23rd August 2022
One problem with books like Nineteen Eighty-four is that their sheer familiarity means they lose their impact.
Indeed, phrases like Big Brother and Room 101 have become so detached from their literary mooring that they now have their own existence in popular culture.
George Orwell, if he were still alive and writing, would probably say that we should not use such now-hackneyed images and create fresh ones – and he may well have a point.
He would no doubt urge that we throw away Nineteen Eighty-four and come up with new and vivid turns of phrase.
But it is a pity for there is one passage in particular in his great novel which seems very relevant in these days of populism, polarisation, and post-truth, the 3Ps.
You will know the passage:
“From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”
In formal terms:
“[X] is [the opposite of X]
[Y] is [the opposite of Y]
[Z] is [the opposite of Z]”
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These slogans are extreme.
But they are perfect, in their ways, for they cover and anticipate what may otherwise disprove them.
These are the slogans of politicians who are utterly unafraid of it being pointed out that the opposite is the case to what they are claiming.
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The slogans of today are similar in effect, if not form, in that they are not capable of being defeated by the opposite being the case in reality.
Yesterday on this blog it was contended (again) that there is not only a discrepancy but a contradiction between the slogan “Law and Order!” and actual law and order.
But there are many more.
For example, think about “Free Trade!” vs free trade.
In the name of “Free Trade!”, we have in Great Britain – with this government’s Brexit policy – cut ourselves off from an immense single market just a few miles away.
Similarly, in the name of “Free Speech!” all supposedly “woke” positions are to be cancelled, especially if taxpayers’ money is involved.
And so on.
There are many more.
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But none of these contradictions matter, for the slogans can brook no opposition:
“Law and Order!”
“Free Trade!”
“Free Speech!”
Against any practical objection – or empirical disproof – the shouted slogans just get louder, and the nods and cheers – and clicks – continue.
Against this, commentary is often pointless.
It does not matter that anyone is pointing out the differences between what is said and what is done, because these politico-linguistic constructs have lives of their own.
You may as well try to catch ghosts and wisps with a butterfly net.
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As this blog has averred before, there is still some purpose in commentating, as at least there can be a register at the time that some people saw the mismatches.
And there may be – perhaps – one or two readers who come to a blog like this other than to have their prejudices confirmed.
But generally blogs like this are merely part of the noise that 3P politicians actually want to provoke – the sound of “libs” being “owned”.
Perhaps after the general election there may be politicians in power (even from the current governing party) who want again to connect what they say with what they do.
Perhaps there may even be enough voters who begin to care that they are being lied to.
Perhaps.
But as it stands, a great deal of commentary – including on this blog – is not making things any better, because many politicians know it does not matter if what they say is not true.
If politicians and voters do not mind such contradictions, then pointing out these contradictions has no real purchase.
And until there comes about politicians that want power who can provide leadership – and make voters care about they are being lied to – then there is little point to law and policy commentary.
But we should do it anyway.
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What a strange time we live in when the promotion of irrationality has replaced political initiatives to solve social and economic problems
Very true. In a blog, I recalled how:
“From about the age of 11 or 12, once I started to lose my respect for adult conversation and began to realise how befuddled and reactive so many adults were, how so many certainties were based on an incomplete understandings and uncorroborated group-think assumptions, how objectivity was continually usurped by emotional fragility, I initially felt a sense of opportunity and societal optimism – I perceived, until my 20s, that all you had to do was to expose the facts to enough people, and a logical conclusion of some sort surely would be drawn.
The internet, with its mass dissemination of information, soon put paid to that liberal delusion.”
Blog here:
https://ayenaw.com/2021/07/18/post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc/
“..But as it stands, a great deal of commentary – including on this blog – is not making things any better, because many politicians know it does not matter if what they say is not true…”
This as you’ve rightly written is the challenge of blog’s and social media in general.
Social media gives rise to the expectation that everyone has a say – to an extent that it true. Unfortunately, much of what is written, blogged and tweeted about is just that ….. it’s nothing special – it all gets lost. in the ether.
I’d go as far as to say that most social media is absolute c**p – it really oughtn’t to be published at all but sadly it is. It diminishes high quality content.
The good news is that good blogs survive & thrive because of interesting topics & an intelligent commentariat. It’s doubtful that such blogs will change the world but they can be a catharsis for the author & reader.
A week or so ago, a chap Tweeted, “George Orwell predicted the mother of all #Freeports and #CharterCities …”
I confess that I had forgotten that such weighty economic matters came into my A Level English Language and Literature study of 1984.
Admittedly, I had, as an A Level Economics student, taken Airstrip One to be very much a command economy.
