“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

February 2, 2017 8:29 PM

Why '1984' is a 2017 Must Read by Michiko Kakutani [The New York Times] “1984” shot to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list this week, after Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to President Trump, described demonstrable falsehoods told by the White House press secretary Sean Spicer — regarding the size of inaugural crowds — as “alternative facts.” It was a phrase chillingly reminiscent, for many readers, of the Ministry of Truth’s efforts in “1984” at “reality control.” To Big Brother and the Party, Orwell wrote, “the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.” Regardless of the facts, “Big Brother is omnipotent” and “the Party is infallible.”

• George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Is Suddenly a Best-Seller [The New York Times]

“Craig Burke, the publicity director at Penguin USA, said that the publisher had ordered 75,000 new copies of the book this week and that it was considering another reprint. “We’ve seen a big bump in sales,” Mr. Burke said. He added that the rise “started over the weekend and hit hyperactive” on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Since Friday, the book has reached a 9,500 percent increase in sales, he said. He said demand began to lift on Sunday, shortly after the interview Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to Donald J. Trump, gave on “Meet the Press.” In defending a false claim by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, that Mr. Trump had attracted the “largest audience ever to witness an inauguration,” Ms. Conway used a turn of phrase that struck some observers as similar to the dystopian world of “1984.””

• Sales of George Orwell's 1984 surge after Kellyanne Conway's 'alternative facts' [The Guardian]

“The connection was initially made on CNN’s Reliable Sources. “Alternative facts is a George Orwell phrase,” said Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty. Conway’s use of the term was in reference to White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s comments about last week’s inauguration attracting “the largest audience ever”. Her interview was widely criticized and she was sub-tweeted by Merriam-Webster dictionary with a definition of the word fact. On last night’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, the host joked: “Kellyanne Conway is like someone trying to do a Jedi mind trick after only a week of Jedi training.””

• Orwell's “1984” and Trump's America [The New Yorker]

“An unbidden apology rises to the lips, as Orwell’s book duly climbs high in the Amazon rankings: it was far better and smarter than good times past allowed us to think. What it took, of course, to change this view was the Presidency of Donald Trump. Because the single most striking thing about his matchlessly strange first week is how primitive, atavistic, and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is turning out to be. We have to go back to “1984” because, in effect, we have to go back to 1948 to get the flavor. [...] And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.”

• 1984 Isn’t the Only Book Enjoying a Revival [The Atlantic]

“It isn’t just works of fiction being sought out by curious readers. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, published in June 2016, quickly became a best-seller among people hoping for insight about rural American voters. The book was Amazon’s 17th-most purchased last year, and currently sits at #3 on the top 100. But an older book has also spiked in interest recently: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Published in 1951, it explores the rise of fascist authoritarian governments in Europe over the past two centuries, and how regimes employ racism and propaganda to gain power. Dan Weiss, a bookseller in San Francisco, told KQED that customers recommended the book for its insight into current events in America, and that since he put in an order for new copies, they’ve been “flying off the shelves.” In the week leading up to Christmas, according to data sourced by KQED, the book was selling 16 times more copies than usual, confirmed by a spike on Google Trends.”

• Teaching 1984 in 2016 [The Atlantic]

“Every year, when I ask students what they learned from the class simulation—my artificial teachable moment—they say they realize that loyalty isn’t as ironclad as it should be. They didn’t question why they had to spy on fellow seniors; they chuckled about the task but they did it anyway. I had a points-hungry go-getter two years ago who eagerly filed detailed supplemental reports on her boyfriend. Students say they learned how quickly a mission supposedly for the greater good can take an unpalatable detour. They admit that they did not always immediately grasp swift changes to previously outlined rules. They admit that they followed me on Instagram without considering the risk of letting an authority figure (were he so inclined) glimpse their personal lives. They realize that they didn’t ask for details about my plan to eliminate senioritis—that they formed no serious opposition, that they just grimaced when my back was turned and whined lightly in isolation. They cared about their grades, they admit, and they thought I was funny, so they did as they were told.”

