a writer, I think, did a magnificent

5:53

job doing that. I just re-read it

5:55

while I was in Edinburgh this summer and

5:58

that is the third go-round. that i've had

6:00

with nineteen eighty four of us have

6:03

a meeting that i think i've read that jack

6:05

handey and douglas adams are the only three authors

6:07

that i've read at least three times with with their

6:10

work ah and i'm

6:12

i think it's it's stupendous it's a fantastic

6:14

novel you you took him to take a whack at it several

6:16

times to amateur yeah yeah i'd i'd

6:19

i have a little bit of a policy i try to read it

6:21

once a year wow okay

6:23

you have he i did no doubt

6:25

like at the end of my life as i'm not lying there

6:27

gasping for breath and about to pass on

6:30

i will think to myself and

6:32

i read a lot of books that i could spend

6:35

that time reading other books but the yeah

6:37

this one this one's it's i think it's one

6:39

of the best novels ever written honestly

6:42

ah and it's certainly one of the most compelling

6:45

and i yeah i

6:47

i i read it i don't know if i always

6:50

get through the entirety of it but i try to i

6:53

usually do the audio book which by the way listeners

6:55

the if you if you like audio books

6:58

you can find it's free online in fact

7:00

that on you tube the

7:03

audio book version read by frank miller

7:05

who i think was the greatest

7:08

audio book narrator of all time ah

7:10

and he does a great job of it and

7:13

that's usually what i do long drives i'll i'll put

7:15

it on and have you know

7:17

disturbed by myself concerned

7:20

about the future ah i i

7:22

recently listen to it by simon preble

7:24

of n y l a thing i'm a robot think is a wonderful

7:27

wonderful as he did have a bang up job with

7:29

that i absolutely loved it which reminds

7:31

me you can find the audio

7:33

book version of nineteen eighty four at

7:35

mighty heat and dot com slash

7:37

good sigh fi or you could check

7:39

that out which is a really good really is a really

7:42

good version and i will also add for purposes

7:44

today we're going to engage in spoilers

7:46

we're not going to hold back and not

7:49

only is it your goddamn fault

7:51

if you haven't read nineteen eighty four yet i

7:53

i'm fairly confident your high school requires

7:55

you to read nineteen eighty four so if i find out

7:58

of touch very nice and eighty four I'm gonna call your

8:00

high school and I'm gonna get your degree retracted

8:02

like in your dream, listener. You

8:04

know how once a year you have this dream where somehow

8:07

you have to go back to high school, I, Andrew Heaton, will

8:09

make that happen. So it's your own fault.

8:12

You need to pretend you read 1984 and Jennings and I are

8:14

gonna spoil it for you. Yeah. Also,

8:16

when you get your degree retracted, you will be in your

8:18

underwear. Yeah. Real quick,

8:21

I have this nightmare two, three times

8:23

a year where there's something about math

8:25

that I did incorrectly and I have to go back

8:27

to high school and I always wake up and think

8:30

it's the funniest thing because right now if

8:32

my, if Deer Creek Public Schools

8:34

called me today and went, hey, this is

8:36

really awkward but we actually have to retract

8:38

your high school degree, I would be like, awesome.

8:41

That's great. This doesn't affect my life at all. Now

8:45

I can tell people I have a high school dropout. Like,

8:47

this is great. But in my dream, it's always this terrifying

8:50

thing. But we're not here to talk about my weird

8:52

dreams. We're here talking about 1984. So

8:54

you try to reread it every year. You've read it at least three

8:56

times. Yeah. What

8:58

strikes you about it now that you

9:00

pick up on that didn't strike you

9:02

the first time you read it back when you were in high school or middle

9:04

school? Oh gosh. Well, one

9:07

of the reasons that I try

9:09

to read it once a year is that I knew things

9:11

strike me in it basically every time I read

9:14

it because there's so much packed

9:17

into the story that it's

9:19

almost impossible, at least for me, to

9:23

not find something new. When I read

9:25

it in high school, I was

9:27

one of those kids who would talk to

9:29

the school librarian and I think

9:32

that endeared me to

9:34

her because

9:36

it was somebody who was actually interested in the books and

9:38

not just looking for the shortest book

9:40

to write a book report on. But she

9:42

kind of very gravely took me

9:45

aside and she said, there are two books that

9:47

you absolutely have to read, 1984 and Brave New World. Oh,

9:51

I thought it was going to be Lolita, but it was Brave New World.

9:55

That was the town librarian. I don't

9:57

want to get into that. As a kid.

10:00

reading it. Obviously the thing that struck

10:02

me back then was the sort

10:05

of panopticon, the

10:08

terror of constantly

10:10

being watched and how

10:13

as technology advances it

10:15

became easier and easier for

10:17

you know entities

10:18

whether it's the government or you

10:21

know the party whatever to do so.

10:25

And it wasn't I would say until

10:27

I reread it in

10:30

my late 20s probably or early

10:32

30s that I began to realize which

10:35

is what I think today which is that's

10:37

a big part of the story it's definitely

10:39

a big part of the the sort of science fiction

10:42

element of it but it's nowhere near

10:44

the most important part to

10:46

me. To me the enforcement

10:50

mechanisms in the book kind

10:53

of play a secondary role

10:55

to the deeper ideological

10:58

drive of the party which

11:01

Winston of course is caught up in you

11:03

know like a like a fish trying to swim against the

11:05

current. When I read it now the

11:08

kind of ultimate quest

11:10

for power and the mechanism by which

11:12

the party is achieving that and at

11:15

least at the time of the end of

11:17

the book the party is completely

11:19

achieving that. That's

11:22

the main takeaway for me now and there's lots

11:24

of other smaller things I mean I don't

11:26

think that I had a very firm grasp when

11:29

I read through the first time of

11:32

Winston's relationship with the character

11:34

Julia because I you know

11:36

was young and hadn't had a girlfriend and didn't

11:39

really know anything about that and kind

11:41

of the evolution of that how Julia

11:44

is kind of this stepping stone

11:46

between both

11:49

Winston and the proletariat and Winston

11:51

and the party in some ways because

11:54

she exists midway

11:56

between where he stands which is not

11:59

merely hatred of the party

12:01

but wanting to tear the party down, the

12:03

position of the party, and then the sort of carefree,

12:06

do whatever feels good idealism

12:09

of the proletariat. And

12:12

of course Winston, again, being this person

12:14

who is constantly

12:17

focused on A, staying alive

12:20

and B, figuring out how

12:22

do we bring this thing down. Right.

12:25

I don't think Julia is, she

12:28

is carefree in a sense, but I think she's actually

12:30

more, I see that relationship

12:32

more as Winston is

12:35

an ideologue and

12:38

she is a cynic and she is a

12:40

realist. Winston

12:42

is, he has a kind

12:44

of internal political awakening where he realizes

12:46

I hate this system, I hate Big Brother, I

12:49

want to bring it down, I want to join the resistance,

12:51

I want to fight the good fight and stop this

12:53

horrible, horrible thing. I want to tear it to

12:56

shreds. And Julia's position

12:58

is, this is just how the world is. The

13:00

world is that there is Big Brother, there is the party,

13:04

and there's nothing we can really do about it. So the

13:06

name of the game is just to enjoy ourselves within

13:09

the confines of action that we

13:11

can have and to enjoy ourselves

13:13

as long as we can and then probably to kill ourselves

13:15

right before we get caught. And Winston

13:18

basically, the impression I get is that she

13:20

really loves Winston and she's willing to join him

13:22

on this crusade to be with Winston. But

13:25

if it weren't for him, she would just keep drifting

13:27

around, having fun

13:31

sexual trysts and staying

13:33

a step ahead of the thought police. But otherwise,

13:35

she probably would have persisted much longer

13:38

than if she hadn't gotten involved in him. I

13:40

do want to backtrack a little bit though, I'm glad you brought up Strange

13:42

New World. That originally we were going

13:44

to do when we thought about doing this episode years ago. You mean

13:47

Brave New World, not the Star Trek series. Thank

13:49

you very much. I'm saving

13:52

you tweets and emails. Thank you. Brave

13:54

New World by Aldous Huxley. We were originally

13:56

going to do an episode on 1984. versus

14:00

Brave New World by Aldous Huct 1984 is

14:26

and always will be the apotheosis of

14:29

totalitarian fear. This is the greatest book

14:31

that has ever been written that expresses

14:36

not just your actions and your life,

14:38

but even your thoughts and your feelings

14:41

will be micromanaged and

14:43

utterly broken if you step out of line

14:45

by an overwhelming totalitarian state.

14:47

The boot stepping on a human face for all

14:49

eternity, right? Orwell is

14:51

the greatest who's ever done any of that. And

14:54

there are other obviously there are lots of other

14:56

dystopian takes, but they, they

14:59

either have to be a lesser version of the totalitarian

15:01

or a poor

15:03

quality totalitarian nightmare that

15:06

Orwell wrote, I think it'd be difficult to beat him at that

15:08

or to take it in a different direction. And Huxley

15:11

takes it in a different direction where

15:14

Orwell is writing about totalitarianism

15:16

and oppression. Huxley's

15:19

take on this dystopian

15:22

nightmare future is where

15:24

we are so distracted and

15:26

we are so infantilized

15:30

that we don't need to be oppressed because

15:32

we don't bother investigating anything that

15:34

we're all if Huxley

15:36

we're alive today. We're all smoking

15:39

dope and watching YouTube and

15:42

dicking around on tech talk and playing with our Tamagotchis

15:45

and which is a very relevant reference

15:47

right now in the year 2023. Basically we're also infatuated and

15:49

distracted with frivolity that we don't need to

15:51

be oppressed. to

16:00

be controlled. Well I think that

16:02

yeah I think that that view of the

16:05

in Huxley's case the entire world

16:08

the entire population is encapsulated

16:12

in 1984 by the the life

16:14

that the Proles lead. To

16:17

me I agree with you the Brave New

16:20

World has... Wait wait so you're basically saying

16:22

like what Huxley is describing for everybody

16:24

is the world of the proletariat's in 1984? Basically I mean

16:28

yes there I mean there are differences between

16:31

the structures of the two for sure

16:34

but ultimately you know it's talking about

16:36

totalitarian power and what

16:39

Huxley sees as the entire civilization

16:43

morphing into minus the you know the cream

16:46

rising to the top of the power structure

16:48

I see as the the

16:50

proletariat in 1984. Yeah. And

16:54

I think that that's

16:56

why that's one of the many

16:59

reasons why 1984 is a better

17:01

book because it just covers so much

17:03

more ground. Well I think I think it's much better

17:05

written and I do think you're right

17:07

there's some overlap there in that one of my big takeaways

17:10

on this third reading of 1984 was

17:13

how much better it is to be a proletariat

17:15

than it is to be an Outer Party member.