There was, though, an old bloke who went on about Imperial measurements when ordering his wallop whilst Big Brother insisted on metric …
The West has always been afflicted with periods of hysteria. This time the salient distinction is that a non-trivial number of influential types have discovered that they can easily obtain power and riches by surfing self-propagating waves of irrationality. I would suggest three large-scale possibilities drawn from history, the recent (20th century) and what could be called a variation on Malthusianism. First, is this the start of another civilization collapse – that is, as in every previous complex construct are humans simply (eventually) unable to control their self-destructiveness? Second, is this a moment that is (with luck) the transient consequence of encouraging sociopathy as a bedrock social organizing principle? Third, is this simply the inevitable consequence of billions of humans: in a world approaching ten billion humans, 1-2% socio and psychopaths – not to mention other anti-social personality disorders like narcissism – is a lot of bad actors.
That said, I do not think you – or we – should stop trying. Thank you for what you do.
For psychopaths, the estimate goes up to 2% to 4% if organizational psychopaths are included. These are not usually physically violent and have not been imprisoned, though some should be.
Why come up with new turns of phrase when the existing ones are very apt? Orwell’s 1984 is very apt for the current “post truth” gaslighting government. Particularly WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY and especially IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. I would also add references to the Ministry of Truth and doublethink.
The reason we haven’t come up with new phrases is that no one has written a dystopian work of fiction with the same direct relevance today as 1984. When someone does we can adopt the quotations. There are of course TV shows like “The Boys from the Blackstuff” which were very relevant at the time, but less directly so now. Its other problem is that apart from “Gi’s a job” not much sticks in the mind, unlike the written quotations of Orwell. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is another dystopian work but while the plight of the victims of the Republic of Gilead is familiar to anyone who has seen the TV version memorable quotations from the text haven’t yet stuck in the collective consciousness.
So in the meantime quotes from 1984 and the genius of George Orwell must suffice.
While phrases may not have entered the public consciousness, images certainly have. Everyone knows what point you’re making if you reply to a Twitter post with an image of someone wearing that distinctive red and white costume, even if you don’t mention Gilead. And there has also been Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta, or more exactly the film based on it which he declined to cooperate with, which was the source of the idea that a powerful and secretive group of anarchists would wear Guy Fawkes masks.
Maybe naively, I still hold out some hope that the few politicians with a military background might try to defend ‘the reality-based community’. There’s an irreducible connection in their profession between bad decisions and costs that can’t be ignored. If they stuff up, people die, and you can’t really hide that.
That said, I’d hoped for better from Tugendhat and Ellwood during the current paroxysm of populism.
Military service seems routinely to engender the kind of unthinking, reactionary nationalism that benights so much of modern life – it’s pretty much the last cohort from which I would expect our salvation to come.
(And it’s not related to rank, either – it doesn’t get better up the chain of command.)
I think you do yourself down.
I suspect that your commentary does actually get read by influential people. Maybe not Priti Patel, Liz Truss or Dominic Raab. But I reckon a fair few of the people who advise them will read your posts.
True, commentary like yours will not prompt a public, Damascene conversion by the people trotting out the kind of meaningless slogans you mention. But it does, I believe, have an effect on the intellectual landscape in which politics and policy are conducted.
Your analysis, along with many others on blogs and in newspapers, undermines the edifice that the charlatans seek to construct. It contributes to the sense in and around Westminster (both in the civil service and the parties) that the current crop of politics are not credible, serious, or competent.
If only. I fear that the undermining is limited to us mate, the converted gathering to be preached to.
To get enough votes for change you must win over the terraces, which are mostly filled with normal folk, not constantly interested in politics (why should they be) until they finally notice the house is on fire.
Is that smoke that i smell??
Part of the difficulty – for me, at least – is that I have to wonder if these people genuinely believe what they say (but are misguided) or whether they are out-and-out manipulative liars.
Both are pretty awful for the country.
When people like JRM talk about being a Christian, can they really believe that Christianity is based on helping yourself and stuff your neighbour?
And do their supporters see through them and do they join in the charade – or are they taken in?
Ultimately – and this links to DAG’s comments about libs being owned – so much of this is about emotion and connection (I was thinking of saying tribalism) rather than dealing with the facts or reality.
We should be cynical – or at least sceptical – about slogans (think about advertising), but we fall for them all the time, perhaps because X’s slogan sounds better than Y’s.
Perhaps what we are missing – to bring in another story – is the little boy to say that the Emperor has no clothes, but he’ll need to say it at just the right time.
I suspect many of us have to self-censor with friends and neighbours because when lies are the currency, the truth may be unpalatable.
“When people like JRM talk about being a Christian, can they really believe that Christianity is based on helping yourself and stuff your neighbour?”
This would explain the strained look on his face. He’s been trying to force camels through the eye of a needle. Seeing how difficult it will be for him to get to heaven.
I struggle to see how some of these right wing populist politicians can reconcile their professed beliefs with policies that are the antithesis of Christianity.