• We Should Fear ‘Brave New World’ More Than We Do ‘1984’ [The Federalist]

“No, if you really want to think about the dystopian novel that should scare you in 2017, you must go to the another school of dystopian literature, away from the gray totalitarianism of “1984,” and enter instead the sex, drug, and leisure soaked society of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It is here, in Huxley’s grim but orderly vision of the future, that Americans should see themselves as closer to their own doom. Huxley’s World State is run by benevolent—or so they see themselves—tyrants enforcing a genetically engineered caste system, in which the populace is repressed not by violence but instead anesthetized by easy sex, ample supplies of euphoria-inducing drugs, and meaningless entertainment. Pleasure and hedonism, not violence and party discipline, are the mechanisms by which society is induced to submission.”

posted by Fizz (55 comments total)

As Thomas Pynchon noted, 1984 is written in the past tense. In fiction, at least, they get through it.
posted by josephtate at 8:41 PM on February 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

This is also an excellent era in which to re-read The Handmaid's Tale.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:43 PM on February 2, 2017 [35 favorites]

It's understandable that 1984 has become a best-seller, and not at all surprising. I personally find myself reading authors like: Primo Levi, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Ta-Nehisi Coates, & Christopher Hitchens. These are just a few of the writers that I've been reading the last month or so. Trying to make sense of things but turning to thinkers and writers who inspire and challenge me to think in different ways. I've also been reading a lot of poetry: Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, & Claudia Rankine.
posted by Fizz at 8:43 PM on February 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

The Van Halen album of the same name should however be skipped at this dark time.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:48 PM on February 2, 2017 [23 favorites]

Now that general terror has risen to the levels it attained during the Cold War, I find myself wishing that we hadn't blown our proverbial wad on comparisons to fascism, Orwell and Hitler during the Bush administration. It feels like it would have been nice to hold something back, for just such an emergency...
posted by klanawa at 8:59 PM on February 2, 2017 [5 favorites]

I've read 1984 both voluntarily and involuntarily and I've found Orwell's non-fiction to be much more compelling, and just as relevant now: The Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Barcelona.
posted by lagomorphius at 8:59 PM on February 2, 2017 [10 favorites]

I've also been thinking about Octavia Butler's Parable series, where she plays out the Promise Keepers, privatization, gated communities, and the Rodney King uprising from her vantage point right after the latter happened. but then I've long suspected my attraction to her distinctly Californian view of intentional communities led by people of color was just wish fulfillment on my part, so...
posted by gusandrews at 9:03 PM on February 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

Catalonia
posted by interrobang at 9:03 PM on February 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

As an, I think, relevant aside, Orwell's works are public domain in Canada and Australia among others. Insofar as people are buying electronic versions of 70-year-old books from a $400 billion megacorp which may be free in their country, that in itself is... Orwellian, and another product of our consumption society's convenience-at-all-costs mantra.

So, strictly now, for those in the relevant countries:
Canada: Faded Page (repository of "Distributed Proofreaders Canada" works. I hope people might bookmark/peruse this reasonably organized site.) (And Brave New World.)
Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia

Unfortunately the resources dedicated to PD works (and often the accompanying web presence and layout :) in these countries are far fewer than the US Project Gutenberg/Distributed Proofreaders effort—despite a much more important corpus of work available to the public domain (at this point, I mean) in these countries.

Is this lectury, yep, but my point is that we are literally robbed of our heritage when a book finally becomes public domain, and in the internet age, we still buy an electronic copy, moreover from Megacorp.
posted by sylvanshine at 9:13 PM on February 2, 2017 [18 favorites]

Catalonia

Oh yeah - typing fast. Thanks.
posted by lagomorphius at 9:23 PM on February 2, 2017

No love for Yevgeny Zamyatin's We?
posted by Chrysostom at 9:40 PM on February 2, 2017 [10 favorites]

> This is also an excellent era in which to re-read The Handmaid's Tale.

Can't do it. I still have terrified dread from the two times I read it more than 30 years ago. Thirty fucking years ago.
posted by rtha at 10:02 PM on February 2, 2017 [10 favorites]

Also consider It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. Published in 1935, it covers how the US falls into corporatist fascism at the hands of a charasmatic leader promising to return America to greatness.

Includes an invasion of Mexico for spurious reasons, and concentration camps for citizens guilty of dissent!

82 years old, and eerily relevant. Plus ça change, eh?
posted by zeypher at 10:16 PM on February 2, 2017 [21 favorites]

Plus ça change, eh?

