Nineteen Eighty-Four and Religion:
Parallels in Totalitarianism and Thought-Control
Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone s eyeballs were too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandyhaired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like My Savior! she extended her arms toward the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
George Orwell [Eric Blair], Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Harcourt, 1949) 17.
In George Orwell s Nineteen Eighty-Four the readers are given a tragic depiction of a totalitarian regime, lead by Big Brother, that uses mind control and crowd manipulation to create loyalty to the Party. Big Brother and the Party enact what Noam Chomsky has called Manufacturing Consent, that is, they condition the population through propaganda, linguistic revision, and historical redaction. The citizens are watched at all times, fit into mechanical social molds, and expected to participate in group worship of Big Brother.
Alfonso Montuori describes this kind of totalitarian model vividly: Conditions can be created whereby any form of dissent from the established government view is considered unpatriotic, no alternative perspectives are accepted, let alone encouraged, and discourse and collective thinking processes become simple, black-and-white processes of conformity.
Alfonso Montuori, How to make Enemies and Influence People: The Totalitarian Mindset, Futures 37 (2005): 20
In many ways this dystopia reveals how, when social and psychological pressure is applied, people will act with undying devotion and allegiance to a unifying power greater than themselves (God, The Party, Leaders, etc.). In this paper I am going to argue that the devotion required of the citizens of Oceana is comparable to the devotion required of some religious believers.
I am also going to compare some key terms in Newspeak, the constructed language of Oceana, to the ways that religious believers have thought and behaved in the past and through to the present. These terms (and concepts) include: Big Brother Thoughtcrime Doublethink Thought Police Two Minutes Hate
Each of these terms has religious parallels and reveals something about what can occur when people are put under fascist rule. The moral of this paper is that if you have issues with the world depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four you should have issues with organized religions, religious devotion, and extreme forms of worship.
Big Brother Big Brother, the elusive and powerful leader of Oceana, provides us with a picture of a totalitarian dictator ruling over a collectivist society. Orwell does not say whether or not Big Brother is a real person or something created by the Party. One of the great points of this book is that, in a totalitarian society, it does not matter whether something is real or created by the Party: they are considered the same thing. One passage seems to hint that Big brother is a creation of the Party.
In The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (known simply as the book ), written by the archenemy of Big Brother, Emmanuel Goldstein, he says Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. The religious parallel would be God is the guise in which Religious Leaders choose to exhibit themselves to the world. Like God, Big Brother s function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence. Nineteen Eighty-Four, 209
Big Brother and God: Comparisons Considered all-powerful and worthy of worship Elusive but somehow in control Demands both love and obedience Watches everything you do and think Demands a demonstration of your allegiance Exclusively takes sides (for Oceana, against Eurasia; for Christians, against Jews)
Thoughtcrime Thoughtcrime is the offense of thinking, feeling, or willing anything that stands against Party doctrine. In Oceana political orthodoxy is a matter of life and death, since at any moment the Thought Police could come to imprison and torture you. Orthodoxy means not thinking not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. Ibid, 54
Those who blindly accept the information given by the Party no longer have to think, for them the case is eternally settled. What thoughtcrime tells us about the Party is that it is not content with keeping citizens behaviorally obedient; to work the Party has to cognitively convince its citizens to the extent that they think the idea was their own (thought inception).
Thoughtcrime and Religion: Comparisons
The religious terms for thoughtcrime include heresy and heterodoxy Sexual desire is thoughtcrime Dissent is thoughtcrime Guilty for something occurring in the privacy of your own mind
Doublethink The Newspeak term doublethink is meant to convey the idea of holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time (in psychology called cognitive dissonance ). Whatever the Party tells you to think, regardless of what your sense perceptions convey to you, is absolute truth.
Winston Smith, the protagonist of the story, elaborates on the idea of doublethink: To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Ibid, 36
Another Newspeak word for it is blackwhite. Blackwhite, Emmanuel Goldstein says, has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of imprudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. Bit it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know, that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. Ibid, 213
Doublethink and Religion: Comparisons God loves those being tortured in hell God wants us to be reasonable and believe blindly You are a slave to God, but free For Christianity: God is 1 and 3, Jesus is fully God and fully man For conservative Jews: God loves and chose us, versus Jewish history
Thought Police The Thought Police are the ones who enforce the Party s doctrines by rooting out apparent dissenters and thought-criminals. You may liken them to early Christian apologists and polemicists who saw it as their duty to preserve orthodoxy and defend it from internal and external influences.
Upon capturing a suspected thought criminal the Thought Police take the suspect to the Ministry of Love where they are imprisoned, tortured, and psychologically manipulated through various forms of aversion therapy (much like the Ludovico technique in A Clockwork Orange). Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (New York: Norton, 1995)
To avoid turning thought-criminals into martyrs the Thought Police would black-bag the criminals without any semblance of due process. Orwell describes it: It was always at night the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faced round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Nineteen Eighty-Four, 20
Thought Police and Religion: Comparisons
The Grand Inquisitors The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Roman Catholic) Priesthood Correlation Program (Mormon) Pastors and Elders (Protestant)
Two Minutes Hate Two Minutes Hate, the required daily rally for the Party, is a time when all the citizens of Oceana gather to hurl insults at Emmanuel Goldstein, the promoter of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought. The citizens view a large screen where Goldstein is depicted as the enemy of Big Brother and saboteur of all the principles upon which the Party is founded. Ibid, 14
The program of the Two Minutes Hate, Orwell writes, varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principle figure All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Ibid, 13
What the Two Minutes Hate tells us is how crowd psychology can be used by totalitarian regimes to inculcate despise of the regime s enemy in its citizens, much like Hitler or Mussolini s use of Gustave Le Bon s notion of herd behavior. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate, says Winston at the rally, was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (West Valley City: Waking Lion Press, 2006) Nineteen Eighty-Four, 15
Two Minutes Hate and Religion: Comparisons
Church services bashing homosexuals, baby killers, and other heretics Religious tent meetings, conventions, and rally s Religious leaders denouncing other religions The psychological splitting of Religious leaders
In conclusion, it should be noted how ironic it is to use Nineteen Eighty-Four as a critique of religious belief, since it has primarily been used as a polemic against Secular fascis,m, that is, Hitler s Germany, Mussolini s Italy, Franco s Spain, Lenin s Russia, and Mao s China. It has been thought to be primarily concerned with communist regimes and was used in the West as McCarthy-era propaganda against communist Russia and the Red Scares. According to Stephen Spender, The world of 1984 is almost entirely secular God does not enter in through any chink of it. Stephen Spender, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of 1984 (New Jersey: Prentiss-Hall, 1971) 63
In disagreement, I think that God, under the guise of Big Brother, permeates the whole work. The obedience of the population closely mirrors religiosity and spiritual devotion, and, as I have shown, the terms of Newspeak have direct parallels in organized religion and within the psychological states of religious believers.
