Gringo View: Revisiting ‘1984’ – Are We Going Mad?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) It has become seriously disquieting and almost impossible to know what to believe in the dystopian world into which we now seem to be sinking deeper and deeper. This gringo sometimes feels like we are all going mad.

While not everyone knows what ‘dystopian’ means, the recent GOP Convention which anointed Donald Trump as its candidate for a second term drove lookups for ‘dystopia’ and ‘dystopian’ at Merriam-Webster to increase by 2000 percent. Trump’s acceptance speech at the end was a dystopian creed. Wrote Melanie Mason in ‘The Washington Post’, “For four nights, convention speakers portrayed the U.S. as a grim dystopia: impoverished and ridden with violence.” Fortunately the facts don’t bear that out: yet.

The dictionary definition of a dystopian world is “an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives. Dystopia translates literally as ‘bad place’.” That this word is being searched so frequently and used so often today suggests that a growing number of people are disturbed like I am – they don’t want their good place, however fragile at the moment, to become a bad place.

As George Orwell wrote so powerfully in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, his 1949 novel that sounds a dire warning about the totalitarian future he saw just over the mid-century horizon, “War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength”. If this appears to be an upside-down fantasy world flying in the face of what we believe to be today’s existing belief system, we may have slipped too far behind in keeping up with the news. Government outrages in the US, Brazil and many other parts of the world, that would have been considered truly ‘unbelievable’ just a few years ago, are now boringly taken for granted: nothing more than yesterday’s Twitter feeds.

Recently departed Trump confidant and adviser Kellyanne Conway had no problem when confronted by journalists insisting that photographs totally proved that her boss’s wildly exaggerated assessment of his presidential inaugural crowd size was untrue. She justified his falsehoods by simply calling them “alternative facts”.

It is not an ‘alternative fact’ that almost 200,000 Americans are dead from the pandemic, due at least to a big degree to Trump’s oft-repeated disparagement of the Covid-19’s seriousness. Now he can only say: “They are dying. That’s true… it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.” Part of ‘controlling it’ in this new reality is silencing the scientific community through dispersing fear, and outright threats to the careers of anyone questioning his false narrative.

‘Alternative facts’ are called ‘untruths’ and ‘doublespeak’ in ‘1984’ and are employed by an authoritarian government in an attempt to control the narrative of its citizen’s reality. “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” wrote Orwell. No wonder Trump is so obsessed with his bubble reality, reimagining everything, even his crowd sizes or TV ratings, and fashioning the present to his own use.

Enter stage right, the conspiracy theorists and their millions of fervent spear-carrying believers and followers, most notably the rabid online Trump supporters known as QAnon; Facebook found their rantings across thousands of groups and pages. They believe that Trump “is saving the world from a satanic cult made up of pedophiles and cannibals connected to Democratic Party figures, so-called deep-state actors and Hollywood celebrities…” Trump has neither questioned the group’s validity nor the truth of their claims. It fits neatly into an Orwellian prediction that in this dystopian world, “Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else.” 

With only two months until the November election, rightly described as the most important in US history, Trump’s followers appear oblivious to the lies and dangers. They prefer to believe that anything outside of their unreality bubble is the product of a dark plot to mount a coup d’état to remove Trump from office. It is an indication of just how far we have descended this slippery dystopian slope.

Twitter now uses the tag “Manipulated media” to signal fraud as they did recently when US House Minority Whip Steve Scalise unapologetically shared a video on Twitter that had been spliced together from separate parts of a statement by the Democratic candidate, Vice President Joe Biden, giving a totally false context to what he had actually said. When called out for the dishonesty of this, Scalise’s excuse was that it is “a common practice”.

Fortunately, that’s not entirely true – not everyone does; sadly, though, more and more people do. If the president lies and cheats all the time, if he ignores and lifts his middle finger at laws, if he can get away with anything he wants, why shouldn’t his followers do what followers do: follow?

Once again Orwell writ large proclaims: “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” Right-wing ‘Newsmax’ wrote: “President Donald Trump is heading to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to talk to the police and responders helping curb and clean up after the violent protests to ‘increase enthusiasm’ and ‘love and respect for our country.’”

That’s what Trump said. Notwithstanding his words, the truth is he went there not to “increase enthusiasm” and “love and respect for our country” but rather to focus attention on rioting and scaring potential voters with fear of civil violence and chaos.

We know that fear drives aggression and is a mainstay element in his authoritarian playbook. Can it be that all this dystopianism is working? We are forced to ask ourselves: are our minds being torn to pieces and are we all going mad?

Orwell provides a helpful reminder and some advice:

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”