“When people like JRM talk about being a Christian, can they really believe that Christianity is based on helping yourself and stuff your neighbour?”
There’s nothing new about the Christianity/hypocrisy nexus.
I used to work with someone who was – by his own reckoning – a fundamentalist Christian. He used to give (and boast about giving) 10% of his salary to his church.
And he was one of the most appalling human beings I have ever met.
The idea seems to be that if you do (and are seen to be doing) right by your church of choice, you’re absolved of any obligation to actually interact with your fellow man in what might be seen as a “Christian” (ie half-way decent – ignoring the obvious appropriation of decency by religion here) way.
Yes. We so desperately need better leaders.
Just having leaders would be an improvement.
Oh but we *have* leaders.
Except that they remain behind the curtain, they wield influence and money in equal measure, they are answerable to none but themselves and, without exception, they are unrivalled when it comes to buying and keeping public servants.
Sometimes that purchase can be crass – “Cash for Questions”; sometimes it can be subtle – a “post-politics directorship£ or NED or two; but regardless of the form, it is always there.
If you haven’t already seen it, I can highly recommend the documentary, “The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire”, which is available on NetFlix. It sheds some useful light on how corruption works, and how it is often brazenly conducted in public.
They aren’t leading anyone. Murdoch doesn’t lead, for example. He influences. (powerfully). However he can’t influence a non-functioning government. We need an accountable leadership, for better or worse (and in the case of Truss it will definitely be worse). In the current situation that is totally missing.
“Oh but we *have* leaders.”
Kevin’s right, We don’t.
What we have is RULERS.
That’s not quite what I meant. Murdoch and Co may control things, but they need our elected leaders to enable that control. That’s why the spend so much time trying to ensure the right party wins. Our elected leaders are the ones missing in action right now. Quite literally because the PM is either on holiday or in Kyiv and his wannabe successors are trying to outdo each other with red meat to please their tiny self-selecting electorate.
At least when leadership is finally reestablished reality might breakout after the terrible but empty rhetoric we’ve been suffering for weeks. Truss will have to do something other than cut taxes because the alternative is millions unable to pay their energy bills this winter. No government can survive a crisis like that and do nothing. It would make the winter of discontent seem more like a mild cold snap of unease in comparison.
Essentially we need the Tories to get their shit together until such time as there’s another General Election and a more humane Government can take over.
Post truth? The greatest gift of the enlightenment was scientific reason that assures us there is no such thing as truth; only quantifiable doubt. Truth is a concept found only in works of pure human imagination, such as those on Religion and Law.
The is little scientific doubt that justice, honour, dignity, wit and the like are also exclusive to human experience; it’s the proud lack of these qualities in your modern politician that’s utterly lamentable. Sod the bloody truth, our leaders look like shit covered pigs who misunderstood what we meant by ‘classless’…
Orwell was a good writer and a mighty fine political scientist.
1984 was about much more than slogans.
The scene in the cinema of people cheering refugees drowning at sea has an eerie quality about it today.
It is often forgotten that Winston Smith himself was relatively privileged with the vast majority of Brits living in an underclass below him.
It is hard also to mention slogans in 1984 without referencing his other great work Animal Farm, After the revolution the pigs got the sheep to bleat the phrase four legs good two legs bad to stifle any criticism. Later when the Seven Commandments were decreed the pigs quickly learnt to reinterpret their meaning for their own designs and the sheep ended up chanting four legs good two legs better after the pigs had learnt to walk on two feet themselves. This is perhaps Orwell’s final riposte to all political systems i.e. at the end of the day they are all self serving.
If anyone is minded to read or reread Orwell I would recommend The Lion and the Unicorn. This is one of his shorter books with the first two thirds giving the most succinct interpretation of his political views.
I can understand your frustration. The political world seems held together by spin and lying. Disappointing but necessary. Even when I look at the better blogs the comments tend to fall into the usual platitudes or peter out into ‘something must be done’.
But concrete proposals as to what to do are very few and far between and either mad or unpleasant or both. Consider ‘a fair and effective justice system’ – as if anyone could afford it and the supporting social and economic infrastructure. Small wonder the Home Office is the nasty department.
I fear politicians are forced to lie, they are boxed in by realities that ensure nice pretty looking policies can never be implemented or afforded for long. The masses cannot be told the truth, let them read the DM. Apart from the necessities of paying off supporters and donors there is the topical problem of energy – any advanced society uses up a lot of energy. Take it away and that society will fall apart.
I am pessimistic about the next 50 years. Just possibly we will come up with a clean(ish) power source but I think electric cars are a non solution that does not scale up. Some seem sanguine about the human population rising and peaking at about 10Bn. I doubt planet Earth can support the necessary mineral and energy supply to provide those 10Bn with a lifestyle anything like the West’s current one. Who would be an honest politician.