17:18

Being an Outer Party member you're

17:20

in this mind-numbing

17:25

bureaucratic role and you

17:28

basically they're gonna kill it's almost like the slow-moving

17:31

Cambodian genocide type thing where they're

17:33

gonna catch you if you're you speak another

17:35

language basically anybody that's too

17:37

smart that's in the Outer Party is either

17:39

gonna become inner party not likely or be killed

17:42

and that happens. It happens to multiple characters and where Winston's

17:44

like that guy's too damn smart for his own good

17:47

not right buddy that's rallying against the party

17:49

there they believe the party. Yeah he's completely

17:51

you're referring to the to Syme

17:54

I think. Yeah exactly.

17:56

He's the he's he's not only

17:58

is he not against the

18:00

party, but he is

18:03

intelligent in that he understands

18:05

the workings of the party, and that's

18:07

going to get him killed. And it does. Yes,

18:10

and it does. And he's too smart, right? Whereas, and so

18:12

you're either, ideally,

18:15

if you're in the outer party, you're kind of a

18:18

bovine character, like his neighbor, who

18:20

also gets killed incidentally. Right, yeah. Well,

18:23

we don't know that he, I mean, he must

18:25

get killed eventually because- You're right. We

18:28

don't know that, we don't know to what extent he's going to be

18:30

punished. Maybe he'll go to one

18:32

of those labor camps for five to 10 years that he's

18:34

alluded to, and he'll come back and, you know,

18:37

might as peace and cues, perhaps, because he doesn't see, he never

18:40

actively did the stuff Winston did, although we don't really

18:42

know. I mean, like, based on what O'Brien says,

18:45

part of the, actually, the main

18:47

fun of it is just being able to

18:49

exercise raw power on other people. Right.

18:52

But that would appear to be the safest thing you could be,

18:54

is this kind of bovine, not thinking

18:57

too hard, go along to get along. Whereas

18:59

the proles, like, in rereading it, Orwell

19:03

talks about how the proles kind of

19:05

can do whatever they want as long as

19:08

they're scattered enough and they're not organized,

19:10

as long as they never, they're just providing

19:13

raw labor, but they're

19:16

not actually thinking as a group, the inner

19:18

party doesn't give a shit. To the point where

19:20

it says, like, the inner party would be fine

19:22

with them having religion if they wanted

19:24

it. They don't really seem to want it, but like, if they wanted

19:26

to have it, it'd be okay, as long as it didn't become a

19:28

rallying thing. And then you're like, oh,

19:31

in this world, like, it's way better to be a prole,

19:34

because you can kind of like, you know, you can go to the pub and

19:36

you can cuss and swear and you can have sex and you

19:38

can, you know, do all those things. And the proles-

19:41

You're going to be poor the whole time, but you are

19:43

going to be much freer. Yeah, even much freer.

19:45

Like they have a, they have like

19:48

a black market system that is referred

19:51

to by party members as the free

19:53

market, because in a party member's

19:55

mind, those two terms are

19:58

equally disgusting. Yeah,

20:00

they can they they trade fairly freely They

20:03

are they they're given kind of the bread and circuses

20:06

treatment in that there's a lorry that

20:08

you know That that they obsess over and

20:10

probably does not pay anyone at all

20:12

ever Yeah, my guess is there's like a grand

20:15

prize a second There's like a tertiary

20:17

prize where somebody gets the equivalent of like ten

20:19

thousand dollars and that probably does

20:22

exist periodically You know just to keep

20:24

people in line But but the grand prize

20:26

of you know a million credits or whatever and you get to

20:28

retire early That bit like

20:31

it's always one town over you know it's always

20:33

it's always a made-up name and and no

20:35

one's ever really figured it Out just like in real

20:38

life with the lottery just like in real life

20:40

for the lottery That's been my experience

20:42

anyway. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah

20:44

that that that to me was like the bigger takeaway

20:47

that I had this time The other thing

20:49

I'll note is in rereading this I was

20:52

struck by how insidious the telescreen was

20:54

in a way that did not hit me when I was a kid when

20:56

I was A kid I read that and was like oh,

20:58

that's cute George. We're well predicted TVs

21:00

because televisions. I think he wrote it in 46 I

21:05

want to say because the night he published

21:07

it in 48 because

21:10

the 1984 is just a reversal of the

21:12

last two numbers. I Don't

21:15

know when he began writing it though, right? And

21:17

so there was in retrospect there might have already

21:19

been a TV out or a rudimentary TV

21:21

as a kid I thought oh, he's just he's just predicting TV.

21:23

He's just putting a visual to radio. That's pretty smart In

21:26

reading it this time. I'm like, well, no, it's it's

21:28

not just that they that they can broadcast

21:30

images in terms of propaganda it's

21:33

that they're being monitored with it and

21:35

it a very at

21:37

a very granular level like the telescopes

21:39

are not just Monitoring the people

21:41

that are in their own homes so that they never have privacy.

21:44

It's watching their facial expressions It's it's

21:46

watching their heartbeat. It has the ability

21:49

to see like like your you know

21:51

You're the vein throbbing in your forehead so it can

21:53

count right heartbeats They're counter

21:55

they're watching your breath. But basically it's

21:58

like a it is It

22:00

is so so anti

22:02

privacy that it is able to see

22:05

your bio rhythmic response to

22:07

things to determine whether or not you

22:09

were in agreement with this thing so it's not even you

22:11

just stand still and smile you and

22:13

like any sit there are bits in there I think some of the creepiest

22:16

things in there are where you have to calibrate

22:18

the right level of facial expression during

22:20

a thing like during during the two minutes hate

22:22

there's there's a certain level of appropriate like

22:25

you're actually breaking the rules because you're not supposed

22:27

to scream or something like that but there's like an appropriate

22:30

level of breaking the rules that

22:32

you got to do and if you don't quite hit that then they don't

22:34

really believe that you mean it and so

22:36

you have to you have to you have to do that which I

22:39

like I somebody

22:41

does comedy I hate it when I'm

22:43

in a room and and the MC

22:46

always goes alright give it up you

22:48

can do better than that come on

22:50

do it like you really mean it I'm like I fucking

22:53

hate that I get why they have to do it I hate

22:55

it I don't want to join you in this weird little exercise

22:58

you're doing so that having having that like I

23:00

have to do this and they're watching my heart

23:03

rate and they're watching my breath to see

23:05

if I really mean it or not or or

23:07

if I'm getting overly agitated when big brother

23:09

comes on but it ought to be a calming influence that's gonna

23:11

be weeding out like that is a truly terrifying concept

23:14

that it's not your actions but your actual

23:16

thoughts as best they can intuit them are

23:18

being monitored well and not only

23:21

that and and I certainly you know when

23:23

you asked me the question I did not in any way mean

23:25

to downplay the horror of short the

23:27

the panopticon it's just it yeah it just

23:30

I think we we we were struck by things

23:32

in reverse but but not

23:35

only that but but there's no

23:38

Winston is is in a very

23:41

strange situation for a for an outer

23:43

party member in that just through

23:45

some dumb luck the way

23:47

that his apartment is constructed there's

23:50

a little nook that the that the telecr only

24:00

time, day or night, that

24:05

he's not constantly, not

24:07

only being monitored by the the telescreens,

24:10

but by fellow party members. You never know

24:12

who's gonna look at you

24:14

and decide that

24:16

you're not being orthodox and so you need

24:19

to be reported as a thought police. Like

24:22

there's never a moment. He even says, one

24:24

of the things I find that was terrifying about

24:27

that is he says the one thing you could

24:30

not control no matter what is whether or not

24:32

you talked in your sleep. And

24:34

that always terrifies him. And

24:37

in fact, the sort of slovenly,

24:39

offish, devoted neighbor, that's

24:41

what ends up getting him caught. His

24:45

children supposedly hear

24:48

him talking shit on the party while

24:50

he's sleeping and report him to

24:52

the thought police. The children are

24:55

absolute monsters. So I think it's entirely

24:58

possible that they just they were like, I'm tired

25:00

of the old guy. Yeah,

25:03

that is one of the other things that struck me is I forgot about

25:05

that. I'm sure it hit me when I

25:07

was a little kid, but reading it now, we're

25:09

an entire generation of

25:12

people because Winston is not

25:16

quite the oldest person that can remember

25:19

before the revolution, but he's like the

25:22

oldest working adult generation that does

25:25

it. Like he is the

25:27

equivalent of a baby boomer today or

25:29

maybe Gen X today, whereas there are some

25:31

silent generation people that were born in the 40s

25:33

life, like that kind of thing. So there are people there. You gather that

25:35

the older people were either

25:38

wiped out in the

25:40

purges or there are people like O'Brien

25:42

who, you know, O'Brien

25:44

seems to be older than Winston. Yeah. But

25:47

he is like 33 or 35. I guess he's something like that.

25:52

I say baby boomer. I've got my things up. He

25:56

in the same way that you know what this is in the same

25:58

is actually exactly the same in the same that you and I

26:00

can barely remember life before the internet. That's

26:03

the relationship that Winston has to the party.

26:05

He can barely remember life before all of this. There are

26:07

people that are older than that. And

26:10

so this incoming

26:12

generation, the Gen Z, or whatever's younger

26:15

than Gen Z, that's been brought up

26:17

in a world completely controlled by the party,

26:19

have been raised where family

26:21

is completely, it's just an organizational

26:24

unit of the party structure. The family

26:26

has no value in and of itself. In fact, it's dangerous.

26:28

And so the party is actively teaching

26:31

children to rat out their parents and bring

26:33

them in if they'd have the slightest bit, because it's

26:35

this incredibly atomizing

26:38

force where all life revolves around

26:40

the state, all life revolves around the party. And

26:43

I found that to be particularly insidious. Oh

26:45

yeah, for sure. And there's, because,

26:49

and I'm sure we'll get further into this

26:51

as we go along, but because of the

26:54

the absolute cognitive

26:57

dissonance that everyone who is

27:00

living in this outer party

27:02

world must take

27:05

on, they encourage

27:07

it. I mean, the

27:09

guy, and all of a sudden his name escapes me, but

27:11

the neighbor, the fat neighbor who

27:13

gets- I don't know, let's look this up. It's

27:16

Parsons. Is that it? Okay. Yeah, Parsons.

27:19

Yeah, that's right. So, Parsons,

27:22

when they haul him into the

27:25

Ministry of Love and Winston

27:27

sees him and Parsons is describing what

27:29

happens. He's like, I talked in my

27:31

sleep. I said, I didn't mean to say anything.

27:34

I would never do that consciously.

27:37

And then he commends his children.

27:40

That's pretty smart. They're on top

27:42

of things. You got to give them credit. They did

27:45

their duty to the party. And it's like, you're

27:47

going to fucking die. On

27:49

top, I mean, like in his level of obliviousness

27:52

too, where he's like, Winston, you

27:54

know what I will tell them when they bring me in for the

27:56

trial, because he thinks there's going to be a trial. I will-

28:00

I will thank them for saving me before

28:03

things got out of hand. And then Winston,

28:06

they'll understand that, right?

