2011...
2011: A Brave New Dystopia
The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were
George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
The debate, between those who watched our descent towards
corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be,
as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and
security state that used crude and violent forms of control?
Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment
and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by
profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression?
It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw
the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.
We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that,
as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual
gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit,
political theater and amusement.
While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept
predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws
that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished.
Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class
are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable,
we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.”
From Prosperity to Austerity...
From Bread & Circuses to Heavy-Handed Authoritarianism
The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and
corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is
time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the
orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving
from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies
and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.
Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books.
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned.
Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure.
Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear.
Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by
trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information.
Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought
was monitored and dissent was brutally punished.
Huxley saw us seduced into submission.
Orwell saw us frightened into submission.
Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell.
Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit
in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement.
Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and
defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx
knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal
and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the
natural world until exhaustion or collapse...
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell
wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of
others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or
luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.
What pure power means you will understand presently. We are
different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we
know what we are doing. All the others, even those who
resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close
to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to
recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they
even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and
for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay
a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.
We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power
with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means;
it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order
to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order
to establish the dictatorship...
"The object of persecution is persecution.
The object of torture is torture.
The object of power is power.”
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term
“inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy
Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term
that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism,
the sophisticated technologies of corporate control,
intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those
employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively
masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer
society.
Political participation and civil liberties are gradually
surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the
smokescreen of the public relations industry, the
entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a
consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no
allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.
The corporate state does not find its expression in a
demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the
anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations,
who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control
the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication.
They control the messages in movies and television. And, as
in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication
to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as
Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce
qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might
weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation,
to its total impression.”
The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity
courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists,
identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters.
All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are
dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists, or members of a
radical left.
Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky,
are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The
culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers,
becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as
well as an endless and finally fatal optimism.
We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our
lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we
are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence.
All messages we receive through these systems of communication,
whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,”
promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin
points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate
executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but
always with a sunny face.”
We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous
technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies
of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through
surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden
culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose
denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority
have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”
Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and
swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions
from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement
or college.
Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from
warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services,
including public education and health care, have been handed
over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who
raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate
happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.
Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the
corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave
New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in
frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.
“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most
wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”
He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been
giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be
free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way,
for example; not in everybody else’s way.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.
The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize
that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from
Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.”
The public, at some point, will have to face some very
unpleasant truths...
The good-paying jobs are not coming back.
The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped
in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate
state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for
citizens, including Social Security.
The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism.
And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the
corporate-imposed cheerful conformity.
The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40
million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of
millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the
lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank
repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that
inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.
We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The
World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by
Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the
public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine
acts of violence dominate the nightly news Goldstein’s image
appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of
the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without
the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden,
will kill you. And all excesses are justified in the titanic
fight against evil personified.
From Winston Smith to WikiLeaks...
The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now
been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of
any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith
at the end of “1984.”
Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the
brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23
of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have
a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying
him with antidepressants.
The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced
with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by
government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into
vegetables.
We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we
can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become
compliant and harmless.
These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed
on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was
imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before
going to trial.
The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of
detainees in our black sites around the globe They are the
staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where
the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute
underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from
Huxley to Orwell.
“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,”
Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will
be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love,
or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or
courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze
you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being
replaced by the era of repression.
Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone
records turned over to the government.
We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human
history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens
of security cameras.
Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our
profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted
down at airports and filmed by scanners.
And public service announcements, car inspection stickers,
and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report
suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.
Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on
terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally
silenced.
The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at
the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly
disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they
sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS.
Dissent = Extremism & Extremism = Terrorism
The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists,
which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis
and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who
dare defy the state’s official Newspeak.
The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers,
documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear
before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The
subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material
support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.”
Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror,
becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect
us from ourselves.
“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are
creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the
stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A
world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling
and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but
more merciless as it refines itself.”
by Chris Hedges
globalresearch.ca |