Something something doomed to repeat something...
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:24 PM on February 2, 2017

I find myself wishing that we hadn't blown our proverbial wad on comparisons to fascism, Orwell and Hitler during the Bush administration.

I've thought the same, but then ultimately have no regrets. Bush/Cheney was unprecedented in a lot of ways. Thought it was the lowest the GOP would go, and not a prelude to something which could be far worse. And that regime was Orwellian in many respects.

Anyways, I hope It Can't Happen Here is getting renewed interest as well. In my opinion, it should be read first, since it lays out a blueprint fairly close to what is happening. The President, in the book, is a complete narcissistic idiot, who loves his rallies, and who leans on a very Bannon-like figure. Shows the slow (and then not-so-slow) boil of fascism from the point of view of a small town newspaper editor, and how even the isolated small towns can't hide from what's happening. Which hits me a little hard, considering I live in an isolated small town. Completely depressing, but ends on a very hopeful note.

hi zeypher. glad there's two of us
posted by honestcoyote at 10:26 PM on February 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

We > 1984

Either way, just pass me some f*cking Soma already.
posted by General Malaise at 10:26 PM on February 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Since (let's be honest) most of us have read 1984 already, I found this short list of suggested reading material from a Yale history professor to be quite good:

6. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don't use the Internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.

I've been reading The Captive Mind by Milosz (1953), on the rise of Stalinism in Poland, and it's eerily on point, page by page. Among other things he goes deep into how, exactly, the liberal intellectual can be persuaded to go along with a totalitarian regime rather than resist. This article on the book is worth reading in full, at least. It (and Milosz) remark on how ill-prepared Americans are for what awaits them. They have romantic, cliched notions that the liberal intellectual will resist fiercely, and continue to be a free spirit with independent thoughts separate from state ideology, and eventually be crushed by the brute force of the state, becoming a noble martyr to liberty. When in reality what will happen is that an all-pervasive new form of thinking will seep in through daily immersion, a "system of symbols" that changes the sphere of discourse and definitions you thought you knew, little compromises will be made, then more little compromises, and before you know it you will have logically accepted a way of being that resembles nothing that speaks to living, breathing humanity. No brute force is necessary when the baseline for normal changes so thoroughly that even the resistance becomes subjugated by it.

I'm seeing this already in just two weeks. Where first, as someone with legal training, I very clearly thought in terms of which executive and legislative acts are constitutional or unconstitutional, and why, I lately find my mind skipping past that portion of the analysis because whether I or anyone protests that something is unconstitutional doesn't appear to have any affect on the daily sweeping changes introduced by fiat that my friends and I have to scramble to deal with on a practical level. Already "constitutionality" as a hurdle is becoming cursory at best. Similarly, Trump's tweets are shifting our ideas and definitions, even as we protest them. As one of his tweets this morning threatened cutting off funds for Berkeley, I found myself protesting it because Berkeley hadn't done anything wrong to deserve it - not because this cutting off funds to a public university for certain forms of speech would be unconstitutionally discriminatory on its face. The rules and the playing field are shifting under our feet, and a new "system of symbols" is worming its way into our brains. Witness people seeing the travel ban as more acceptable because green card holders were let back in. What can we do to actively resist it? It's like fighting the onset of Alzheimer's. Already the so-called opposition party is thinking about whether to acquiesce and capitulate and save its battles for "another day". You start playing into the control games and even believing the rhetoric (a liberal friend was on my facebook feed the other day explaining why he thinks immigration should be more skill-based and less family-based. Apparently it's cognitively less stressful to just start going along with the state's justifications rather than fighting them; I see some are doing this quicker than others.)
posted by naju at 10:38 PM on February 2, 2017 [49 favorites]

I read It Can't Happen Here shortly before the election, on a lark, because it found me when I wandered into a used book store. I'm glad I read it but I also wish I hadn't, if that makes any sense.

