Isn't that line about a foot stomping on a human face forever a quote from O'Brian? If so, it's the kind of thing he'd like to believe, but it wouldn't be the sort of thing that could be known, and is less likely to be accurate considering that atmosphere of lies that Oceania had.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if Orwell meant it to be taken straight.
Second thought: O'Brian might not have believed it himself (what does belief mean to an Inner Party member?), he just might have been saying it to get Winston to despair.
One of the other implausibilities of the book is that people who get hurt in dictatorships are generally just ground up by the system, they aren't targeted by a highly intellectual stalker.
And Margaret Atwood made this point:
But this view of Orwell is contradicted by the last chapter in the book, an essay on Newspeak [..] the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it's my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for.
in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen
Plusuntrue. This may simply be a conventional way of indicating that Orwell is discussing a fictional universe; there is nothing in the text to indicate that the narrator of the appendix resides within the world of 1984. Similarly, when SM Stirling ended "Marching Through Georgia" with an appendix of Draka history and weapons, it was in the past tense, but it wasn't obviously an in-universe work; it had information not readily apparent to any Alliance writer, but attitudes neutrally non-Draka.
Isn't that line about a foot stomping on a human face forever a quote from O'Brian? If so, it's the kind of thing he'd like to believe,
No, I don't think he'd like to believe that, and that's one of the major points of the book.
The horror of the book is twofold.
Everyone could be against the system, and wish it weren't so, but still be efficient and effective cogs in the machine. The machine does not require willing cogs. O'Brien seems more resigned than a true believer, but he obediently plays his part as a cog.
The other horror is the ability to take up WInston like a piece of meat, grind him up like hamburger, and mold him into whatever shape they wanted. Make him believe whatever they wanted, make him love or hate whatever they wanted.
There is a tradition in a lot of fiction to glorify the idea that people can't be broken, that they can hold one small piece of themselves inviolable. Winston thought he could hold on and not betray Julia. Wrong.
Another example of such glorification was Bigger Thomas saying "you can't make me do nothing but die". Guess again. Your'e a meat machine with buttons, and if we press the right buttons in the right order, you'll beg and plead to be given a chance to please us, and you'll mean it. You'll want to please us.
The most stable forms of government are democracies and monarchies; nothing else endures that long.
What's the difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship? A monarchy has rules of succession but most monarchies foundered through contested successions. A dictator can also groom a successor (like Kim Jong-Un). And many monarchs who didn't inherit their power could be called dictators.
Robespierre was deposed from within his own government - and so the Terror, for all its bloodshed, didn't even last a full year. The worse excesses of Stalinism ended with Stalin. Gorbachev voluntarily opened up his regime (to a certain extent). Mao would excoriate the China of today.
All of these are examples of very stable dictatorships. As you point out, none of them were close to revolution (Gorbachev's USSR had coup attempts, but not popular revolutions). In each case, when the successors attained power, they repudiated the previous dictator's harsh policies and instituted reforms - something which is easiest to do during a generational change of power. This didn't happen because the dictatorships weren't stable.
What's the difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship?
There are both ideological and practical differences. A monarch is head of state explicitly because of his ancestry; further, they tend to go with a hereditary aristocracy explicitly identified as such. (The Soviet nomenklatura was certainly hereditary, but it was not part of the public organisation of the USSR.) A dictator may inherit power from his father, but that's not the basis of his legitimacy; he is dictator because he "safeguards the revolution" or "leads the Party" or whatever. In fact, monarchies generally speaking don't have an explicit ideology, unless you count "family X shall retain the throne"; dictatorships have,a least publicly, some sort of theoretical underpinning, whether it's marxist-leninism, lebensraum for the X race, or Ordnung Muss Sein.
Further, monarchs have, as a general rule, been less obvious about the mailed fist; secret police and censorship certainly occur, but they are not central, obvious features of the regime. They also tend to be less overtly militaristic; note for example that Britain has a Royal Navy and a Royal Air Force, but a British Army. That's ...
