LAL #027 — On Orwell's "1984": The Imperative of Individual Significance

Law and Legitimacy

I re-read Orwell’s 1984 the other day — one of the joys afforded by cross-country travel is the plenty of downtime in airports and on planes. How well does Orwell’s fears of a totalitarian society account for what we have become, and are becoming? The work is bleak, as those of you who read it through to the end know. But don’t assume that just because Communism has failed as an ideology that Orwell has less to say to us now than he he did in 1949, when the work was first published.

Where once stood the party, there now stands big tech. If anything, Orwell failed to foresee just how powerful the means of mass manipulation and control could become. Social media occupies the place of Big Brother. In the end, Winston Smith, is broken by Big Brother. Smith’s quest for significance, what I will call the fundamental human drive, leads him into a direct confrontation with the state. The state crushes him, and it demands that he renounce not just the woman he loves, but love itself, the better to be made into a compliant slave of the collective. It’s tempting to regard the demands of political correctness and a “progressive” view of history as the functional equivalent of Big Brother. We are all, those of who aspire to advance and prosper at any rate, tethered to a world of common expectations, a vision of the good that demands we find our significance in the eyes of the collective good.

That is the path to spiritual death. The heroes in 1984? The proles. The ordinary people forgotten by history for whom loyalty is an end in itself and the simple pleasures of loving and being loved are enough.

Were Orwell alive today, he’d write a more pessimistic book, but the message would be the same: in the tragic mess we call history, the quest of individual significance in the only enduring value worth pursuing.

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