I've been telling everyone to read Ursula K. Le Guin's story The Finder, the first story in the Tales of Earthsea collection. There's some magic in it, but the story focuses more on how ordinary people experience and resist tyranny. It's unsparing, poignant, and bittersweet by turns, but it also ends on a hopeful note.
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 11:14 PM on February 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

I'm in the middle of We right now. This passage made me stop and read it a couple of times, this week:

Even among the ancients the more grown-up knew that the source of right is power, that right is a function of power. So take some scales and put on one side a gram, on the other a ton; on one side "I" and on the other "We," OneState. It's clear, isn't it? - to assert that "I" have certain "rights" with respect to the State is exactly the same as asserting that a gram weighs the same as a ton. That explains the way things are divided up: To the ton go the rights, to the gram the duties. And the natural path from nullity to greatness is this: Forget that you're a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.

posted by jeweled accumulation at 11:19 PM on February 2, 2017 [6 favorites]

Also a good time to re-read Lutz's _Doublespeak_.
posted by kreinsch at 11:28 PM on February 2, 2017

Brave New World? If you could emigrate there US citizens would be filing for refugee status.

I keep thinking of Aldous Huxley's Island :
[Hitler was] A Peter Pan if ever there was one. Hopeless at school. Incapable either of competing or co- operating. Envying all the normally successful boys—and, because he envied, hating them and, to make himself feel better, despising them as inferior beings.
posted by benzenedream at 11:33 PM on February 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Maybe the kids don’t understand how America’s government works. Don’t they know that there are checks on executive power and that campaign bravado—even the cruelest sort—doesn’t necessarily follow the country’s elected presidents into the White House? Maybe the kids—some of them gay, many of them immigrants, most of them young women—worry in a histrionic, sky-is-falling fashion because they’re less touched by “real-world” concerns than adults, who, of course, know better.

I wonder if he still thinks that the "it can't be that bad" adult attitude is the more realistic one.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 11:49 PM on February 2, 2017

The central argument of Amusing Ourselves [to Death] is simple: there were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble).

Andrew Postman, My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World, The Guardian (2 February 2017).
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:13 AM on February 3, 2017 [11 favorites]

whynotboth.gif
posted by naju at 12:34 AM on February 3, 2017 [12 favorites]

hi zeypher. glad there's two of us.

More than two. I've read most of what's referenced above, and 1984/We/Brave New World/The Handmaid’s Tale have similar themes but still don't seem quite real somehow. It Can’t Happen Here, for as many decades old as it is, felt almost like current events when I read it at the end of last year. This month it’s an American future that seems even more possible to me... and, like in the book, it could happen quickly.

If you're not a reader (if you aren't, you probably won't be in this thread), be sure in any case to watch the now 60-year-old A Face in the Crowd for more relevant insights. An excellent movie, with a brilliant performance by Andy Griffith, who reportedly so scared himself with his portrayal of a ‘common man’ turned political tyrant that he vowed from then on only to play the kind of folksy, small-town character we now remember him for.

p.s. 1984 forever wil remain important for its insights about language. "Ignorance is Strength, War is Peace" indeed. And now the current "Refugees are Illegal Aliens" referenced by Arsenio/Warren Hall/Oates in a different thread.
posted by LeLiLo at 1:06 AM on February 3, 2017 [6 favorites]

josephtate: "As Thomas Pynchon noted, 1984 is written in the past tense. In fiction, at least, they get through it."

"The interests of the regime in Oceania lie in the exercise of power for its own sake, in its unrelenting war on memory, desire, and language as a vehicle of thought. Memory is relatively easy to deal with, from the totalitarian point of view. There is always some agency like the Ministry of Truth to deny the memories of others, to rewrite the past. It has become a commonplace, circa 2003, for government employees to be paid more than most of the rest of us to debase history, trivialise truth and annihilate the past on a daily basis. Those who don't learn from history used to have to relive it, but only until those in power could find a way to convince everybody, including themselves, that history never happened, or happened in a way best serving their own purposes - or best of all that it doesn't matter anyway, except as some dumbed-down TV documentary cobbled together for an hour's entertainment." --1984 Foreword, by Thomas Pynchon
posted by chavenet at 3:23 AM on February 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Also: Pynchon on 1984 on MetaFilter previously, a more innocent time
posted by chavenet at 3:34 AM on February 3, 2017

Even more pertinent given Kellyanne Conway just recently discussing the "Bowling Green massacre", an attack that never actually happened.

Or when Spicer referenced the attack in Canada discussing how the attacker was Moroccan, when he was actually white, French-Canadian and a Trump fan.

