1984 by George Orwell

18:42Jeff:I agree. It has a real flavor of, like, tis better to have loved and lost. Yes. They know it's doomed. There's kind of a Romeo and Juliet spin to it almost. They know from the get-go. Like, this is not a lie in bed in each other's arms and dream about your future decades together. That's not possible. There's nowhere to run to.

19:01Rebecca:There's no possibility of, like, we can make for the hills and live amongst the wolves or something.

19:07Jeff:Every moment could be the last moment that you have with each other. They're always waiting for the door to get knocked in.

19:14Rebecca:And which makes the end so, so, so terrible and beautiful in its own way, in the Orwellian way, which they both are eventually brought in. and they both seem, we only get Winston's perspective. We don't get Julia's perspective. We only get some sense of what's happened to her until the end, though we have a good sense that's very similar to what's going on to Winston. He's brought in. He's tortured. O 'Brien comes in and sort of makes the big villain reveal, and he's reeducated and sort of instructed about what the point of this all is. One of the other things that's so frightening about this book is that once he's actually in the machine, they're not afraid of telling the truth about what's going on.

19:52Rebecca:Like there is no, well, what if this gets out? They are so confident in their ability, their unbreakable hegemonic force that there's just sort of monologue, like almost a Bond level villain monologue to Winston about what's going on, why that's going to happen. And he is eventually broken in a couple of ways. The first is that this two plus two equals five, where he undergoes so much pain that eventually this sort of central logical underpinning of the world is broken in him. where just because he's under so much pain that his body and the body-mind thing is so collapsed that just to get the pain to start, his unconscious starts to say, yep, five, just sorts of agree.

20:34Rebecca:And it's not that he's lying to stop the pain. That's crucially important. Yes. And it's made crucially important in the book. It's not that you're just agreeing so that you'll make the thing stop. It's that you actually think, even just for a moment, and it doesn't last long, I don't think, that, oh yeah, there are five, just to make the thing stop. Because as Winston says earlier in the book, the foundation of all freedom is the ability to say two plus two equals four, meaning to say this is true and that's not true. That is the prime directive of all freedoms flow from that. And we can talk about more of that later.

21:08Rebecca:I see you have a note about this too. I want to talk about more with the idea of freedom of speech as being the foundational one. So that part breaks, But the part that hasn't yet broken is his attachment to Julia. He won't give her up in sort of a moral, kind of like an ontological way. And that's where he's finally brought into Room 101. The rest of the stuff has just been in like the very bad but not the worst parts of the Ministry of Love as far as I can tell.

21:35Jeff:The Ministry of Love also. Yeah. We should highlight that. There's the Ministry of Love and like the Ministry of Peace. Yes. And everything is named the opposite of what it is.

21:46Rebecca:Which that one feels so on the nose for today, by the way. We can get into what feels more or less on the nose. So eventually, like, O 'Brien knows that he still has some redoubt in his heart that has not been breached. And he takes him into room 101, which somehow they know what your biggest fear is. This is part of the party's totalizing understanding of you. And for Winston, it's rats. and they show to him and put on his face this cage, this sort of long cage. In the middle, there's a barrier. On the other side, there's these rabid, crazy rats. And what they're essentially trying to do is get him to say, I would rather you do this to Julia than to me.

22:24Rebecca:Basically to put someone else in his position just to save his own skin. Yeah, ultimate betrayal. The ultimate betrayal that also everyone understands. Like they seem to understand it themselves going in that they'll give each other up. But this is like, this is where he doesn't just get it. Like it seeps into his soul. It breaks his soul to understand what he will do. There is nothing he will not give up to save his own self from his worst nightmare. And then once he says that, they take the mask off. They don't actually ever release the rats. That would be bad enough, Rebecca, but that's not the end of the story here because Julia and Winston meet up and then what happens?

