Why you need to (re)read 1984 -- ASAP

Orwell's dystopian classic never fully went away. But six years after Covid lockdowns returned it to center stage, China, mass surveillance and AI-generated propaganda make it more relevant than ever.

(FIRST OF TWO PARTS)

You’ve read 1984.

Even if you haven’t, you think you have. Everyone knows its most famous slogans, testimony to the power of propaganda to warp minds. Big Brother Is Watching. Two Plus Two Equals Five. Freedom Is Slavery. War is Peace.

So why take the time to read George Orwell’s novel (again)? After all, on the most basic level, 1984’s predictions were wrong. Published in 1949, as the Cold War began, the book forecasts a nuclear war that destroys democracies, ends economic progress, and melts the world into three all-powerful states.

We avoided that particular future, thankfully. The missiles stayed siloed. The West did not fall into the trap of communism or fascism. And in 1990, 41 years after Orwell’s masterwork, the Soviet Union collapsed, largely without bloodshed.

Yet this weekend I reopened 1984 for the first time in many years — and found it more relevant than it has been at least since the fall of the Soviet Union. 1984 was the most important novel of the 20th century. It is shaping up to be the most important of this century too.

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(Spoilers ahead. Including the most important. I depend on you for this work. I hope you’ll support it)

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As I read I realized I had forgotten the visceral horrors of the world Orwell created in his pages.

Orwell, an English journalist whose real name was Eric Blair, had fought on the Communist-backed Republican side against Nazi-backed fascists in the brutal Spanish civil war. He had seen overwhelming state power up close. He could easily imagine totalitarianism’s horrors overtaking democracies.¹

And Orwell does not hide his pessimism. From 1984’s first pages to its terrible final sentence, Orwell insists Winston Smith, his hero — though hero is not entirely accurate, as Smith is a sad, damaged, cowardly man — has no chance of overcoming the state. The Party and its Thought Police control Oceania completely.

Smith knows the truth too: thoughtcrime IS death, he writes as he begins a diary — a forbidden act, for it gives him memories the Party cannot erase. He is sure the Thought Police will soon discover his feeble efforts at resistance and destroy him.

The novel proves Smith not merely correct but optimistic in his hopelessness.

Indeed, the blank diary itself has been sold to him by a member of the Thought Police, just as the insurgency he will later believe he is joining is a mirage, created by the state. His pathetic rebellion has been monitored almost from the moment he first imagined it seven years before. Orwell denies him even the minor glory of being allowed to die in revolt.

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(Orwell was no Prince: 1999 was way more fun.)

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But Oceania is not merely totalitarian; it is a bitter, poor place.

Even a trained, educated Party member like Smith lives badly, subsisting on barely edible food, constantly facing shortages of basic goods like razor blades. Only a handful of “Inner Party” members live well. Scientific and technological progress has largely stopped, too.

Here Orwell’s politics betrayed him.

He hated fascism, but he was a socialist. He misunderstood the importance capitalism and technological progress would play in saving democracy. The United States, Europe, and the rest of the democratic capitalist world grew fantastically from 1949 to 1989. The Soviet Union and its communist allies fell too far behind to compete economically, socially, or militarily. They had taken freedom from their citizens but offered nothing in return. The massive state bureaucracies at communism’s core destroyed not just business competition but innovation of any kind.

So when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was easy to slip 1984 into the dustbin of history. The world Orwell imagined — of “a boot stomping a human face, forever” — was gone. Totalitarianism might triumph behind national borders and walls for a few years or even decades.

But it eventually would collapse under its own weight, and the weight of the governments required to administer and police it. Totalitarian states simply could not compete with capitalist democracies. That was the lesson the second half of the 20th century seemed to teach. History had not ended.

It had been won.

Except China had other plans.

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(Beijing, June 5, 1989. A man blocks a column of Chinese tanks from sheer force of will.

Spoiler alert 2: The Party ran him over. Metaphorically, maybe physically too.)

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The spring 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square should have marked the beginning of the end of the Chinese Communist regime, which had failed as badly as its Soviet cousin to deliver prosperity to its people.

Instead China’s rulers adapted, liberalizing economic rules without giving up political power. The West encouraged China’s efforts, engaging tightly, opening laboratories and universities to Chinese students and scientists, transferring technology, helping the Chinese become a global manufacturing leader almost overnight.

Part of this move came from self-interested multinational companies. But the United States and European governments encouraged it, betting that sooner or later China’s newly wealthy and empowered population would demand a chance at democracy.

Did that plan ever really have a chance?

I doubt anyone outside Zhongnanhai, the central Beijing neighborhood that is home to China’s Communist elite, knows for sure. For a very brief period in the 2000s, it seemed as though it might.

But now, almost 37 years after Tiananmen Square, the Western bet on Chinese democracy has been decisively lost.

China is the world’s largest or second-largest economy, depending on which measure of gross domestic product is used. It still badly lacks in soft power and cultural importance, but it is the unrivaled world center of manufacturing and has pulled ahead of the United States in many advanced technologies.

Overall, China trails only the United States as a military and global power, and not by much. The People’s Republic is a greater rival to the United States than the Soviet Union was at any point past about 1960.

And it has done so without sniffing democracy. Indeed, China is a profoundly authoritarian regime — and becoming more so by the year. It has garrisoned millions of Muslim-minority Uighurs in northwestern China and pressed them into forced labor camps. During Covid, it locked down hundreds of millions of residents of major cities for months or years, enforcing much tighter restrictions than Western citizens would tolerate.

Its leader, Xi Jinping, tolerates essentially no public opposition — not from ordinary citizens, not from wealthy elites who have made billionaires in China’s boom, and not from members of his own government.

Yet China’s growth continues to outpace the United States and far outpace Europe.

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(Fighting for freedom one word at a time. With your help.)

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China’s growth story fundamentally undoes the hopeful Western premise that democracy is a driver of long-term economic growth, and vice-versa.

No one knows this better than China itself. With an eye towards retaking Taiwan — an event that would represent a seismic threat to the world order, as it would force an entire democratic nation of 23 million people under authoritarian control — it is increasingly talking up its own virtues, and using its vast wealth to promote its influence across the global south.

But how has China avoided the totalitarian economic nightmare that 1984 so brilliantly captures?

And what does its success mean for the future of democracy in the United States and everywhere else?

END OF PART ONE

1. In this way, 1984 feels a lot like The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history which Philip K. Dick imagines the Nazis have won World War 2 and occupy the United States; Dick wrote it in 1962, when the Nazi horrors were still fresh.