Think for a moment how things will be when there is an attack in the US - how will anyone know who really did it? Or what actually happened?

Truth is disappearing, and the only thing that matters, is power.
It's as is 1984 and others are being used as a manual.
posted by rolandroland at 3:44 AM on February 3, 2017 [10 favorites]

Of course, around the White House, it's simply referred to as The Manual.
posted by jonmc at 4:14 AM on February 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Even among the ancients the more grown-up knew that the source of right is power,

Sure, that's the medieval principle "might makes right." It's a worldview, a guiding belief about how the world ought to be ordered. In reality, the raw exercise of power without restraint over the long term always leads to ruin. Unfortunately, sometimes the powerful are able to shield themselves from the direct fallout of their own actions throughout their lives. If they don't feel any common sympathy with human society, their own future descendants, or other human beings, they don't even have to consciously suffer. In Buddhist thought, all that guilt sticks to them and hurts them throughout life in ways they can't necessarily appreciate, becoming karmic psychic residue that influences their actions unconsciously toward their own detriment, but if somebody just doesn't care hard enough and is clever enough about squirming away from harm themselves, they might not get any sort of comeuppance in life. That's where the whole idea of reincarnation comes in as a backstop, the thought being these worst offenders have to own their shit eventually, somehow, for the math of cause and effect to work out. But of course that may be just-world fantasy, wishful thinking, or just a deliberate bit of psychologically comforting BS in keeping with the idea of skillful means.

Anyway, "might makes right" isn't a natural truth, it's a belief, a philosophical commitment. In fact, it's one most closely associated with tyrannical oppression throughout history. Wherever it's been rejected, however briefly and imperfectly, we've seen human progress and hope, everywhere else, nothing but darkness and human misery perpetually on the rise for most.
posted by saulgoodman at 4:24 AM on February 3, 2017 [5 favorites]

I read 1984 and Brave New World together as part of my high school senior English class in 1980, just as Ronald Reagan was making it morning in America again, and even then it wasn't too hard to see that America was so much more like BNW than 1984. Then, 1984 seemed more like what Reagan kept saying was the threat of Soviet Russia rather than anything lurking in our own society.

My daughter just finished reading 1984 as part of her sophomore English class a couple of weeks ago. Interestingly, they are not reading BNW at all. I tried to engage with her about 1984, which is still delivered in the same context of fear of a certain type of totalitarianism but it seemed wholly irrelevant as far as she was concerned. Then she went back to watching an endless YouTube stream of K-pop videos on her Kindle Fire.
posted by briank at 5:06 AM on February 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

Wish I could find a good book to live in,
Wish I could find a good book.
If I could find a real good book I'd never have to come out and look at...
Look what they've done to my song.
posted by Segundus at 5:38 AM on February 3, 2017

I heard Atwood speak at an event last fall (when cheeto voldemort was polling in the single digits and we thought hrc would be in the white house) and she pointed out that the final segments of 1984 and the handmaid's tale make it clear that the events described had happened in the past and were no longer the status quo.
posted by brujita at 5:44 AM on February 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

I've taken to reacting to any IRL reports of Trump's horrible misdeeds with a stony "We are the dead." Sooner or later, someone's going to answer with "You are the dead," and then I'll feel a momentary glow of co-recognition, and will be able to reflect fondly on it when they haul us all off to the camps.
posted by Mayor West at 5:54 AM on February 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

The new edition
posted by elgilito at 6:03 AM on February 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yeah, it started back then, kept taking hold no matter how much some of us shouted warnings, and now here we are. The right words were being used all along. That wasn't the problem.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:29 AM on February 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I heard Atwood speak at an event last fall ... and she pointed out that the final segments of 1984 and the handmaid's tale make it clear that the events described had happened in the past and were no longer the status quo.

There's something both reassuring and chilling about the frame narrative that Atwood constructs around The Handmaid's Tale. It's an academic conference, so in a way a very familiar and anodyne setting, and yet the speakers are so blase and oddly dismissive about the human tragedy that lies behind the documents. They're simply regarded as historical "material," which I always thought was a great take on the obliviousness and privilege of a certain kind of academic practice. I also wonder too if Atwood was making a gesture towards Jack London's Iron Heel, which also positions its narrative as a "source document" discovered and made sense of by academics in the far-distant future.