23:00Jeff:They meet up. They have this conversation with each other. He confesses. I gave you up. She confesses. I gave you up. They agree. You know, in a moment like that, all you're thinking of is each other. And then.

23:16Rebecca:And that's it. And then basically, you know, the last line is he loved Big Brother, which he's been totally subsumed by their psychological torture, their political machine and the monolithic worldview they represent. that he has been completely erased of individuality, personhood, or a way to reckon with it, the world he lives in at all.

23:36Jeff:Yeah, and that it's not that he's performing, saying the things they want him to say. This is really important. In the construction of the book, the thought police know this. If you're just telling them 2 plus 2 equals 5, if you're telling them a thing that you don't think is true, what they actually want is for you to believe the thing that is untrue. and they don't stop until you're saying two plus two equals five and you believe that two plus two equals five and like that realization as you were saying is the thing that breaks winston along with this that like he and julia knew that they would betray each other but they didn't know what that would look like and it's the reality that it's not just yes she did bad things too it's not just saying, you know, like he's not just ratting on her.

24:22Jeff:It's saying, go torture her instead of me. And that that is the worst thing that they could have done to each other.

24:30Rebecca:Right. Because it's a kind of, it's the last bastion of the self, right? To be able to distinguish between what's good for you and bad for someone else and vice versa. He's completely torn down and there's nothing of Winston left. Like he doesn't even know at the end what's happened to him. He has no ability to reckon with his own story. And that's both true of him, but it's also true of the party and the worldview. It's very important to the party to be presented as stasis, that things have never changed, do not change, and can never change. Because if you introduce the idea of change, then it suggests things could be other than they are.

25:09Rebecca:And if that's possible, then maybe rebellion, maybe resistance, maybe some other kind of future could happen. So there's like this crazy sameness of time, of affect, of aesthetics, of even speech that underpins so much of how control is exerted because the ultimate goal, the ultimate sort of kind of control is where no one even thinks to do anything else but what they're supposed to do. Like there is no alternative to imagine.

25:39Jeff:Yes. And it's not like there are rebellions in the streets and the party comes after those people. It's that it doesn't occur to anyone to rebel. And like the just wondering if it maybe might occur to somebody someday to rebel, that's a thought crime. But, you know, the book came out in 1949 and I think is often read as being a response to World War II and to watching the rise of Hitler. And certainly like this has a lot to say about fascism. There are a lot of ways to apply it today. And people certainly do extend it, or I think they don't necessarily know what they're reaching for when they say that what we're living through today is Orwellian.

26:15Because to take the Minneapolis

26:18Jeff:example, that's very Lisa. We do have people out in the streets, and we do have governmental institutions that are still functioning to some degree, citizens who are still willing to stand up. And in fact, watching government overreach results in an uprising of more citizens than have ever gotten into the streets before. What happened in Minneapolis is really remarkable from that perspective. So there was something kind of weirdly affirming about where we are today from reading 1984 of like, yes, there are very bad things happening. And there are people who would be totalitarian rulers if they could pull it off.

26:58Jeff:But the if they could pull it off is such a big if. and looking at the level of organization and coordination that Orwell identifies, a group would need, not just for a few years, but for generations, to execute something like this. Actually kind of dialed back, not my willingness to be in the streets, but my DEF CON rating. Yeah.

27:23Rebecca:And I have some more to say about 1984 and Orwell as a, I don't know, as a touchstone for any particular political moment. So I'm going to save that for just now. But if it's not clear why it's important, you probably know by listening to this show that it's in sort of the water of how we imagine political resistance and talking about authoritarian regimes and politics on a grander scale even. And like, this is, as you say, the landmark work of dystopian fiction, political satire. And I say, and you have, I don't know how to have this conversation, but like, maybe this is the landmark work of fiction in the 20th century, at least in English.

28:01Rebecca:I can't speak to other languages.

28:02Jeff:Yeah, I think you could make a really strong case for that.