28:09

Maybe I'll do some labor for a couple of years, but

28:11

I mean, the party's good. I

28:14

interviewed Michael Malice recently, and

28:16

I was asking him about the differences between Soviet

28:19

gulags and concentration camps, both

28:22

of which are pretty bad. And

28:25

with the gulags, there was this thought process,

28:27

though, of, oh, this is a clerical error.

28:30

Like, I'm a good party member. I

28:33

shouldn't be here. This is somebody messed up a

28:35

form when they realized this, I'm going to be taken

28:37

out of this problem. Whereas, where

28:39

it was, no, you're just

28:41

chaffed to be destroyed by the state because

28:43

we're liquidating

28:46

everybody with your last name because we think your family's full

28:48

of spies. It doesn't really matter who you are. And

28:51

Parsons is that same kind of idiot

28:53

who believes that the party

28:56

is fundamentally good, that

29:00

he is so eager to appease

29:03

it and agree with it that he's saying things like,

29:05

I will thank them for catching me before it got

29:08

out of hand. Right, right. And

29:10

that's part of the reason why I ... and

29:13

it doesn't matter because we'll never know the answer, but why

29:16

I wonder if he actually did it at all

29:19

because you don't really

29:21

get the sense that there's much in terms of

29:24

a subconscious recognition

29:27

on Parsons' part that he's participating

29:31

in this absolute

29:33

mental charade that

29:35

just to him it just is reality. Which

29:40

again, that is such a

29:42

massive part

29:45

of the terror of the book to

29:47

me is this rewiring

29:50

of the human brain, the

29:52

understanding on the part of the

29:55

party ideologues of people who drew

29:58

all of this up and decided, you know, this is the end. the

30:02

the Nazis couldn't accomplish it, the

30:04

Soviets couldn't accomplish it, we're gonna accomplish

30:06

it because unlike them we're not gonna stop,

30:09

we're gonna keep going, we don't,

30:12

there is no like, no

30:15

in a real sense, there's no ultimate

30:19

moment where it's like well and then we'll be

30:21

free and everybody will live as you know, brothers

30:23

and sisters, like that's just never going to happen

30:26

because ultimately we seek power and

30:29

so to do that we have to

30:31

completely rewire not

30:34

only society like

30:37

aggregately but every single

30:39

individual human being has

30:41

to be completely rewired and we'll weed

30:43

out the ones that you know, that crop up because

30:45

they will crop up because

30:49

they're gonna stand out like a sore thumb, people

30:51

like Winston, I mean O'Brien tells

30:53

Winston I've been I've been following you

30:55

for seven years, he's known about

30:57

Winston for seven years, this is a long

31:00

slow chess game for them and you gather

31:02

that they enjoy it and

31:04

so for somebody like Parsons, I

31:08

look at that and I think okay well maybe

31:10

some tiny tiny part of his brain recognizes

31:13

that this is all fake but

31:16

more likely his absolutely

31:19

monstrous children just got

31:22

annoyed with him one day and decided

31:24

to report him to the thought police. You know I've never thought

31:26

about that of course, you think it was spurious and the children

31:29

just did it to like, I think it's possible

31:31

they gained credit within their scout troop or

31:33

something for turning their dad in. Yeah

31:35

and I mean they've been

31:39

completely desensitized to any

31:42

kind of concept of death

31:44

being a bad thing, I mean

31:48

they're clamoring at the beginning of the book to

31:50

go see the hanging, they're very upset that they

31:52

don't get to go see criminals

31:54

of war hanged to death

31:57

and so that

31:59

yeah.

31:59

that kind of death culture

32:03

combined with something

32:07

that requires you to

32:09

not merely like the...

32:13

Here's an interesting idea.

32:17

What if you take the people,

32:19

the outer party in 1984 and all of

32:21

a sudden one day the inner party ceases

32:24

to exist? How many years do

32:26

you think it would be before

32:29

everything that they do just

32:32

collapse under its own weight? Because I don't

32:34

think it would go away immediately. I think

32:36

that mindset, especially

32:39

with the children who know nothing

32:42

else and

32:44

with the fact that people like Winston are a dying breed

32:46

literally. The book was going to be called Last

32:48

Man in Europe. That was one of the alternate titles. Oh,

32:51

I didn't know that. Interesting. Yeah. It

32:54

makes sense. Winston as kind of the final human being, yeah.

32:56

Yeah, interesting. In terms of whether

32:58

we would collapse under its own weight or not, I think

33:01

that this is sort of the million dollar question that's

33:03

posed by George Orwell is, does

33:06

totalitarianism burn out or

33:08

is it sustainable? I remember

33:12

reading an essay back in high school that basically

33:14

said totalitarianism

33:17

does burn out, that it's not ultimately

33:19

a sustainable system

33:23

because you eventually

33:28

piss off enough people in the outer party or the proletariat

33:32

equivalent that they rise

33:34

up or you get like a Gorbachev

33:36

type character who tries

33:39

to inject freedom into the equation

33:41

to plaster

33:44

up the cracks in it and then it destabilizes

33:46

the entire thing. That is my

33:48

profound hope, is that totalitarianism

33:51

does collapse under its own weight. The stuff that really

33:53

creeps me out is China

33:56

never collapsed. was

34:02

close-ish to this, I'd say within

34:05

living memory that Maoism was

34:08

a pretty similar phenomenon to this.

34:11

And then it liberalized to

34:13

a great extent under Deng

34:16

Xiaoping, I think, instituted a

34:18

bunch of market reforms, was kind of going in a free

34:21

direction, and they watched the Soviet

34:23

Union collapse. And they went, we're not going to let that happen.

34:26

And they've, I think, been

34:28

able to be much more flexible in terms of their

34:30

approach to markets, which has been to the great

34:32

benefit of the Chinese people. But at the same time,

34:35

I don't see much evidence

34:37

that civil rights have increased under the

34:40

Chinese totalitarian regime. And

34:42

if like I were a Uyghur, I mean like Uyghurs right

34:44

now, out there in Western

34:46

China, there's something like 500,000 Uyghurs

34:49

that are under more or less constant facial

34:52

surveillance equipment that they've got all of

34:54

these set up to watch where all of the Uyghurs are.

34:57

They've got programs in place where, in addition

34:59

to like trying to destroy the language

35:02

and religion or anything else, like they will

35:04

assign, I can't remember the term, but it's

35:06

very Orwellian, it's like, you know, adopted

35:09

grandfather, where they'll send in Han Chinese

35:11

people to live with the Uyghur family to monitor

35:13

them and to convert them into

35:16

Chinese culture. And like that

35:18

kind of stuff I look at and I'm like, I don't know,

35:20

maybe they have figured out, they're working on that social credit

35:23

system where they'll

35:25

be, you know, you get points

35:28

added or subtracted based on your behavior and

35:30

like your internet browser and presumably

35:32

that will all get hooked up with AI where a

35:35

ruthless, totally inhuman intelligence will

35:37

be. I start looking at that stuff and I'm like, I

35:39

don't know, maybe that could go on forever, which is

35:41

terrifying. I, you

35:43

know, you mentioned China

35:45

and China is a really good example. I think another good

35:48

example and maybe in some ways an

35:51

even more starkly

35:53

relatable example would be North Korea.

35:57

Which is way more totalitarian than

35:59

even China. Right, right. But

36:01

not just totalitarian, but the

36:04

level of brainwashing that

36:07

seems to be on display anytime you

36:09

hear anything, the rare thing that

36:11

escapes from their borders or

36:14

person, it seems

36:16

a very big

36:20

brother-like. Oh, for sure. I

36:22

mean, right now it's a sad thing, but there are concentration

36:25

camps on the planet right now. Right.

36:28

They're in North Korea. They're in North Korea as well, but

36:30

North Korea for sure has multi-generational concentration

36:33

camps. Kim

36:36

Jong, not Kim Jong-il, Kim

36:38

Jong-sung, the founder of the dynasty

36:41

said that like, you know, traitor blood goes

36:45

a generation either direction. I

36:47

can't remember the exact phrase, but basically if

36:50

I, Andrew Heaton, were convicted

36:52

of being a traitor by some secret court

36:55

in North Korea, everyone

36:57

in my immediate family would go to the concentration

36:59

camp with me, meaning that my parents

37:02

would, my aunt and uncles,

37:04

my kids would. And

37:07

if I'm there with my wife and we have

37:09

children, my children are guilty

37:11

because they have been born to a traitor. They have traitor

37:13

blood. And so, I mean, there

37:15

are people living in this Orwellian situation

37:18

right now, which is terrifying. Yeah. Yeah.

37:21

And one wonders too, like one of the things that

37:23

you encounter frequently throughout the

37:26

book, 1984, is usually

37:29

through the telescreens, but also in conversation

37:32

with other people is just

37:34

how good everyone has

37:36

it. How

37:39

chocolate rations are up from what

37:42

they were last year,

37:44

whereas they're actually down from what they were last

37:46

week. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

37:49

Which is very Soviet, like, you know, like, or wheat

37:52

production up 20% comrades. Yeah. Yeah,

37:54

exactly. And it's, I would

37:57

be very curious to know. not

38:00

curious enough to try

38:02

to make the attempt to go there. But

38:04

I'd be curious to know how that looks in North

38:06

Korea because that's got to be what they're telling their people. Because

38:09

their people are starving, like lots of them

38:11

are starving. They don't have reliable

38:14

electricity. I don't know if this is true. I have

38:16

heard that like when the space

38:19

station flies over that part of the world,

38:22

the only country not lit up at night is North

38:24

Korea. I think that's they don't have the infrastructure.

38:27

I believe that's demonstrable, that it's just a

38:29

black out there. Part of the propaganda

38:31

efforts that we do, as I understand it, or that South Korea

38:33

does, is it will just float

38:37

chocolate over in balloons to be dropped on

38:39

North Korea. And the reason

38:41

that that is psychologically destabilizing is

38:43

that if you're in North Korea, the idea

38:46

that any country could have the resources to

38:48

just put chocolate on balloons is

38:50

insane. That they could have so

38:53

much money, you could afford to just

38:55

throw away chocolate is nuts.

38:57

And then that makes you start thinking about that going, do

39:00

they really have that much money? Like when I was talking to

39:02

Michael Malice, who wrote a book called Dear Reader,

39:04

where he went over to, it's what he got famous for, he went

39:07

over to North Korea, he collected all of their propaganda,

39:09

had it smuggled out, had it translated, and then put it together

39:12

as the unauthorized biography of Kim

39:14

Jong Un, or Kim Jong Il, Kim

39:16

Jong Il.

39:17

He

39:18

was speaking to a guy and

39:20

that like, I think

39:23

he showed him like a plastic bottle. And

39:25

it was the guy's job to like carry glass

39:28

bottles up and down stairs all day for

39:30

like a nickel or something. And he showed him a plastic bottle.

