Orwell based "1984" on his bizarre political experiences in Spain's Aragon province, fighting with the P.O.U.M. in the Spanish Civil War. The most amazingly-evil things happened, and only a great writer like Orwell could properly capture it all.
Still, Orwell didn't live long enough to see our modern improvements to the world of Big Brother. In particular, even though he met people like him, George Orwell never met Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, William Kristol, et al., personally.
In 2004, I blogged about how George Bush's "War on Terror" was far better than the Tri-partite edge-of-the-empire skirmishing that Orwell mentions in "1984" at creating a modern dictatorship, because it was far more efficient: fewer resources were required and there was less chance of deadly miscalculations.
Below, Billmon starts with "1984" and looks at the creation of the closed conservative mind. Noting Billmon's observation that "reality must not push back too vigorously against the false reality that’s being constructed," I note that comfortable suburban America is a perfect place to create false realities of all kinds, precisely because life in the suburbs is usually pretty darned comfortable.
The next great project: link "1984" with that other great classic from the 1940's, W.J. Cash's "The Mind Of The South", which explores another closed mindset, the pre-WWII South, using blogposts by folks like Billmon and the films of Michael Moore as glue:
The business, of course, is disinformation: the creation of a closed loop of emotions, beliefs and pseudo-facts that buttress, at all times and all points, the party line.
However, the more I study this, the more I’m convinced the primary goal of the exercise isn’t to convince the broader public, whom I think the Rovians essentially view as the equivalent of the "proles" of 1984 -- dull lumps of unthinking flesh who, nine times in 10, will follow the loudest, most simplistic and most passionate voice they hear.
The goal of conservative disinformation, then, is to provide that voice by creating the kind of "mind" (e.g. epistemic community) among the true conservative faithful that Sanchez is talking about: one impervious to reason, logic and -- most importantly of all -- factual evidence. The growing nervousness of some conservative intellectuals, like Douthat and Frum, about this project perhaps reflects the dawning realization that they are basically irrelevant to its success.
The creation of a closed mind is, of course, a prerequisite for successful doublethink (defined as the ability to hold two diametrically opposed beliefs at the same time, and to immediately change one or both of those beliefs when instructed). By their very nature, doublethink constructs tend to be fragile. They have a low tolerance for contact with non-managed reality -- much less open debate (thus the need, in 1984, for the constant writing and rewriting of history, to ensure a seamless and timeless continuity to the party line).
But the real breakthrough discovery by the conservative propaganda machine (Fox News, in particular) is that despite this inherent fragility, it doesn’t take an Orwellian police state to create and maintain the kind of self-contained, artificial consciousness that doublethink requires. Indeed, it can be done even in a supposedly free and open society -- that is, as long as two conditions are met.
The first is that the target audience must be trained to be active participants in their own indoctrination, and not just the passive recipients of it. The circular logic that Sanchez mentions -- i.e. if something contradicts the accepted conservative narrative it must be liberal, and therefore false -- is a key tool for creating this kind of "self-executing" doublethink.
The second requirement, however, in many ways is the more important, at least in a society not fully under the control of those seeking to create the closed mental loop: Reality must not push back too vigorously against the false reality that’s being constructed. In particular, non-conservatives (especially the non- or quasi-conservative mass media) must accept the disinformation narrative as legitimate -- i.e. as simply another political point of view -- and ignore the manipulative process by which it has been created.
But in a free society, those two conditions cannot be maintained perpetually and indefinitely (knock on wood), which may explain why the conservative movement in the US has shown a tendency to crash and burn whenever it runs into realities (the 1991 recession, the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial meltdown, etc.) that can neither be assimilated by the false conservative reality nor fully denied by its inhabitants -- thus puncturing the doublethink bubble.
So far, however, these setbacks have all proven temporary. The conservative "mind" has shown an impressive ability to pick itself up and put itself back on the track after every derailment. Whether that's mainly due to the machine’s technical efficiency, or a testament to the sheer power of the will to believe among the conservative faithful, I don't know. Both, I suspect.
One final note: I should clarify that when I refer to the creation of a "self-executing" conservative doublethink as a breakthrough, I’m only talking about the American political experience. The ability of an authoritarian movement to build a powerful false narrative -- and then persuade millions of followers not only to believe it but actively defend it against encroaching reality, even in a more-or-less free society -- was clearly demonstrated in Weimar Germany during the 1920s and ’30s by [GODWIN REDACTION].
One can hope the peculiarities of time, place and culture explain much, if not all, of the catastrophic success of that previous experiment, which is unlikely to be repeated now.
But I’m not entirely sure it would be the smart way to bet.
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