28:04Rebecca:I don't even know what the other candidates are. I mean, that's maybe a Patreon or a special episode here, but it's difficult to see something that can joust with 1984 in terms of its prescience, its ongoing influence, and really framing how we think about thinking about these things. What else has done that in the world of fiction in the last hundred years?

28:28Jeff:Nothing as comprehensively as 1984. Like, this isn't the first novel to explore the most extreme and absurd ends of fascism. The first one to do it after Hitler was Brave New World. No, this is the first one to do it after Hitler.

28:41Rebecca:After Hitler, yeah.

28:42Jeff:Yeah. Brave New World was 1932 after World War I. Ray Bradbury did some of this in Fahrenheit 451. We continue to get stories that approach some angle of this, but Orwell's is the most comprehensive.

28:53Rebecca:I mean, it's 2451, The Handmaid's Tale in 1984 in terms of political satires. I mean, whatever else you want to say about those three. But I think 84, and this isn't about quality, that's not what I'm talking about, but in terms of influence and notoriety, it stands head and shoulders above even those two, I think. Yes.

29:13Jeff:And I think I can imagine a future several decades from now where The Handmaid's Tale has caught up in familiarity, namespace, recognition because of the ways that reproductive rights have eroded over the last few years. If that trajectory continues, maybe we get an Atwoodian or a Handmaid's Tale has crept into more popular culture and folks in those costumes, you know, out at protests. But nothing currently touches the size and scope and ongoing influence of 1984. And it's been that way since it came out. It was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. This is not what it was.

29:48Rebecca:Well, 50 years later, some English professor dusted off like it hit the ground running, which is amazing to think about.

29:54Jeff:Immediately received as a masterpiece. More than 8 million copies had sold in the first 20 years that the book was out, and now more than 30 million have sold worldwide. It did return to bestseller lists in 2017, right after Trump was first inaugurated, when Kellyanne Conway, one of his advisors, was on TV suggesting that he worked from alternative facts. Yes. Like I had we're just so used to talking about the Trump advance administration as Orwellian now that I had forgotten that that was the like that was the thing that made us first pull it out was the alternative.

30:24Rebecca:That's the most direct. You could imagine that as a phrase that's in 1984 alternative facts. Except Big Brother would not allow the adjective alternative. Like, I think that is actually not a bad way of sliding doors between one authoritarian wannabe and an actual, well, a more fully realized, the fully realized authoritarian regime in Big Brother is alternative facts. We're still using that adjective, which allows just enough slippage for those of us still around in the wider culture to be like, they're not suggesting it as facts. They're merely alternative. It's bad enough. Don't get me wrong.

30:57Rebecca:But it's still different than going through, say, the New York Times, going through the New York Times archives, having a government official like clipping all this stuff out and replacing it with what the government wants.

31:09Jeff:And when that happened, it sold 26 ,000 copies in one week. Then again, January of 2025, after Trump was inaugurated the second time, 19 ,500 copies in one week. So it continues. It reenters the conversation. And a lot of people either pick up this book for the first time or go revisit it. But, you know, we're going to be continuing to hear about Orwellian. It's on and off of bestseller lists. And that's a remarkable thing for a book that's 70 plus years old, almost 80 years old. Spring is here and there's a whole new way to chai at Starbucks that's made perfect for you. Choose your sweetness, dial it up or keep things light.

31:51Jeff:Add a touch of pistachio, a hint of strawberry or vanilla or make it a spring classic with lavender. because this season, there's endless ways to chai at Starbucks.

32:27Rebecca:R.J. Decker, series premiere, Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu. Tax Act understands you haven't memorized the tax code. That's why Tax Act has live experts to help. Tax Act can even do it for you if you prefer. It's the easiest way to know you're doing it right. Well, other than going back to college and obtaining a bachelor's degree in accounting with a minor in finance, then interning somewhere and becoming fluent in all tax forms. But that might be hard to accomplish before tax day. So maybe just stick with Tax Act. Tax Act. Let's get them over with. I think it's important to the timing of when it came out, how quickly it sold in the years after.

