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Devil’s Kitchen has been promoting a campaign to send copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to MPs. Tom Harris received his copy yesterday and his response can be summed up in the two words “What Rubbish“. Devil’s Kitchen objected to this point of view, in the strongest terms1.

I enjoy reading Devils Kitchen. He swears too much for me, and occasionally it gets a little tedious, but the blog makes for entertaining reading and he writes some really good stuff – like the hypocrisy of continuing experiments to find out what causes climate change, or an exceptional rant against people who object to James Bond. One thing that has always irritated me, though, is the constant ranting that we’re wondering into an ‘Orwellian nightmare’ of a totalitarian state under New Labour.

3 Reasons That Nineteen Eighty Four is Not Our Future.

The idea that the book Orwell wrote in the 50’s has some bearing on the world we live in today only works on the most superficial level. On the surface, one can draw beautiful parallels – CCTV cameras chime neatly with the telescreen through which The Party watches everybody; the thought police and their habit of ‘disappearing’ people resonates with the 42 day debate and the threat of detention without charge; even the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq carry echoes of the constant wars with Eurasia and Eastasia. Dig a little deeper than superficial similarities, though, and you realise how far Winston Smith’s world is from the one we live in today – or the one that we’ll live in in twenty years. There’s three reasons for this. In reverse order of importance, here they are:

Democracy.

This is the most often-cited, but definitely the least important reason. At some point within the next 18 months, the public will vote and show either their approval or their disapproval of the way the country has been run since the last election. The argument that there isn’t a real choice is a red herring – Devil’s Kitchen disproves that argument on his own steam by being a founding member of a libertarian political party. If his ideas are genuinely what people want, his party will gain support (and I hope they do, as I’ll get to in a minute) then you can bet your bottom dollar that one of the major parties will take note and recognise the shift in the zeitgeist. If his ideas aren’t what the public want, you can hardly suggest they’re being oppressed – they’ve made their own choices. Lack of belief in democracy is either just as totalitarian as English Socialism or disgustingly condescending, in that it betrays the belief that the electorate are too stupid to know who to vote for. Either way it’s an utterly disingenuous position for a ‘libertarian’ to take. Real democracy will never – can never – deliver an oppressive state.

Infrastructure.

A government which can’t deliver an IT system on time or on budget or without serious flaws (normally any two of the above is achievable, but not all three – Labour consistently fail on all three counts), can barely build a canvas dome in time for the single occasion on which it will be used (god knows what’s going to happen with the Olympic village), and can’t even keep their MPs on message, let alone the general public, cannot possibly be on its way to becoming a totalitarian state. Seriously. The Party was a well-oiled machine, meticulously planned and organised in advance to utterly dominate every aspect of human existence from the moment they took power. After 11 years in government, New Labour are lucky if they get compared to a ship with no rudder, let alone a well-oiled machine.

Communication

This is the real game-changer. When Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty Four, he was hugely prescient of the problems inherent in communist Russia and other and totalitarian states. He saw the idea of the state using one-to-many communication to indoctrinate and entire society and put them under the thumb of the state. What he never imagined – probably couldn’t have imagined, is the effect of many-to-many communication, which has taken hold of our entire society in the form of blogs, forums, wikis and social networking sites over the last five to ten years. The effects of this cannot be ignored or underestimated.

The dystopian futures of Nineteen Eighty-Four and V For Vendetta relied on state control of communication channels, preventing the general populace from gaining a full understanding of what was happening to them. If we were on our way to an ‘Orwellian Nightmare’, you wouldn’t be able to talk about it. You wouldn’t know about it. You wouldn’t know anyone who knew about it. You wouldn’t read about it in blogs or hear about it in forums, because there wouldn’t be blogs or forums. and don’t tell me about EU legislation to regulate blogs, it won’t happen. As proven in China, it can’t really happen, there is no system a human can build that a human can’t hack. We, the people, the bloggers, the talkers, are unstoppable, uncontainable and uncontrollable. And that’s how we’ll remain.

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The Case For Libertarianism

Having said all of that, there’s a really good case to be made for libertarianism. As The Devil’s Kitchen himself writes, there is genuine merit in the idea that the state should be so small, and the people so free, that who is in government doesn’t really matter. If the country were an office block, the government shouldn’t be like the flaky, unreliable IT systems that need constant maintainance and require an entire department to look after them; they should aspire to be like the plumbing. Not flashy, not more than is needed, just always there, always dependable, easy to fix when something goes wrong. There to make sure that the shit gets taken care of.

So why, oh why, do you have to frame the debate around a belligerent comparison with Nineteen Eighty-Four? Guys, get over it. It’s a work of fiction. It isn’t happening, and it can’t happen. Nobody will listen to your arguments nor understand your intentions when you spend so much of your time chasing after little more than a conspiracy theory based on shoddy logic and obtuse arrogance.

  1. I would fully expect, if my blog were notable enough, to be called words which some 15-year-olds don’t even know for having written this post, but sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. Besides, by the end of this post I’m actually quite nice about libertarianism – don’t give up on me just yet. [↩]