Living in the sticks, surrounded by nice people who are totally taken in by what the Telegraph, the Daily Mail etc tell them, it has been a lifeline for us to be able to read blogs like yours and Chris Grey’s, to know we are not going mad, that the government are lying to us, taking us for fools, ripping us off and laughing all the way to the bank. Thank you for your, always thoughtful commentary.
Your blogs are certainly very worthwhile, albeit to a narrow readership, because, as well as informing, they sharpen and clarify issues, thereby reminding one akways to properly wake up. I found the same yesterday listening to Michael Rosen’s Word of Mouth on R4. The edition about conversation and listening was exceptionally enlivening -https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001bbtn
Yes I heard it too, Rosen is consiently interesting
I agree absolutely. I think the Free Trade example is interesting because Brexiters who use the argument will point to the protectionist aspects of the EU (which are there and used probably to be worse than they are now) as a reason, on principle, for leaving it: thus ignoring the fact that Britain’s decision to leave has made its own trade opportunities fewer than they were, not greater. I suppose the problem of sloganising generalities like Free Trade is that, divorced from specifics, they can be used to argue for almost any specific policy.
I can only say that for myself there is most definitely a point to the insightful commentary offered in the ‘Law & Policy Blog’, which I find of real value: namely the lucid, and balanced, clarification of the day’s significant topics thanks to your specialist knowledge and your informed and extremely intelligent perspective. If I were to claim a “guru” in life, you would certainly be a leading contender, alongside Martin Lewis and David Attenborough. Please keep up the good work or you will leave us stumbling in the dark. And thank you.
When I first read 1984 many, many years ago, I never, ever thought that Orwell was accurately describing the future, coupled with Animal Farm these two books should be the only literature to be mandatory reading in our secondary schools. I despair of what has happened to GB, I thought his writing would act as a warning, how wrong I have been! The Tories have taken them as a blueprint!
Add to those two books the complete diaries of Adrian Mole and we shall indeed have a generation of wise children. But whatever they achieve will be undone, if not by the next generation, then by the one after that.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH always struck me as a bit of an anomaly there as they aren’t obvious opposites. I assume it’s a take on KNOWLEDGE IS POWER but I’m no literature expert, or even novice.
These expressions always strike me as perfect candidates for language translation software testing purposes.
Readers may have come across the anecdote of an early attempt at an English-Russian/Russian-English algorithm. It did passingly well at basic sentences, but was tripped up with colloquialisms. Given, “Out of sight, out of mind,” it returned, “Invisible Idiot” and offered, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”, it responded with, “The vodka is strong, but the meat is rotten.”
To give you another under-used expression: “To err is human, but to really foul things up, you need a computer…”
Along with “Free Trade” and so on, there’s another slogan which is popular, particularly in Northern Ireland: “Save The Union!”. One must support the actions of the largest Unionist party or be condemned as a Nationalist, even if the actions of the Unionist party could almost have been calculated to accelerate the reunification of Ireland. So first one must save the Union by supporting a Withdrawal Agreement that creates a border in the Irish Sea. And then one must destroy that Agreement, even knowing that this offends and scares the increasing proportion of NI folks whose answer to the Union question is “don’t care”.
An element of these phenomena that perhaps we don’t discuss sufficiently is the role of the media – and perhaps social media – in the proliferation and perpetuation of post-truth.
One need only look at Fox News in the United States to find countless examples of disingenuous reporting, specious coverage and outright lies being peddled as truth. As recently as the last two weeks the channel has claimed that the FBI actions against former President Trump were un-announced, were a “raid” and accused the agency of planting evidence.
That isn’t an organisation taking journalistic responsibilities seriously.
Things are slightly different in the UK, although the funding of the BBC has become a political football in recent years, as has more senior appointments at the BBC. However, the way that the British political establishment tends to wield power with the press is through favour. News outlets [print or broadcast] that fail to paint an administration in a sufficiently flattering light are squeezed out. Scoops and leaks are shared elsewhere. The Spin Doctors work behind the scenes, always speaking off the record, always promising juicy news in return for positive coverage.
In the UK the slightly more subtle approach to the relationship between politics and news can make this harder to spot.
But the sad fact is that the media, the entity that has such an important role in holding politicians to account, are complicit in supporting their post-truth world. Industry use the phrase “regulatory capture” to describe the scenario that occurs when, through bribery, such as offers of a post-term directorship, regulated companies find ways of influencing a regulator that are corrupt.
What we have with the media is exactly the same form of corruption, just expressed differently. The main political parties all understand just how cut-throat the media world is and use the fact to their disadvantage. When they have the power to make or break a journalist, it isn’t hard to exert that influence to get the coverage they want.
And we let them do it.