The Guardian is now going to town on these kinds of pieces. Here's a new one: Sarah Churchwell, 'It will be called Americanism': the US writers who imagined a fascist future, Guardian (3 February 2017). One of the commenters below the line cheekily points out that this is the sixth of these articles to appear in recent weeks.
posted by Sonny Jim at 6:48 AM on February 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

If you don't follow her already, now is a great time to follow @michikokakutani on twitter.
posted by janey47 at 7:04 AM on February 3, 2017

To throw another chillingly relevant book into the pile, I had just started rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls when the election went down. And yeah, I know, Hemingway's problematic on several axes, but that book really plays to his strengths and my god was it chilling, reading about people fighting a doomed civil war against their former neighbors. I literally couldn't sleep the night I read Pilar's story about the purge of the Fascists in her town, because it was way too easy for my imagination to transplant the action to, say, Owatonna, MN.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 7:17 AM on February 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

If you're not a reader (if you aren't, you probably won't be in this thread), be sure in any case to watch the now 60-year-old A Face in the Crowd for more relevant insights. An excellent movie, with a brilliant performance by Andy Griffith, who reportedly so scared himself with his portrayal of a ‘common man’ turned political tyrant that he vowed from then on only to play the kind of folksy, small-town character we now remember him for.

I thought about this movie last year when audio of Jerkface talking about women hit the internet. The thing is, in the movie Griffith's character is immediately discredited when his listeners hear him saying what he thinks about them. In reality land, this does not seem to matter one bit.
posted by JanetLand at 7:49 AM on February 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

It's worth keeping in mind the chronology of events that led to the rise of 1984 on the Amazon bestseller list (It's not showing up on other lists, like the NYT list, for example).

So, if I were a tech titan with an online bookstore, and was also the owner of one of the most read newspapers in the country which was both critical of and targeted by a new president who had specifically expressed his dislike of both my newspaper and my online business and made threats to have my online business investigated for antitrust violations—when that president's advisor used the term "alternative facts", I might consider leveraging a bestseller list where I chose the criteria of what bestseller meant and didn't need to defend it because I was notorious for not sharing actual sales figures—I too might put 1984 on my bestsellers list. As other's have pointed out, Brave New World might actually be more applicable, but it doesn't share the same kind of Newspeak that Conway likes to spout.

Don't get me wrong, there are tech titans out there who only recently have become major heroes of mine for standing up against threats that other business titans are caving to, and then there's that fucker Thiel, but it did recently occur to me that we don't actually know how many copies sold of any of the books on most bestseller lists, let alone that one. But if the rise of 1984 on the Amazon bestseller is an editorial choice rather than one supported by data, it's a brilliant move.
posted by Stanczyk at 8:10 AM on February 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

I can't remember who exactly said it, but when fascism comes to America it will be draped in the flag and carrying the cross.
posted by Sphinx at 8:16 AM on February 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Another important read: Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. My wife gave it to me when it came out and she read it last year, and we both find it chillingly relevant to current events.
posted by languagehat at 8:17 AM on February 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

One other thought about Bezos. The guy is truly a tech and markets visionary, but how he had the foresight to personally greenlight The Man In the High Castle is almost creepy. It is so prescient that one wonders if he himself has figured out a way to travel through alternative history.
posted by Stanczyk at 8:25 AM on February 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Fair warning on The Handmaid's Tale: it had always been summarized for me as "the US becomes a theocracy" and that's one of those overly pithy summations that's not exactly wrong but seems to miss nuance by like a mile. It's more about how women, racial minorities and LGBT people completely lose all civil rights in a part of the former US after a coup by right wing theocrats. Reading it for the first time gave me a week long panic attack and taught me that while Margaret Atwood is a fantastic writer, I have to steel myself for a crap ton of violent rape and sexual violence in like all of her books. I can't imagine what reading it for the first time in the current climate would do to me. Nonetheless, it remains the best and most plausible, nuanced dystopian book I've read.

I'm catching up on other dystopias I've missed out on, spaced in between comfort food reading, right now. V for Vendetta was pretty good, although V's form of resistance is a silly fantasy (Valerie's form of resistance is perfect, but completely un-sexy and grim, so of course I have never seen anyone mention her at all, ever). The Man in the High Castle was also good; the most chilling aspect is how...comfortably people who weren't being specifically targeted by the Nazis or Japanese empire were able to adjust to life in the Reich. Also the total lack of resistance except in a few outstanding individual acts; everyone standing back to let the Jewish POV character get arrested is horrifically believable.