I'm confused by this post but I'm not sure if that is because of vocabulary or actually disagreement (and whether that disagreement is about Orwell or the world).
First, I don't agree that "dictatorships are stable forms of government" has seeped into our consciousness. I mean, maybe it is the case for people who just read the book. But in the field of international relations it is practically a truism that dictatorships are unstable. Much of American foreign policy thought consists of worrying about what will happen when this or that dictators dies, loses control over his military or faces popular revolt. And there are tons of explanations for why democracies are so stable, see "Democratic Peace Theory".
Second, Orwell's Oceania wasn't a dictatorship. There was a central figure-- "Big Brother"-- but it turned out Big Brother was long gone, if he had ever existed at all. Totalitarian, authoritarian and oligarchical--yes, but it isn't clear it is a dictatorship. This is relevant because Orwell's prediction wasn't actually about the number of people with power: it was about power as a force which could control and produce all human activity. It was a war...
But that doesn't mean it's accurate as a source of predictions or counterfactuals. Orwell's belief that "British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war" was wrong.
London has rougly as many cameras that watch it's population as Orwell predicts in his book. Sure the camera's that people have in their homes aren't yet directly connected to the surveillance apparatus but the amount of camera's outside the home is massive.
Secret gap orders allow powerful people to delete newspaper articles from the internet archives of important UK papers and prevent new articles to get published.
You have laws force people to speak in front of court against their own interest by giving the government their passwords.
Agree denotationally, but disagree connotationally. Yes, some of these predictions are accurate, but they aren't used nearly to the extent that would be required for this to be an Orwellian dictatorship.
We were discussing the British situation. How did we suddenly jump to Guantanamo?
Because there were British detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
a lot of implicit assumptions have seeped into our consciousness. The most important one (shared with many other dystopian novels) is that dictatorships are stable forms of government.
we should refrain from assuming that dictatorships, whether party or individual, are somehow the default state, and conduct a much more evidence-based analysis of the matter.
My comment is unrelated to Orwell, but it is related to the stability of real-world political regimes.
I recently read The Dictator’s Handbook, an excellent book which essentially is a popular account of the selectorate theory. Let me attempt a TL;DR, or rather a list of key points relevant to the current discussion, from memory:
Nobody rules alone. Stalins, Genghis Khans and Clintons need supporters to keep them in power.
The key imperative of a ruler is his political survival, that is, staying in power.
The ruler stays in power by rewarding his essential supporters (referred to as ‘essentials’), that is, people whose support translates into staying in power.
Regimes where the coalition of essentials is small are referred to as autocracies. Regimes with large coalitions of essentials are referred to as democracies. The auth
Statistically, the political survival of a ruler (defined via the probability of being ousted in the next two-year period) in an autocracy is significantly higher than in a democracy. That is, an autocracy is statistically more stable than a democracy.
By ousted, do they mean a revolution? Or does that also include the normal election cycles?
Perhaps something which may be useful here is to look at a couple dictatorships that have been stable, and why:
North Korea survives on propaganda, isolation, and by keeping the population so poor and scattered that revolution is nearly impossible. The controllers have access to substantial power compared to the population as a whole, and the population is prevented from using their political superpower because they're too scattered and diffuse.
Saudi Arabia survives by having so much power and money funneled to the ruling class that the ruling class is
Orwell did write that Oceana wasn't robust to genuine external threats, but his fictional world lacked them. Also, I suspect that a sufficiently bad natural disaster could also disrupt things enough to shut down the system and force people to start over.
One important step is to identify the relevant factors that need to be considered to determine what kind of governments are stable. Educational level, technology, wealth, cultural diversity and antagonism, etc. A recent paper in Science is an interesting example: "Ethnicity and Conflict: Theory and Facts", Joan Esteban, Laura Mayoral, and Debraj Ray, Science 18 May 2012: 858-865. [DOI:10.1126/science.1222240]. It took on the question of how ethnic diversity affects stability. They found 1 ethnic group is very stable, 2 less stable, 3 the least-st...