39:33

And the guy was like, where did you get this miraculous

39:35

technology? Because the idea that

39:38

I could carry water and something that's a fraction of

39:40

the weight was like, but this is a plastic bottle we're talking

39:42

about. So yeah,

39:45

I suspect that that could be the case.

39:47

I don't know, what do you think? To

39:49

tell a turn is, does it crash out of its own weight?

39:52

Or is it something that could be permanently sustainable? I

39:55

suspect it could not be permanently sustainable,

39:59

you know, Orwell goes to great pains

40:01

to describe what it

40:03

took to make it sustainable because

40:06

you have the three main governing

40:09

bodies throughout the world. You have Oceania, you

40:11

have East Asia, and you have, what's

40:14

the third one? East Asia and-

40:17

Eurasia. Eurasia, yeah. Eurasia,

40:19

yeah. So you have these three governing bodies. You get

40:21

the sense from him that

40:23

all three governing bodies basically

40:27

work the same way. They're basically all

40:29

these totalitarian regimes that are- Yeah,

40:33

like East Asia has death

40:35

worship, but that's just Inksoc. It's

40:37

just Asian Inksoc. Exactly. Everybody

40:39

basically has the same system just with some rhetorical

40:42

flair in it. Right, exactly. And

40:44

so because of that and because they have this delicate

40:47

balance of East Asia's

40:49

at war with Oceania until

40:51

it becomes convenient to

40:54

flip it and Eurasia

40:57

goes to war with Oceania or whatever,

41:01

they're always moving the chess pieces around. But

41:05

honestly, not that many people are even dying

41:07

from war because

41:09

they're not really fighting this global

41:12

war. Under

41:16

those auspices, I don't

41:19

know if it's possible for it to sustain forever.

41:22

I do think it could sustain for a very, very,

41:24

very long time if you had it. If all

41:26

countries were North Korea right

41:29

now and

41:32

we were subdivided into

41:35

only three major powers or

41:37

four or something like that, I think

41:40

if it was planned maybe. The

41:43

good news here, because I do

41:45

think that 1984 maps onto a lot

41:47

of today's site and culture,

41:50

and we can get to that, but

41:52

it doesn't map across the

41:55

whole gamut

41:58

of human experience in the way that it does there.

41:59

So

42:01

at

42:04

least, I

42:06

think I come to the same conclusion that you do, which is I'd

42:09

like to hope that it's not possible

42:11

for that to be- But are you a little

42:13

worried? I'm a bigger

42:16

and bigger fan of Bayesian reasoning, by the way. Bayesian

42:19

reasoning, for anybody unfamiliar with this term, is rather than

42:21

having a binary of I believe this or I don't believe

42:23

this, you go, I 80% believe this, I 20% don't

42:25

believe this, which is

42:28

I think a more accurate reflection of how most people

42:30

think. I 90, I 95%

42:32

think the Kennedy assassination went down the way it did, 5%

42:34

of me doesn't believe it, like that's, you know, that kind

42:37

of thing, right? So like with this,

42:40

I 70% think that solitaryism collapses under its

42:42

own stupid weight, 30% think

42:45

maybe you could computer your way out of it. Although

42:48

I will say I think that

42:50

Orwell was an optimist about this, and

42:52

I say this from the text itself in that

42:56

he has a very odd chapter in my opinion,

42:58

where having gone through this

43:02

epic that is emotionally

43:06

taxing and concludes with

43:09

Winston the absolutely shattered

43:11

man. That

43:16

was another thing, by the way, of like I'd forgotten about

43:18

the last, I mean, I knew that

43:20

he is imploded at the end, but I

43:22

forgot about just how thoroughly that they

43:25

give him a cinecure,

43:27

he's given a promotion, he gets

43:30

unlimited disgusting victory, Jen, and

43:32

that he once or twice a week

43:34

goes down to the office to hang out with these other broken

43:37

cinecure men, and they debate

43:40

in new speak, the proper

43:42

role of brackets and

43:44

periods, should periods go before or after,

43:47

and they'll get really animated and argue about it, and

43:49

then they'll just kind of lose interest because no one cares, the

43:51

whole thing is a great work assignment, it ultimately has

43:53

no effect on anything, and they're just being kept

43:55

in that holding pattern until they can be

43:58

trotted out for a show crime. trial

44:00

and then they'll be killed. That's

44:02

this horrible thing. And so

44:06

it concludes with this, where Winston has been so thoroughly

44:09

destroyed that he meets

44:11

Julia and dispassionately says, I betrayed

44:14

you. And she says, I betrayed you. And it's just, there's

44:16

no emotion in it because they're utterly

44:18

ruined as human beings. They've been utterly wrecked.

44:20

They are just stumps. They

44:23

are ash. They are the residue

44:25

of what a man once was. And

44:27

the final line is, the struggle

44:29

was over. He loved Big Brother that he

44:32

had internally come to take

44:34

their worldview. And then George

44:37

Orwell writes in appendix about how the language

44:40

works. It's a very

44:42

odd thing to do. And he insisted on it. I

44:44

think if I'm not mistaken, that was

44:46

not in the original American publication.

44:49

I believe in the American publication, the American publishers

44:52

understandably went, this is a very odd and

44:55

anticlimactic thing to put on the book. You're

44:58

now going to have 20 pages on

45:00

how Ingsoc or how NewSpeak

45:02

works. And the reason that I think that Orwell

45:05

put it in, in addition to the fact that like any author

45:07

he wanted to like, no, no, no, I worked out the worldview.

45:09

See, like he wanted to do that. I

45:12

think the other bit is it says,

45:16

NewSpeak was the language

45:19

of, like he uses past tense language. And

45:23

I think the implication is that the

45:26

totalitarian society he is describing

45:29

is a period of human history, but it's not

45:31

an open ended period that there is some

45:33

historian in the future describing this retrospectively

45:36

as a thing which has concluded. And so

45:38

this is me like desperately clawing

45:41

at some kind of optimism. I am aware

45:43

that this is a fantasy. I'm

45:45

aware that this is not real. But even then I'm very

45:48

bothered by that. Like in this made up universe,

45:50

I'm still like, but it does end though, right? In this

45:52

made up universe. And I think that's the implication.

45:55

Right. Right. Right.

45:58

So that's a. what

46:00

I take it as as well. Also, I think, I mean,

46:02

stylistically, like it's what it struck

46:04

me as, it's a very Tolkien

46:07

thing to do. Yeah. Because Tolkien

46:09

also will lead you on this long journey that

46:11

just has this, you know, very

46:14

emotional, that happy emotional ending,

46:16

but just very long and

46:18

he'll tie things up at the end. And then there's just

46:21

this like, oh, by the way, I'm

46:25

going to write 40 other things that

46:27

just explain all of this. And I don't know

46:29

if that's, I think there's at the end of the Lord

46:32

of the Rings, I think there

46:34

are like appendices and stuff like that. I

46:36

might be wrong about that. But at

46:39

any rate, it's very, it

46:42

is kind of jarring to get to the end of this book where

46:44

you're like this person you have rooted

46:46

for to somehow, if

46:49

not win, at least survive

46:52

throughout the whole time of the course

46:55

of the book. Not

46:57

only does he not survive

46:59

in any real sense. I mean,

47:02

he's going to be killed. O'Brien is going to

47:04

shoot him. There could not be a more thorough extinguishing

47:06

of a character. Right. Exactly. But

47:09

an interesting thing about that, I

47:12

think you're probably right that

47:14

that's what he was going for is to give you

47:16

that open ending and

47:18

say, well, this can't last forever.

47:21

But I had an interesting thought about that,

47:23

which was in the

47:26

world that Winston inhabits, history

47:29

has been completely erased because

47:32

everything now is, there

47:34

might be truth to things that

47:37

are said about history, but

47:39

if so, it's only a matter of time before they're

47:41

reversed. Because everything

47:45

is in flux. History no longer

47:47

exists. We only live in the present with

47:49

an eye toward the future. And

47:51

so everything in the past has changed

47:53

constantly, Winston is a part of that. And

47:57

if you come out on the other side of that, and someday

47:59

the party does fall and is defeated

48:02

and the pearls

48:04

rise up, whatever happens, humanity

48:09

then has to rebuild essentially

48:11

from zero because they

48:13

don't have a historical

48:16

infrastructure that they can trust to

48:18

be correct anymore. The

48:21

artifacts have been destroyed, all

48:24

of the historical documents have been rewritten

48:27

and rewritten and rewritten again so that they're not

48:29

trustworthy at all. We're basically

48:31

back to square one in terms of coming

48:33

up with what

48:36

mankind must have been like before this whole

48:38

thing happened. The interesting thing

48:40

about that to me was when

48:43

I first realized that I thought, I

48:45

wonder if that ever happened before in the past.

48:49

We have seven going on, eight billion

48:51

people on the planet now, so it'd be

48:54

a lot harder to do. What about

48:56

when there were only seven million people

48:58

on the planet? It

49:00

seems unlikely because humankind spread out,

49:03

but even in a localized sense,

49:05

how much history, ancient history has

49:08

either been lost or completely

49:10

rewritten? We know that a lot of

49:12

history is rewritten anyway. Even

49:15

if the totalitarian state

49:18

that Winston exists in is not

49:20

permanent, the damage that

49:22

it has done might be. Maybe

49:27

not permanent in the sense that eventually

49:29

humanity will reform,

49:35

but I think you'd be looking

49:38

at a reboot period that would just

49:40

be nightmarish. That'd

49:42

be an interesting follow-up novel. Once

49:44

it goes into the public domain, you're going to write 1984

49:46

part two. The

49:52

party fell one year after

49:55

Winston died. He just kept

49:57

his trap shut. I

50:00

think that would be fascinating. Well, like one of

50:02

the things that they talk about in the book that Orwell

50:05

obsesses over is Newspeak and that the idea

50:07

behind Newspeak is that

50:10

they brag it's the only language in the world that's

50:12

getting smaller. Right. They're

50:14

actively getting rid of terminology and

50:17

the project of Newspeak specifically is

50:19

to get to the point where you

50:24

basically you can only think things that are approved.

50:26

The language is structured in such a way and

50:28

this really gets into some epistemological theory here.