Peter Watts is probably good reading now, too, though the "eco-totalitarianism" of the Rifters series already seems quaint in an era where those running environmental and research agencies seem to've been picked based on how likely they are to shutter everything.
posted by byanyothername at 8:48 AM on February 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

> My daughter just finished reading 1984 as part of her sophomore English class a couple of weeks ago. Interestingly, they are not reading BNW at all

It's very dated; the teachers might not want to make students read about the savages, for exampl, if there are equally relevant but less icky books available.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:00 AM on February 3, 2017

I heard something terribly eerie last night-- my friend's pro-Trump conservative aunt has been sending her emails, and the messages in them are just alternate universe bananas. They include--

-you are a Christian, so you can't not be a conservative
-Liberals believe in Orwellian doublespeak, unlike honorable conservatives like Trump who always tells the truth
-Jesus never said we should care for the poor, he said we should make money to care for our own families
-You should read Orwell's Animal Farm, it explains why poor people are to blame for their poverty, and why we shouldn't try to help them

I just?
What?
How?
?????????

It's like they got the message that "Orwellian" is bad, but instead of actually reading Orwell and understanding what he is warning against, they said "IF ORWELLIAN IS BAD AND LIBERALS ARE ALSO BAD THEN BY THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTY LIBERALS ARE ORWELLIAN, GOOD JOB ORWELL FOR WARNING US ABOUT THOSE BAD BAD LIBERALS" without ever reading the actual texts.

Imagine George Orwell, author of Down and Out in Paris and London, finding out that he's being used in defense of the Prosperity Gospel.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 9:03 AM on February 3, 2017 [18 favorites]

I would like to put in a word for Orwell's shorter essays--not just "Politics and the English Language," which everybody cites and nobody actually reads, but pieces like "Raffles and Miss Blandish," which, while it is superficially a lament of the loss of the good old days in popular fiction, has some penetrating insights into power-worship.
posted by praemunire at 9:03 AM on February 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Also Joseph Roth's "The Auto-Da-Fe of the Mind," which is available translated in his What I Saw.
posted by praemunire at 9:07 AM on February 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Thanks for all the great book recommendations, everyone. My reading list seems to continually get longer instead of shorter.
posted by LizBoBiz at 10:33 AM on February 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Then, 1984 seemed more like what Reagan kept saying was the threat of Soviet Russia rather than anything lurking in our own society.

I saw a fun contrarian take on 1984 pass by yesterday, 1984 Is a Utopia, and Trump is not Big Brother that would agree with you. It argues that Wilson is delusional, privileged, and reactionary, and that's why 1984 reads like a right winger's idea of socialism instead of a real thing. I don't buy all of the article, and it dips into irony, but it's a fun take.

Brave New World didn't resonate with me at all. Its worries about industrialization seemed really silly to me. And I feel like there's not much to it if you set a filter for priggish alarmism?

What If 'Those People' Become Too Important Socially and Either It's Impossible for a Guy Like Me to Get Laid, or All the Women are Too Trashy TBQH, and I Feel a Little Disappointed and the State Oppresses Me ... Even Me : a Dystopia.
posted by fleacircus at 11:38 AM on February 3, 2017

The Man in the High Castle was also good; the most chilling aspect is how...comfortably people who weren't being specifically targeted by the Nazis or Japanese empire were able to adjust to life in the Reich. Also the total lack of resistance except in a few outstanding individual acts; everyone standing back to let the Jewish POV character get arrested is horrific

One of the things that has always struck me about The Man In The High Castle is that it's just a description of contemporary America at the time (and how America always had been, and is now still, too) - an occupied country with a racially segregated hierarchy and a power structure which precludes the original inhabitants of the land - and the pernicious ways that such an unjust society warps and demeans everyone in it, the unprivileged and the privileged alike (such as Tagomi's impossible struggle to reconcile his self image of himself as a good man with the abhorrent fact of the occupation and his position in it).
posted by dng at 12:24 PM on February 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

and she pointed out that the final segments of 1984 and the handmaid's tale make it clear that the events described had happened in the past and were no longer the status quo.

