When Newspeak Comes
By Lee M. Williams
I loved 1984 by George Orwell, not because it was the first dystopia I read as a young man, but because it was so relevant to what I was observing in the world around me. Like any other kid, I was intrigued by what was happening with me in terms of growth, hormones, and social circles, but I was also growing keenly aware of two other entities, politics and corporations.
When you are young you get the natural benefit of being further removed from day to day activities than most of those around you. When I looked at the commercials on TV, the influence of careers, and the messianic role of consumerism, I saw many people around me playing a role in a system. This system, and it’s processes and methods, were far reaching in terms of who and what they touched.
Politics and it’s role in the day to day lives of those in my suburban neighborhood, and my middle school, and my family, was all pervasive. So much so that like the role of corporations and capitalism, it was intertwined into the fabric of everyone's existence. Very few people around me had that half-step-back perspective, that these core concepts were so relevant to theirs and other peoples lives. Yet so much of what they did everyday was interrelated.
I would walk back and forth to school each day and I was a walking reader. When I wasn’t reading, and sometimes when I was, I would reflect upon these things and try and draw those lines. My father recognized my obsession with reading and thinking and fed me with a steady supply of fresh literary meat to consume. I would later realize that this was one of if not his only great gift to me as a young man, these books that most people would never have given a person my age.
The morning I started reading 1984 on my walk to school, I skipped school so I could finish it that same day. It had everything I wondered about at the time tied up in one neat little package of insight, and I couldn’t believe that this guy had written it and projected so much from his desk back in 1949.
I still see parallels to what is happening in our world today, and it has been well over another 30 years since that book was written. What is different is how some of the concepts have manifested themselves in our present time.
Thought crime as an example. In Orwell's fiction this is representative of independent thought, and judgement and punishment is sent down from some inner party of Oceania. What he may not have anticipated is that an ‘inner party’ would become best represented by the masses and some combination of social media and technology.
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My Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of family, friends, friends of friends, and loosely affiliated colleagues who behave as one collective inner party. They are offended by any measure of independent thought and they jump at the opportunity to tell me and others who have it that they are first, offended that you have some and second, that you are wrong, often quoting headlines, rhetoric, and false facts that they found somewhere online as proof.
It is one big group think that in no way represents an original thought of the individual, but instead regurgitates the opinions and needs of a platform or group.
This is what our politics has turned into. Like Orwell and others have predicted, there is also a strong form of collusion and almost a complete merger of the political and corporate worlds and they are collectively monitoring and analyzing our every comment and move. Collectively we offer some excuses for this in the form of capitalism and peace, but there is no doubt that it is happening and at a scale and rate that would make most individuals, if they were truly given the details, tremble in the realization that they were really a part of one big brother like police state.
The second example of the prescience of that hallmark dystopia is Newspeak. I can remember reading about this concept of how you could change the language and the very vocabulary that a society used and control them, and while I thought it fascinating, I had a hard time believing that it could ever happen here. Now I see it happening here.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
That quote from George Orwell, who lived during a time of great struggle and a time where the rise of Nationalism was the most terrifying and unifying force, summarizes what we hear in mainstream media and among our friends and neighbors today. 1984 assumed Newspeak would come from some government or political entity that desired to control our ability to independently think and offer sincere impressions. Thoughts that were more relevant to the human condition were viewed as counter productive and damned by the powers that be.
Listen to the news today, we have what is being called normalization. Which is just another term for insincerity. Our politicians and our media, in their attempt to gain acceptance for concepts and issues that are historically damning to the individual, are giving us different words and using nuance to overcome the full impact of what is happening.
Let’s pull some of these slips of paper out of the tube of language correction and observe them for what they are, Newspeak. Alt-Right is a perfect example. I have heard this described as a marketing label for the white supremacists, but I don’t think that concept does justice to the true harm of the media’s use of it on TV and in newspapers today.
When someone hates something or a group of people, or a whole race, calling that an alternative is being extraordinarily polite. So much so that you are agreeing to cover up the true impact of the term. Instead of telling the public that this person hates a whole race or group and has actively worked to demean, discredit, and disadvantage them, you legitimize and justify it. That is more than marketing an idea or labeling a concept, it is actively participating, through association, in the very harm that will come from the hate of those individuals.
The entire concept of normalization occurring on media, online, and in pubs and coffee shops around our country right now is a trend toward full acceptance of Newspeak.
What is embedded in these conversations is an insincerity and an obfuscation of independent and original thought. We are actively persecuting human rights, right in front of ourselves, and acting like the last century of development and progress was not worth our time.
Rest assured that the future is not a dystopia, and it is not going to be filled with questions about whether or not someones race, skin color, heritage, family, or economic disposition is their flaw. That is not how progress works.
What Orwell’s 1984, and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and Toffler’s Future Shock, and Dick’s Man in the High Castle, and other texts that many of us were handed as we were growing up trying to figure out what was really going on in the world, were really telling us is that progress through history is not a straight line. These authors, and other independent thinkers, gave us a toolbox of perspectives and concepts by which we can rationally expose the truth in our world. They did this because they knew we would need it.