50:31

Like Orwell is really going out on,

50:34

he's really embracing this idea

50:36

that you can only think things that language

50:38

allows you to think, which is an interesting concept

50:40

and there is some data on this. I read an article

50:42

a few years ago that when

50:45

they ask Germans and Spaniards

50:48

to describe bridges that

50:50

Spaniards will go, bridges

50:53

are, they're strong, they're stalwart, they're trustworthy,

50:58

they hold the bridge up over the water and when you

51:00

ask Germans to do it, they'll use language like

51:02

bridges are sleek, they're

51:04

elegant, they connect

51:06

things and that the reason for this

51:08

is that the word for bridge is feminine

51:11

in German whereas the word for bridge is masculine

51:13

in Spanish and that sort of innate

51:19

structure of the language influences how people

51:21

interpret it. So Orwell is really

51:23

taking that to the nth degree believing that

51:25

if you could program language you could

51:27

program people and get it to the point

51:29

where they literally could not conceive of things

51:32

that was not allowed for in the language. Like presumably

51:35

you would get rid of

51:37

any concept of

51:40

freedom fighter or righteous

51:42

revolt or anything like that. There could only, like

51:45

treason would be the only thing you could think. There

51:49

would never be a way for you to think about

51:51

like revolutionary

51:53

or radical or anything like that and so if

51:55

Orwell is correct then you'd

51:58

kind of have to rebuild language. That's

52:00

the, which I think would happen naturally given that

52:02

it already has. Over time. Yeah,

52:05

but, or I think the other equivalent would be like Cambodia.

52:07

Cambodia killed a quarter of its population

52:10

in four years. And I did an episode

52:12

on the political orphanage about this a couple of years ago. By

52:16

the time the Khmer Rouge finally went

52:18

under, I think there were seven attorneys

52:20

left in the entire country. Like, think about

52:23

a country where there

52:26

are, you know, like I realize ha

52:28

ha ha, good start, you know, antiloyalry and all

52:30

that. But like, but like, think about just like

52:33

with like doctors, like they're the

52:35

same thing. I mean, like the entire intellectual class

52:37

got liquidated, like the, the, the artists

52:39

class got liquidated. Like imagine, imagine

52:42

killing everybody in the United States that

52:45

we would classify as a creative person or an

52:47

artist. That would grow back. But

52:49

my God, that would be an incredible, incredible

52:52

loss in terms of the intellectual life, the cultural

52:54

life, like it had come back, you know, and you could not, not

52:56

only, not only you don't just, you don't

52:58

only liquidate them, but over time you liquidate

53:01

everything they ever created as well. Or

53:03

you change it into something else. So

53:05

that the points of inspiration are

53:09

also gone. And they have to,

53:11

they have to kind of emerge once again into

53:13

the human consciousness. I want

53:16

to go back for a second to what you were saying about the

53:19

way that Orwell sees language working.

53:23

I tend to, I tend

53:25

to think that he's right actually,

53:29

because I think we see elements

53:31

of it in society already. I

53:33

doubt, certainly not in the, in the

53:36

totalitarian, to the level

53:38

that you see in the book, but that

53:41

kind of cognitive rewiring to the

53:44

point that you eventually become able and

53:46

then you become able to rewire

53:48

yourself and then you become unable

53:51

to stop rewiring yourself. I

53:54

think, I think exists to

53:57

a large degree. To me, I

54:01

would say there's kind of three levels of

54:04

thinking here. There's kind of the amorphous,

54:07

and I'm not a neurologist or anything

54:09

like that, but this is how I see it. There's

54:12

kind of an amorphous blob

54:15

of thought that I think in

54:17

there you can think of things that you can't,

54:20

that don't have language to describe them, but

54:25

you cannot articulate those amorphous

54:27

thoughts until it

54:31

goes from being amorphous into being systematized

54:34

and organized

54:36

in some fashion. We use language to

54:38

do that. So you cannot articulate

54:41

thoughts that you don't

54:43

have language for, even

54:46

though maybe you can think them. And so you can

54:48

have feelings that you

54:52

can't describe, and you are increasingly

54:54

unable to describe if your language

54:56

is getting smaller and smaller all the time. And

54:59

so they basically eventually just ... I

55:01

mean, they might be there, but

55:03

you have no way to communicate them. And

55:07

I think ultimately, I don't

55:11

know if he would

55:13

agree with this, if Orwell

55:15

would say, yes, this is what I was going for, but

55:18

I think maybe the ultimate message of the book is

55:22

the absolute necessity of free

55:24

thought and free speech, because once

55:27

you start to winnow away ...

55:30

I mean, language is

55:33

simply the vehicle that drives my thought

55:35

to your brain. And once you

55:38

take the tires off that vehicle and

55:40

remove the engine, and it's eventually

55:43

just a big old hunk of metal that I have

55:46

to push along to try to get to your house, it

55:51

is basically useless at that point. And

55:54

anything that's trapped up here just is going to

55:56

atrophy and die, because thought

55:59

thrives. on interaction with other

56:01

thought. Otherwise it just becomes circular

56:03

and nonsensical and probably dies out.

56:07

I don't know. What are your

56:09

thoughts on that and do you see

56:11

the world of newspeak and

56:13

right

56:14

think,

56:16

can

56:20

you map that onto our daily

56:23

society in a meaningful way?

56:26

I feel like that's a two-parter. So the first part

56:28

of do

56:31

the feelings go away if you can't

56:33

articulate them? It sounds like we're at the same position,

56:36

which is that there's like how I would describe

56:38

it which I don't think is contrary to what you're saying, just a different

56:40

descriptive mechanism is I would say there's

56:42

system one thinking and system two thinking. There's conscious

56:44

thinking and subconscious thinking or

56:47

there's like what we would call rational thinking

56:50

and gut thinking. They're

56:52

both thinking by the way. I'm not a very good gut thinker but

56:54

that's not because I'm smart. It's because I don't

56:56

pay attention to the much larger, faster

56:59

computer in my head. I only

57:01

look at the one that can spit out English but

57:03

the one that doesn't speak English I don't pay attention

57:06

to but there are people that are very good at that and it's

57:08

your brain operating the same. What

57:12

kind of is happening in my mind is newspeak

57:15

is able to reduce

57:17

the ability of your rational brain

57:20

to articulate things but it can't really do anything

57:22

about your emotional mind,

57:24

your subconscious. In my

57:26

mind it would kind of be like you don't think

57:28

it retrains that? I

57:31

think that it retrains your brain

57:34

but the retraining of the brain in 1984 I don't think

57:37

is a product of language. I think it's just motivated

57:40

reasoning like with Parsons. Parsons

57:42

knows on some level it

57:45

is better for me to go

57:48

along with the party than to understand reality

57:50

as objective reality. There's no money in objective

57:52

reality for me. There's

57:55

money in getting along which we all have

57:58

to a great extent. is a very profound

58:00

thing in human beings. Evolution

58:03

does not give a shit if you understand reality

58:05

correctly or not. It could not care less. What

58:08

evolution wants you to do is reproduce and get along

58:10

with your tribe. So if everybody in your tribe

58:12

says it is a profane thing, if

58:14

you think that lightning is not caused by farting

58:16

angels or farting Valkyries or something, and

58:19

you will be tossed out of our tribe if you don't believe

58:22

lightning is caused by farting Valkyries, you

58:24

will feel a very strong urge

58:27

to agree, yeah, yeah, it does kind of make

58:29

sense that that would happen because it makes sense.

58:31

So I think that's the main thing that's happening in terms

58:34

of circumscribing or rewiring how people

58:36

think is motivated reasoning.

58:39

It is in your best interest to go along with the party. The

58:41

language bit almost seems to me of like

58:45

turning people into teenagers. And

58:47

what I mean by that is like, remember when you're

58:49

a teenager and you're just very angry and you're

58:52

like, I don't know how to, I'm

58:54

bad. You don't have like, we're happy all the

58:57

time. I don't know what you're talking about.

58:59

Like now, or like there's

59:01

somebody I'm close to in life that has

59:04

been to rehab and gone through a lot

59:07

of therapy and now has

59:09

the ability to always had feelings,

59:12

but really couldn't lack

59:14

the skill set to introspectively

59:16

investigate those feelings or communicate

59:18

them and now can go,

59:22

I'm feeling really insecure today. I think it's because

59:24

this, this and this and like can interact,

59:27

right? So I feel like that mechanism is lost, but the feelings

59:29

are always there. But I don't think

59:31

that we're saying anything really different there. I think we're

59:33

just approaching it from two different angles. Insofar

59:36

as mapping it on to

59:38

today, I think that we

59:40

now enter a different section

59:44

of the book or analysis of the book, which

59:47

is this panopticon

59:50

censorship mechanism. Where

59:53

does this come from and how does it hit our society

59:55

or does it hit our society? So I don't

59:58

feel like that is something that that's happening over here.

1:00:00

For me, the predominant factor

1:00:03

with 1984 is this is a totalitarian government

1:00:07

that is incredibly

1:00:09

intrusive, pervasive, and punishing.

1:00:15

That to me is different than what

1:00:17

I would say is happening over in the States and

1:00:20

Britain of cultural policing of language,

1:00:24

which we see. I think

1:00:26

that there's a very big difference between cultural

1:00:29

policing of language versus state

1:00:31

policing of language. Imagine

1:00:34

that you can say you're

1:00:36

in some other country that you're on a moon base,

1:00:39

right? You can say whatever

1:00:41

you want and nobody cares about it, no

1:00:43

one gives a shit. But if you say certain

1:00:46

forbidden moon words, you will be fined by the government.

1:00:50

That to me is a very different proposition

1:00:53

than the culture of the moon says you

1:00:55

will be cast out if you say one of these things

1:00:57

from our social circles. By the way, there's

1:00:59

no punitive measure that will happen to you legally.

1:01:02

It's just that all of your friends will quit talking to you and

1:01:04

you will not be invited to the picnic and

1:01:07

you'll probably be fired because no one will

1:01:09

want to work with you. That to me, and

1:01:11

I think that that is actually much more insidious. I think the

1:01:13

cultural side of things is far more insidious because

1:01:16

with the government does

1:01:18

it, there's a fine, but

1:01:21

it doesn't really atrophy the social side of things

1:01:23

so much. When the actual tribe- Well,

1:01:27

unless it gets to the totalitarian level.

1:01:29

Unless it gets to that level. But even then

1:01:31

though, yes, it gets to that

1:01:34

level. We're talking like East Germany

1:01:36

where you're ratting out your neighbors and

1:01:38

things like that. To me, this

1:01:41

is the East German model where this

1:01:45

is a top-down governing

1:01:47

of language where people are also being co-opted

1:01:50

as spies. In East Germany,

1:01:53

one of the things that happened when the regime

1:01:55

fell was they opened up all the files from the,

1:01:58

I can't remember, the KGB equipment. equivalent, these German

1:02:01

thought police, whatever it was. The Saad. Thank

1:02:03

you, the Saad. And it turns out like

1:02:05

one out of every five people was a spy. And

1:02:08

so you'll find out that like your

1:02:11

best friend was, you know,

1:02:14

regularly updating the government on you for years and years

1:02:16

and years, right? That to me is kind of the situation

1:02:18

there. That feels different

1:02:20

to me of like the kind of political

1:02:23

correctness, wokeness, whatever we want to call it in the United States.