Same with The Iron Heel, but the timeline doesn't make me feel any better.
posted by bongo_x at 6:28 PM on February 3, 2017

Even with its surging popularity, I feel like a lot of readers of the book don't fully get the fundamental idea behind Newspeak and the Orwellian society. Gopnik and Kakutani, both as sophisticated readers as you will ever find, come close, but even they don't entirely grasp the ultimate role of power in 1984, perhaps because they are, despite all the developments of the last few weeks, fundamentally too optimistic.

Kakutani writes:

If such narratives are riddled with lies, so much the better for those in power, who then succeed in redefining the daily reality inhabited by their subjects.... In this world, 2 + 2 does = 5, as Orwell noted, and the acceptance of bad arithmetic simply becomes a testament to the power of rulers to define reality and the terms of debate.

This gets closer to the core idea than many readings of 1984: the point of reality-redefinition is not simply as a tool of political power, redefining terms or people's conceptions in order to achieve political goals (or wear people down as a intermediate step towards those goals). More fundamentally, it's a testament to power, an indicator that is itself a perquisite and aspect of power. But what that exactly means she leaves ambiguous.

Gopnik gets a little further:

Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power... There is no political cost for Trump in being seen to be incompetent, impulsive, shallow, inconsistent, and contemptuous of truth and reason. Those are his politics. This is how he achieved power. His base loves craziness, incompetence, and contempt for reason because sanity, competence, and the patient accumulation of evidence are things that allow educated people to pretend that they are superior. Resentment comes before reason.

This gets closer to the core. Falsification is not a tool, not even an indicator or perk of power, but is itself a way of doing power. But like "testament," that leaves it a bit ambiguous whether "way" is a means of doing power or a type of power, and he ultimately suggests that it could just be an outgrowth of some pop-psychology resentment that takes aim at reality because it is associated with hated liberal elitists. But that doesn't go nearly far enough.

Orwell makes this about as clear as he can at the end. People often quote the last line of this dialogue, but I don't think they usually quite appreciate what it really means or how far Orwell goes. [Warning: dark stuff ahead -- and I should emphasize that this is my reading of Orwell, not my own view of the world.]

"And now let us get back to the question of 'how' and 'why.' You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak," he added as Winston remained silent.

"You are ruling over us for our own good," he said feebly. "You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore—"

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.

"That was stupid, Winston, stupid!" he said. "You should know better than to say a thing like that."

He pulled the lever back and continued:

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. ... Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
…
"Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."

For Orwell, ultimately newspeak is not a tool for obedience, and obedience is not a tool for power and control. By Orwell's lights, when Conway or Trump tell obvious lies, the purpose is not to confuse or wear us down, and it's not even a way to redefine reality or remove the idea of reality in order to better control people or win power. By Orwell's lights, it is the power. The destruction -- the act of destruction -- of sanity, reality, language, meaning, beauty, science, etc, is the goal itself. It is what power is for, is what power is. The objective of hatred is to hate, to build a society of hatred in order to make more hate, and the destruction of the opposition is not just a step towards that (anti) utopia, but the essence of that utopia already in action. The aim of newspeak is not to control or remake reality: the aim is the act of mind-destruction itself. Pain is not the tool, but the objective. By these lights, the policy goal is not to eventually eliminate immigrants: the pain and chaos of the sudden ban, the weeping and the protests and the deaths, is itself the goal. The Final Solution was itself an Orwellian term, in that it was actually the process that was essential, a way of creating and maintaining a society and that society in action, not fundamentally an end goal that, once achieved, would be done. Hatred is an end, not a means. The rest is just ways of doing hate. There is no other end, no answer to the question of what they are trying to achieve. What they are trying to achieve is what is happening right now: chaos, destruction, pain, and the weeping of their enemies, whose tears they drink like sweet nectar.
posted by chortly at 10:06 PM on February 3, 2017 [15 favorites]

Re: Margaret Atwood, and another of her dystopias (Oryx and Crake), I loved that series to pieces, she's clever as hell, but on reading it a second time especially, I just couldn't help thinking "gee, Margie, you're such a fuckin downer."
posted by gusandrews at 7:59 PM on February 4, 2017