Your caveats seem to make the rest of the post a bit pointless, although it is very interesting! You say that dictatorships have not been stable up till now, i.e. in conditions we are used to. But the central xrisk concern about dictatorships is their stability in new conditions i.e. world government or advanced surveillance. The stability of dictatorships in the past or at present doesn't seem to have much bearing on their stability in the future.
Or rather, it seems to have bearing in the more limited sense that we can examine particular causes of past in...
I think you'd do well to distinguish between dictatorship and totalitarianism.
Ideological totalitarianism seems very stable to me in ways that a corrupt and venal dictatorship is not. Add in a panopticon that is already technically feasible, and there's little reason I see it can't last and last and last, particularly if the group in power sees benefit in the system.
I am glad to see you write that forever = forever. The more I learned about the implications of absolute terms the less I came to use them.
There is no evidence that anything like the world he envisaged could (or will) happen.
The future won't be like the past
Which is it? The past limits the future or the past does not limit the future?
Nitpick: the British expansion of the franchise seems out of place in your list. Britain was hardly a dictatorship to begin with, so doesn't constitute evidence that dictatorships change, though it is evidence that non-democracies can become democracies without violence.
It was a product of its time. For a long time the shift had been towards larger states, bigger weapons of war technology had allowed more central authority.
Since then the shift has gone the other way. One person can carry a weapon which can blow the largest warship out of the water and significant weapons have become smaller and more accessible. Computing and crypto has given everyone capable the tools to speak privately if they really want it.
Some tech makes it easier for a small number of people to control a lot of people, some tech makes it harder.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is brilliant, terrifying and useful. It's been at its best fighting against governmental intrusions, and is often quoted by journalists and even judges. It's cultural impact has been immense. And, hey, it's well written.
But that doesn't mean it's accurate as a source of predictions or counterfactuals. Orwell's belief that "British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war" was wrong. Nineteen Eighty-Four did not predict the future course of communism. There is no evidence that anything like the world he envisaged could (or will) happen. Which isn't the same as saying that it couldn't, but we do require some evidence before accepting Orwell's world as realistic.
Yet from this book, a lot of implicit assumptions have seeped into our consciousness. The most important one (shared with many other dystopian novels) is that dictatorships are stable forms of government. Note the "forever" in the quote above - the society Orwell warned about would never change, never improve, never transform. In several conversations (about future governments, for instance), I've heard - and made - the argument that a dictatorship was inevitable, because it's an absorbing state. Democracies can come become dictatorships, but dictatorships (barring revolutions) will endure for good. And so the idea is that if revolutions become impossible (because of ubiquitous surveillance, for instance), then we're stuck with Big Brother for life, and for our children's children'c children's lives.
But thinking about this in the context of history, this doesn't seem credible. The most stable forms of government are democracies and monarchies; nothing else endures that long. And laying revolutions aside, there have been plenty of examples of even quite nasty governments improving themselves. Robespierre was deposed from within his own government - and so the Terror, for all its bloodshed, didn't even last a full year. The worse excesses of Stalinism ended with Stalin. Gorbachev voluntarily opened up his regime (to a certain extent). Mao would excoriate the China of today. Britain's leaders in the 19th and 20th century gradually opened up the franchise, without ever coming close to being deposed by force of arms. The dictatorships of Latin America have mostly fallen to democracies (though revolutions played a larger role there). Looking over the course of recent history, I see very little evidence the dictatorships have much lasting power at all - or that they are incapable of drastic internal change and even improvements.
Now, caveats abound. The future won't be like the past - maybe an Orwellian dictatorship will become possible with advanced surveillance technologies. Maybe a world government won't see any neighbouring government doing a better job, and feel compelled to match it by improving lot of its citizens. Maybe the threat of revolution remains necessary, even if revolts don't actually happen.
Still, we should refrain from assuming that dictatorships, whether party or individual, are somehow the default state, and conduct a much more evidence-based analysis of the matter.