1:02:25

That to me almost feels like more of a religious

1:02:29

smothering of that word

1:02:31

is profane. That is a heresy. You're

1:02:33

not allowed to say that. It is an affront to the

1:02:35

goodness of the universe. And you must

1:02:38

be given penitence if you do it. So

1:02:41

it feels different to me there. I

1:02:43

don't know if you were looking to go to America specifically

1:02:45

or whatnot, but for me, 1984 is that

1:02:47

like state driven, East

1:02:50

German, North Korean, Soviet type

1:02:52

totalitarianism. So

1:02:54

yeah, American culture obviously

1:02:56

is the one that I'm the most familiar

1:02:59

with. So it's easiest for me to talk to that. So

1:03:03

I don't disagree that

1:03:08

we do not live in the world of 1984 at all.

1:03:13

I would say you're talking about

1:03:16

social policing versus government policing.

1:03:19

Sure. Well put. In 1984, well, you

1:03:21

said it, not me. Yes,

1:03:25

well put. In

1:03:28

the world of 1984 though, it

1:03:30

isn't just government policing. It

1:03:32

is government and social policing

1:03:35

because there is that constant threat that if

1:03:38

the thought police don't catch you,

1:03:40

that girl that looks at you

1:03:42

sometimes in a weird way might be about

1:03:45

to rat you out or your kids or whatever. So

1:03:48

you're getting it from both sides. So

1:03:51

I guess to me, what I see

1:03:53

today, and I think in the United

1:03:56

States anyway, you can kind

1:03:59

of divide it in two ways. into two sort of pyramidal

1:04:01

power structures that are both,

1:04:03

I guess,

1:04:05

in the cognitive stage of development,

1:04:08

if we indeed ever tilt towards

1:04:12

a tyrannical system like

1:04:14

that. But

1:04:17

I think that you lay the groundwork

1:04:21

maybe on a cognitive level, and you

1:04:23

outlined it very well. You know, in

1:04:26

the kind of red team, blue team,

1:04:28

the blue team has this sort of religion

1:04:30

of wokeism,

1:04:34

the red team has this sort

1:04:36

of religion of religion, perhaps

1:04:39

would be one way to look at it. But

1:04:42

there's definitely,

1:04:45

or not definitely, but

1:04:47

I think that

1:04:50

you, what

1:04:52

we see there is if

1:04:54

you are willing to participate

1:04:56

in a society where you

1:04:59

have to constantly be on your guard, not

1:05:02

because the government's going to come shoot you, but because all

1:05:04

of your friends might never speak to you again. Like

1:05:07

you said, it seems like that

1:05:10

might make it easier for some

1:05:12

totalitarian systems to come along

1:05:15

and take advantage of that, because

1:05:18

ultimately that is a kind of weakness.

1:05:20

I mean, we probably don't like to admit

1:05:22

that about ourselves. I know

1:05:24

I don't like it about myself when

1:05:27

I see myself being

1:05:30

guarded in my speech, not because I'm

1:05:33

trying not to hurt somebody's feelings, which I think is a

1:05:35

noble thing to do, and not

1:05:37

because it would cause more

1:05:40

harm than good if I said this thing, and

1:05:42

so I'm calculating

1:05:44

that it's just better not to. Those are noble versions,

1:05:48

I think, of self-censorship. What I'm

1:05:50

self-censoring, because I'm thinking,

1:05:53

you know, this room has

1:05:56

just enough people in it that might make my

1:05:58

life a little better. living

1:06:00

hell if I say what I actually

1:06:02

think here. I don't think

1:06:05

that's a good thing. It might

1:06:07

be a form of cowardice. I don't know. I hope not. But

1:06:10

regardless, the fact that

1:06:13

you and I, who

1:06:16

are about as free-thinking people as I know,

1:06:20

nevertheless fall prey to that

1:06:23

and we know people, so

1:06:27

many people who on

1:06:29

team red, team blue, everything in between,

1:06:33

who fall into that category

1:06:36

even more so, who

1:06:39

feel like they constantly have to toe the line. I

1:06:42

mean, I don't know. To me,

1:06:45

you're sowing seeds into

1:06:47

fallow earth for a society

1:06:50

that it could be easily or

1:06:53

at least legitimately

1:06:57

taken over and subsumed

1:06:59

by a totalitarian state.

1:07:02

I don't think that we are anywhere

1:07:05

near collapsing

1:07:07

into the world of 1984. I know

1:07:12

lots of people who think

1:07:14

that we are and I would be

1:07:16

so bold as to say most of them have actually never

1:07:18

read 1984. I know the sorts of people

1:07:21

you're talking about and I think

1:07:24

what they basically mean is language

1:07:26

is being changed to try to force me to think

1:07:29

a thing. And while I would describe

1:07:31

that as Orwellian, I think that it's Orwellian.

1:07:33

We're not in an Orwellian world. And

1:07:35

by the way, that does happen. It does piss me off.

1:07:37

So for example, I

1:07:40

am very pro-immigration. The debate for me

1:07:42

is lots of immigrants. Take

1:07:44

a drink everybody. Yeah.

1:07:47

Is it lots of immigrants or open borders?

1:07:49

This is where I'm at. So like either triple the amount

1:07:51

of legal immigrants coming into the country or just open

1:07:54

it all. If you don't have a disease

1:07:56

or a terrorist record, come on in. That's about where I'm at. You

1:07:58

don't get much more pro-immigrant than

1:08:01

Andrew Heaton. That

1:08:03

being said, I'll say illegal

1:08:06

alien, and I have friends that say undocumented

1:08:08

immigrant, and the first time I heard this

1:08:10

term, this person explained, well, illegal

1:08:13

alien implies that they're doing

1:08:15

something illegal, and you can't

1:08:17

be illegal as a person. It's

1:08:20

impossible for a person to be illegal. Undocumented

1:08:23

is a better phrase, and I'm like, well, the problem's

1:08:26

not that they don't have to pay, like if you want

1:08:28

to go down that road, a better phrase that

1:08:30

would meet your criteria would be, they are a national

1:08:32

trespasser. That would be the thing. If

1:08:35

you want to call them a national trespasser, which again, I want

1:08:37

them in here, but I'm not

1:08:40

going to alter my, like, I know what you're doing. You're trying

1:08:42

to get everybody to agree to a term so

1:08:44

that everybody has to arrive at your conclusion,

1:08:46

which I do find very insidious, and fuck you, I'm not going to do

1:08:48

that. I'm going to keep using my language and

1:08:50

arrive at a position that's actually much more liberal

1:08:52

than what you want anyway. But I'm going to continue

1:08:55

using my language to get there. Because

1:08:57

you're a goddamn American and not an Oceanian.

1:09:00

And I, yes, exactly. I am a free thinker. And

1:09:02

yeah, so I think that the people

1:09:05

that shout Orwell when they hear that are correct in

1:09:07

the sense that it is an Orwellian tactic. Anytime

1:09:09

you're trying to force other people to adopt

1:09:11

your language, to trick them

1:09:14

into arriving at your conclusion, that is an Orwellian tactic.

1:09:16

But at the same time, I wouldn't say we're living in 1984. We're

1:09:20

ways away from that. No, certainly not. Yeah. I

1:09:22

don't know that I think it's impossible that that could ever

1:09:25

happen. I think we'd probably have to have

1:09:27

a massive world war that killed

1:09:29

off most of the human population because

1:09:31

I don't think you can probably sustain it at eight billion

1:09:33

people. But we're

1:09:35

a long ways away from that unless that

1:09:37

happened. Well, can I toss a question

1:09:40

to you that's more direct about 1984 rather than the

1:09:42

implications in our

1:09:44

current culture? Do

1:09:48

you buy O'Brien's explanation at the end?

1:09:53

Because to me, this breaks down a

1:09:55

little bit where I love the

1:09:58

O'Brien. And incidentally,

1:10:01

I kept like, third

1:10:03

time I've read this book and I found myself

1:10:05

yet again going, but maybe

1:10:07

O'Brien's a good guy. Yeah. Yeah.

1:10:11

Yep. Every time. For

1:10:13

real, no, Emmanuel Goldstein is real and Emmanuel Goldstein called

1:10:15

O'Brien and went, O'Brien, they're onto you. You

1:10:17

gotta throw someone under the bus. Pick

1:10:19

Winston. I know you love him. It's

1:10:21

a shame. You've gotta do it for the greater good. And like,

1:10:23

if we just heard three or four more chapters, O'Brien would like,

1:10:26

you know, like bring it all down. There's this part of me that wants

1:10:28

to believe that, right? I know that that's not the case. I know that's

1:10:30

not the case. I don't know that you can 100% say that's not the case.

1:10:34

Yeah. Yeah. It's such a, like

1:10:37

almost more than Winston being

1:10:40

broken at the end and, you

1:10:42

know, loving Big Brother, the

1:10:45

heartbreak of that book is

1:10:47

the O'Brien character.

1:10:50

Because for one thing, like as somebody

1:10:52

who's read a lot of fiction and written a lot of fiction and you're

1:10:55

the same, you should totally see it

1:10:57

coming from the very beginning. Just

1:10:59

like you see O'Brien,

1:11:01

he looks like somebody you can trust in a world where you

1:11:03

can't trust anybody and then, you know, he invites

1:11:06

you. You should be sitting there going like,

1:11:08

ah, this is totally a trap. Because there's got to be a trap

1:11:10

at some point, right? Like he's got to fall

1:11:12

into the end of act two where

1:11:15

the end of act two is always you fall into

1:11:17

the well and there's no possible way to get

1:11:19

out. And then act three, you get out. But

1:11:21

then it turns into this monstrous

1:11:28

third act where, no, not only are

1:11:30

you not getting out of the well, but

1:11:33

I, who theoretically was supposed

1:11:35

to be the person pulling you out of the well, am

1:11:38

the one throwing the rock down on top of you

1:11:40

from the top of the well. Whether or not O'Brien,

1:11:43

like you have to say if O'Brien

1:11:45

is, let's

1:11:49

say for a moment that O'Brien really is,

1:11:51

he is part

1:11:53

of the resistance, Goldstein is real, all of this stuff

1:11:55

is real. He told

1:11:58

Winston up front like, You're

1:12:00

going to have to betray people. And you

1:12:02

will be caught. And at best, we will slip

1:12:04

you a razor. Yeah. Right.

1:12:07

Right. At best. Well, you have

1:12:09

to assume that O'Brien is also assuming that about

1:12:11

his own life because he says we're not going to accomplish

1:12:14

the downfall of the party in our lifetime. It's not going

1:12:16

to happen. I'll be dead. You'll be dead. Our

1:12:19

kids will be dead. Whatever.

1:12:21

This is a down the road thing. So theoretically,

1:12:24

maybe he betrays Winston because it's the

1:12:27

only way that he can, you know, be able

1:12:29

to bump up to the next thing and cause

1:12:33

further problems for the party from within. Probably

1:12:37

not. Probably he's just an absolute pure

1:12:39

evil character who... The

1:12:43

other interesting thing about this too, about

1:12:45

your question is, because O'Brien's an

1:12:47

inter-party member. O'Brien

1:12:50

is really smart. Like

1:12:52

Syme was really smart. O'Brien

1:12:54

and Syme have basically, there's no daylight

1:12:57

between their understanding of what the party's trying to

1:12:59

accomplish. O'Brien just knows more. But

1:13:02

they definitely understand the ideology.

1:13:05

So

1:13:06

at what level in the

1:13:08

upper party do you

1:13:11

get to have that level of understanding

1:13:14

and be allowed to live? It's not

1:13:16

where O'Brien's at because he's

1:13:19

telling the truth to Winston. Then

1:13:21

he's going to be killed eventually. Now, if he's not telling

1:13:23

the truth... I don't think that's

1:13:26

true because he... The explanation

1:13:28

that O'Brien ultimately has of, the

1:13:30

hell are you doing this for is the goal

1:13:34

of the party and the reason the party is immortal

1:13:37

is, one, it's almost like this, you

1:13:39

know this Buddhist parable, maybe it's a Hindu parable

1:13:42

of the wave is approaching the shore

1:13:44

and it's like, oh no, I'm going to die. And then another

1:13:46

wave says, you're not a wave, you're the ocean,

1:13:49

you can never die. This is like the insidious

1:13:51

dark world version of this, of like, oh

1:13:54

no, I'm an ugly bureaucrat approaching

1:13:56

the end of my life. And it's like, no you're not, you're the vestige

1:13:59

of the party and the parable. cannot die. That's kind

1:14:01

of where O'Brien's in, right? So

1:14:03

O'Brien already has that bit of like, my

1:14:06

individual identity doesn't matter, I am a part of the collective.

1:14:09

But he also like, he says explicitly

1:14:12

to Winston, the quality of life for

1:14:14

everybody in the party, including the inner party, is

1:14:16

worse than it was before the revolution. Like

1:14:18

that I as an inner party member, I

1:14:21

get like better carpet and I, you

1:14:23

know, I get wine, apparently wine is still

1:14:25

being produced somewhere in the world. I get that and like maybe,

1:14:27

presumably, I'm never for want of razors,

1:14:30

which is one of the shortages going on. But the

1:14:32

actual material companies available to me

1:14:34

are pretty modest. I would be, you know, middle

1:14:37

class by the standards of 1940. But the point of the

1:14:41

party, according to O'Brien, is to

1:14:43

exact power over other people

1:14:45

and that that power is exacted by inflicting

1:14:47

harm on them and showing my

1:14:51

displaying to you my ability

1:14:53

to make you prostrate prostrate before

1:14:56

me is the ultimate goal of

1:14:58

the party. The party's goal is just to

1:15:00

have power over other people. I don't

1:15:02

think by that metric, that you automatically

1:15:05

get squelched if you become too smart. I

1:15:07

think if you just happen to be in the inner party,

1:15:09

and you don't run afoul

1:15:12

of internal, internal

1:15:14

interpersonal conflict that you're probably fine

1:15:16

at that point, or maybe some

1:15:18

amount of purity test happens occasionally. I don't

1:15:20

know, but I don't think he's automatically going to go. No, but

1:15:23

the bit that I want to glom onto though is, do

1:15:26

we buy this explanation? Because I

1:15:28

don't think I do. I think

1:15:31

that, I mean, Grant, this is Heaton's

1:15:34

internal Pollyanna bit. So we're, but

1:15:36

you know, over on the political orphanage, the main show

1:15:38

I do, I genuinely believe

1:15:40

that the vast majority of people with

1:15:42

whom I have disagreements are usually

1:15:46

coming at it from a good place. What we're usually disagreeing

1:15:49

on is, there's all these values

1:15:51

we all agree on, that they're all good values. And what we're

1:15:53

really disagreeing on is, which

1:15:55

of these constellations do we prioritize? Are

1:15:57

we prioritizing this thing or this? thing.

1:16:00

And the disagreement is not, are

1:16:03

you a Sith who believes that, you know, evil

1:16:05

is good, ha ha, cackle, mustache, or is

1:16:07

it, are we prioritizing equality

1:16:10

over opportunity, or are we prioritizing

1:16:12

growth over redistribution,

1:16:14

or whatever, right? That's the stuff we're arguing about. And

1:16:17

that most people are coming at things

1:16:19

from a good intention, and

1:16:22

that the problem lies in the execution

1:16:24

of it, that I intend to do this good thing,

1:16:26

but my plan doesn't work, it's going to result in a bad thing,

1:16:28

and that's what I'm finding you on. So,

1:16:29

knowing that's where I'm coming from, I think

1:16:33

most people

1:16:34

do generally want to benefit the

1:16:36

world. I do, there

1:16:39

are clearly like sociopathic, psychopathic

1:16:42

sadists out there, like Saddam Hussein's

1:16:44

kids strike me as that, I've just enjoyed torturing

1:16:46

people for sport. So like, maybe if

1:16:48

they get in power, you know, maybe the

1:16:51

the the the Idi Amin

1:16:54

Saddam Hussein characters, they really is

1:16:56

their goal is just to influence like just to have power

1:16:59

and stuff. But even then I think that like, let's

1:17:02

take Saddam Hussein, piece of shit, by the way, not

1:17:04

a fan of Saddam Hussein, not a not a not

1:17:06

a Saddam apologist. I think

1:17:10

now that they're not paying me, I've

1:17:12

dropped my support of the Hussein administration.

1:17:16

But I think that like, if

1:17:19

Saddam Hussein felt 100% secure, if he felt 100% secure,

1:17:23

he didn't think there was any chance he was going to be unseated

1:17:25

from power. All things being equal,

1:17:27

I think he would have preferred that the people be be

1:17:30

better off rather than worse off, because they would love him more,

1:17:32

and he'd rather have love than not love, right?

1:17:34

Now, between I'm going to

1:17:37

murder 100 people to root out one

1:17:40

possible threat to my security,

1:17:42

absolutely, he would do that. Right? Absolutely.

1:17:45

Like, all things being equal, though, I don't

1:17:47

I don't think that the goal with

1:17:50

most of these radical institutions is

1:17:52

to amiserate the population. I think emiserating

1:17:54

the population is a totally

1:17:57

acceptable price to pay for remaining

1:17:59

in power. But that if you're in power and

1:18:01

not worried about it, just immiserating

1:18:03

them for fun and sport is not really a part of it.

1:18:06

I don't know. What do you think? Well,

1:18:09

I don't think that they're doing it for fun and sport. I

1:18:12

think they're doing it because they

1:18:15

have rightly, at least

1:18:17

in the world that Orwell is picturing,

1:18:19

if not in real life, they have

1:18:21

rightly surmised that the

1:18:23

reason that previous totalitarian

1:18:25

regimes failed, like

1:18:28

the Soviet Union, like the Nazis, was

1:18:31

that they didn't keep going. The

1:18:34

revolution was not supposed

1:18:36

to ever stop because once it stops, then

1:18:39

people can regroup and people eventually start

1:18:41

to form their own thoughts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So

1:18:44

I think that what O'Brien... I

1:18:47

buy O'Brien's explanation

1:18:50

in the sense

1:18:53

that I think he genuinely believes that. What's interesting

1:18:55

about him is, and maybe this is why

1:18:57

it's so jarring and every single time you want him

1:19:00

to turn out to be a good guy, is

1:19:02

that O'Brien, if he

1:19:04

believes everything he's telling Winston, this is

1:19:06

the most honest character

1:19:09

in the entire book. And

1:19:12

he is being 100% genuine

1:19:15

with Winston once he's got him in his

1:19:17

clutches. And to

1:19:19

me, the recognition that a thing is

1:19:21

evil only matters

1:19:24

if evil is a thing that you're

1:19:36

worried about. And

1:19:38

in terms of... Again,

1:19:40

I don't think they're doing it for fun. I think they're doing it because

1:19:42

they recognize that the sausage

1:19:45

has to be made and the way that you make

1:19:47

the sausage the most successfully

1:19:50

for the longest period of time, or forever,

1:19:54

is you've got to keep grinding it. And

1:19:56

that means people have got to suffer because

1:19:58

power requires... that

1:20:01

people suffer. Orwell

1:20:03

was decades

1:20:06

ahead of somebody like Michel

1:20:09

Foucault in terms of understanding

1:20:13

the raw naked truth

1:20:15

about

1:20:16

power, its maintenance.

1:20:19

And

1:20:21

of course, I think Foucault

1:20:23

drew a lot of the wrong conclusions from that, but he certainly

1:20:25

understood that power is this

1:20:28

thing that is essentially

1:20:31

in the ether to be

1:20:34

grabbed. And once

1:20:36

you grab it, if you're going to have a regime

1:20:38

that lasts forever, you're going to have

1:20:40

to continuously break people down. So

1:20:44

maybe it's fun for the sadists among

1:20:47

the inner party. Maybe they enjoy it.

1:20:49

Surely some of them do. O'Brien

1:20:52

might enjoy it. But

1:20:54

I don't think that's the goal. I

1:20:57

think that's just a side effect. So

1:20:59

O'Brien is wrong then. If it's

1:21:01

not the goal, it's a side effect. He

1:21:03

is being accurate. No, no, no. I

1:21:06

think enjoying it is a side effect. If

1:21:08

it's causing pain, it's a thing that

1:21:12

is enjoyable to that side effect. So the sadism

1:21:14

is immaterial. For the party to continue

1:21:17

to exist, it requires immiseration,

1:21:19

pruning, and all of that. Okay, there might be something

1:21:22

to that. So what

1:21:24

I don't think is I think very few revolutionary

1:21:27

regimes start out with there

1:21:31

is no good guy or bad guy. This is just

1:21:33

about power. I laugh at your morals.

1:21:35

I think Robespierre thought he was

1:21:37

the good guy. Stalin thought he

1:21:39

was the good guy. I think most of these people

1:21:42

think, yes, I'm getting my

1:21:44

hands dirty because it is in the service of the greater

1:21:46

good once I'm able to do

1:21:48

this. At the same time though, I can't

1:21:51

remember who said it, but

1:21:53

there's the famous quote, war is the lifeblood

1:21:56

of the state. I think that that's true. I

1:22:00

don't remember who it was. War is a very good way

1:22:03

to get the irritating,

1:22:05

squabbling citizenry to shut the hell up and do

1:22:07

what I tell you because now there's an external

1:22:09

threat. And it's also this

1:22:12

very odd thing where citizens

1:22:15

will very much like

1:22:17

try to thwart the government and paying taxes, will

1:22:19

fight taxes, will do tax avoidance. Pretty

1:22:21

happy to send our kids off to die. It's always been

1:22:23

a pretty easy thing to do compared to tax

1:22:26

avoidance is a lot harder to get rid of than

1:22:28

the draft. The draft is just sort of accepted like,

1:22:30

well, we got to go murder strangers across the world. Okay.

1:22:33

Do we get hats? Yep, you get hats. You

1:22:35

search your gun. All right. Like it's

1:22:37

this weird thing, right? And like, I think you can make a good case

1:22:40

that we're at a point in history where like, we

1:22:42

don't really, wars

1:22:44

could be a lot less common than they are. Like,

1:22:47

I mean, I'm really flashed my politics here, but

1:22:49

like, I think America is probably safe

1:22:52

from getting invaded with about

1:22:54

a quarter of the current military budget. We have a lot

1:22:56

of nuclear warheads and our neighbors

1:22:58

are Mexico and Canada. I think if we had like 20

1:23:01

submarines on either side of the continental

1:23:04

United States, we're fine. We're not going

1:23:06

to, no one, China's not going to come over with as many nukes as

1:23:08

we've got, but we have to have, you know, the military

1:23:10

industrial complex has kept going because it's very

1:23:12

lucrative and, and whenever, maybe

1:23:16

not in America, other countries, I think like Putin's

1:23:19

done this when there's some sort of domestic problem

1:23:21

at home, pick a fight with another country because

1:23:23

then there's an us versus them thing that happens. We

1:23:27

were to invade North Korea. I think the,

1:23:30

the North Korean regime's popularity would skyrocket.

1:23:32

So you, so kind of this idea

1:23:34

then that the immiseration

1:23:37

of the masses and the exercise of power is

1:23:40

a necessary structural phenomenon

1:23:43

for the party to continue to exist.

1:23:46

Yeah. Yeah.

1:23:49

I think that makes sense. Yeah.

1:23:52

Again, like it's

1:23:54

also, I want to stress something

1:23:57

I said earlier, which is I don't like, I don't

1:24:00

I don't think that the likelihood

1:24:03

of the absolute worst scenario

1:24:07

as evidenced in 1984 is very high.

1:24:12

But there's really, I mean, there's so many

1:24:14

levels of absolute

1:24:17

horror that exist between where we're

1:24:19

at and that, that many

1:24:21

of them are easily attainable. Many

1:24:23

of them are attainable by some stretch.

1:24:27

And so I think, I think to

1:24:29

me, the reason I read 1984 every year,

1:24:31

it's twofold. One, it's one of the best

1:24:33

books I've ever read and I love the language of it.

1:24:38

I love that, I love that the beautiful,

1:24:41

simple but elegant prose serves

1:24:44

as this striking counterpoint

1:24:47

to the concept and

1:24:50

the use of new speak within

1:24:53

that same story. What

1:24:56

he's describing in

1:24:58

beautiful terms, kind of presaging like

1:25:01

Cormac McCarthy in The Road, just

1:25:03

how bleak

1:25:05

and sad and you're

1:25:09

always just hungry. Like

1:25:11

you're never full and when

1:25:13

you are, it's full of bad food and all that.

1:25:18

It's interesting that he

1:25:20

goes to such lengths to beautifully describe

1:25:22

that, this world

1:25:25

where the

1:25:28

use of language is sort of being

1:25:30

winnowed away by these

1:25:32

people who are no longer creative. They have no

1:25:35

desire or need to be creative. But

1:25:39

yeah, I don't think we're anywhere near that, but I do

1:25:41

think that I read

1:25:43

it first because it's pleasurable to read

1:25:45

and second because I like to remind

1:25:47

myself that this is

1:25:52

definitely something we want to steer away from when

1:25:54

we see elements of it beginning

1:25:56

to crop up in our own lives and in our own society.

1:26:00

This is one of those things where like, I've never

1:26:02

said in my life, all right, you can go too far

1:26:04

with Orwellianism, but you need a little bit of Orwellianism,

1:26:07

right? Like, you know,

1:26:09

like, you don't want to go chin Orwell, but like,

1:26:11

you know, two or three, like no, no, I'm

1:26:13

with you on that. I think

1:26:16

Orwell is very much a

1:26:18

warning in his own words. I

1:26:22

have gone through the stuff I wanted to

1:26:24

talk about. I know you've got four pages of notes. Are there

1:26:26

any elements of this book that we've not hit that

1:26:28

you want to talk about? I

1:26:31

don't think anything that

1:26:33

wouldn't lengthen this by another couple

1:26:36

of hours, but honestly, no,

1:26:39

I think we've hit the main points. I did.

1:26:41

I wrote four pages of notes. I

1:26:43

drew a little chart that

1:26:48

in preparation for this is the most prepared

1:26:50

I've ever been for a podcast I've done with you. So

1:26:53

take that as you will, audience. And

1:26:56

it's the most sober I've ever been. So for yourself. No.

1:26:59

Yeah. But

1:27:04

I think that I'll

1:27:07

leave it at this. I think were we

1:27:09

to spend another couple of

1:27:11

hours digging into this, I

1:27:14

do think there's probably more of

1:27:17

the world of 1984 that you

1:27:19

could map on to modern American society

1:27:22

than just the

1:27:25

social policing of language. I

1:27:29

think there's more to that that

1:27:32

you could dig into as well. But I'd

1:27:34

say that I think the panopticon thing is there, although

1:27:37

it's the social rather than the top down. Like

1:27:39

the state in America is

1:27:41

not scrutinizing you that much. But

1:27:43

one thing that I do think has happened that

1:27:46

we're the last generation to remember prior to this is

1:27:50

we're all kind of aware that we can be taken

1:27:53

out career-wise or socially if something

1:27:55

goes wrong and it's put on tape. Jennings

1:27:59

and I spent a lot of time together. behind closed doors

1:28:01

drunk and there's very little that

1:28:05

we would say off-camera that the listening

1:28:08

audience would be disturbed to hear us say. We

1:28:11

might be more frank in what we would do or

1:28:13

we might occasionally say something that would like

1:28:17

be an off-color joke that within our little dyad

1:28:19

is amusing but there's like it's not like what

1:28:22

I'm saying is it's not like Jennings and I are wanting to

1:28:24

like shout racial epithets in an Applebee's or

1:28:26

something. That's not what's going on. So noting

1:28:29

that, I think that we're

1:28:31

all aware like you're on

1:28:33

an airplane and you're very stressed and you say something

1:28:35

like like heinous that like your life could

1:28:37

be over like you could like this this could ruin

1:28:39

your life. That there's a certain level

1:28:42

of societal

1:28:44

mind your Ps and Qs which I think is much higher now

1:28:46

than it was 30 years ago. Maybe

1:28:50

for good and for ill like I occasionally

1:28:56

watch these British

1:28:59

period pieces where you

1:29:01

know the the Lord shouts it is made

1:29:04

you know you stupid trollop. I

1:29:06

said bring the silver you profit gold you

1:29:08

know and you're like god what a dick why would anybody

1:29:10

like why it's unnecessary why would you do that I

1:29:12

would never do that and then I will I'll

1:29:15

be in my home and I'll be like I

1:29:17

won't say the the name lest it trigger it

1:29:19

and people listening but I'll be like Amazon

1:29:22

Echo play Electric

1:29:24

Light Orchestra and it'll start playing the wrong song I'll

1:29:26

be like you dumb whore I asked another

1:29:28

one I wanted and then I'm like oh it turns out I

1:29:31

am that monster when there's no social pressure whatsoever

1:29:33

I think most people are but I think that

1:29:35

panopticon element is much stronger now. There

1:29:38

is a sense of being watched that I that I think

1:29:40

is now ubiquitous. I think I feel as though

1:29:42

I'm being watched all the time even though even

1:29:44

though we're all right we're all laughably

1:29:47

minuscule figures in this world. There

1:29:49

is a sense of like anything I say can

1:29:51

be taken out of context at the grocery

1:29:54

store that I think is I

1:29:56

think that that is kind of a new feature of life that didn't

1:29:58

used to be there. By

1:30:01

the way, this is funny

1:30:03

and hopefully more funny than disturbing, but

1:30:06

one of the areas that

1:30:09

I find myself thinking about this in an inordinate

1:30:11

amount is I listen to some true crime

1:30:14

podcasts and stuff, and you'll hear stories

1:30:17

about serial killers

1:30:19

in the 70s and even

1:30:22

in the 80s,

1:30:24

the top 10, the really bad guys

1:30:27

that killed a lot of people. And you'll hear

1:30:30

kind of the slow

1:30:33

way in which they were brought down. And

1:30:36

I'll sit there and I'll think, I'll

1:30:39

think, oh, man, you could get

1:30:41

away with so much more back then. And I'm

1:30:43

like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? Yeah,

1:30:45

that's not a good thing. We

1:30:48

can catch a serial killer a lot easier these days,

1:30:51

but it does kind of, I'm sure it's

1:30:53

just nostalgia for that timeframe. Everybody

1:30:57

has that as they start to get older, looking

1:30:59

back on the time when they grew up, when things

1:31:02

were simpler and blah, blah, blah.

1:31:04

But definitely there's a market

1:31:06

difference between, you're

1:31:09

right, it's mostly a social thing, but

1:31:11

it's also a law enforcement thing

1:31:13

as well. I mean, there's, because it is harder

1:31:15

to get away with a lot of things than it used to be. That's

1:31:19

good for now, as long as

1:31:21

law enforcement and the government don't, you

1:31:24

know, get out of hand. London

1:31:26

is one of the most surveilled cities in the world.

1:31:29

There's a tremendous amount of CCTV in

1:31:31

London now. I

1:31:33

don't think of London as a totalitarian

1:31:35

place at all, but there is something

1:31:38

to be said for like, you know what? It's this, there's, I

1:31:40

think the space in the

1:31:42

world that is anonymous has declined.

1:31:45

The bits where it's still anonymous are the shitty

1:31:47

parts I don't want to go to, like Twitter, where

1:31:49

I'm like, oh cool, I can argue with ass

1:31:52

raptor 432 for three hours about something stupid.

1:31:55

Like yeah, you get to be anonymous in that context, but the bit where you

1:31:57

just go outside and you're anonymous, that seems to have declined.

1:32:00

a lot, which is a weird feeling. And

1:32:02

I suppose it is a touch more Orwellian

1:32:04

than it was 30 years ago. I share

1:32:07

your general optimism,

1:32:10

I think mostly. To me, 1984 is a cautionary

1:32:12

tale. And I guess when

1:32:18

I see things crop up that

1:32:21

are, that feel

1:32:24

like they have that flavor to them,

1:32:26

he

1:32:27

gives me the willies. So

1:32:31

that's, I guess that's, there you go. That's

1:32:33

my end of the two hour discussion.

1:32:36

Conclusion of my thoughts is, it gives

1:32:38

me the willies. I like it. Me too, my friend.

1:32:41

We will put a pen in there.

1:32:43

Josh Jennings, always a pleasure. Always

1:32:46

a pleasure for me as well. And I'll see you soon.

1:33:29

I don't think I've been

1:33:31

swelled, you made everyone feel

1:33:33

everywhere. Lord I've came

1:33:35

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1:33:37

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