33:08Rebecca:It sold 8 million copies, as you said, by 1970. So you think of the foment of like the post-war 50s into the 60s, into the 70s in Watergate. Like this was available for people to like use as a lens through which to see these things and interpret them. And in that investigation, I think the book itself has changed how we even think about thinking about those things. It's very difficult for me to imagine a world of thinking about politics that doesn't have 1984 in it. And maybe that's the biggest kudos I can offer. It's hard to imagine a world in even my own thinking that it doesn't even have these sort of golf clubs in my golf bag, right?

33:46Rebecca:But I can't just – it is the golf bag for a lot of people thinking about how bad things can get. It's kind of remarkable.

33:52Jeff:And it's so potent that it has been banned and challenged also since its publication.

33:57Rebecca:Which is the great irony of all these things, right?

33:59Jeff:It's currently not available in classrooms and libraries in several school districts in multiple states around the U.S., but always on the list. Like right now, not on the top 10 list of most banned and challenged books because the book banners are really obsessed with LGBTQ people right now. But on the long list, 1984 is always there. And it's for as long as we live in this kind of cultural water, I expect we'll continue to see it. But as you were saying, like, it has and actually this is an interesting way into it, since the party is obsessed with reducing language in order to control thought.

34:35Jeff:Orwell gave us new language, which opens up a new way of thought. Like you've gathered some of the phrases that entered the lexicon. Like we have big brother, thought police, double speak. We have always been at war with East Asia. Two plus two equals five. And memory hole, which I had forgotten that Orwell gave us, if I ever knew that Orwell gave us memory hole.

34:56Rebecca:What do you think that was an internet thing or where do you think that came from? Yeah, I just thought it was an internet thing.

34:59Jeff:But like, I say it all the time. Like, did I just memory hole that? Yes, you do. Memory hole is one of your things you go to.

35:03Rebecca:That's true.

35:04Jeff:Yeah, which I'm maybe going to modify now that I remember what it came from.

35:08Rebecca:Did you memory hole where memory hole comes? I don't know if that's a thing.

35:11Jeff:Memory holes all the way down. Right. But that's really fascinating. And very few writers, like you note Shakespeare here in our outline, very few writers give us new language that shapes the way that we understand the world. And Orwell did that multiple times. Yeah.

35:29Rebecca:And then maybe his most famous coinage didn't actually happen in this book, but I believe in essay, he's the first person to use the term Cold War. And you can understand that's – I've never really thought about that. Well, I had thought about it. We did an episode on Orwell for a show we used to do called Annotated, which is like a reported NPR style show, which – pour one out for Annotated. But I never realized the beauty of that phrase, Cold War, to describe the relationship of U.S. and Russia throughout most of the mid-century. And I know we're in some other—we need Orwell to coin something else for us now.

36:03Rebecca:But I think that speaks well to this idea of how much the articulation, the specificity of language can unlock for us new ways of understanding. Because that way of understanding what was going on, I think, actually helped people understand what was going on. I mean, that sounds reductive, but I think it's true. I think it's absolutely true.

36:22Jeff:You need somebody to articulate it. And Orwell showed up and articulated it in a way that was sort of immediately understandable to people and that has been extensible. And that's been part of the book's staying power. To get into his bio, it's maybe surprising to look at his history and realize that this guy becomes one of the signal writers. Well, why do you say that?

36:45Rebecca:I mean, why do you say that? It's interesting. I hadn't really thought of that, but what makes you say that?

36:49Jeff:Not a great student. The 75th anniversary edition that I read had an introduction by Dolan Perkins Valdez, which I recommend. And she talks about how no one who knew him, like thought of him as particularly brilliant.

37:04Rebecca:Not most likely to succeed in his high school yearbook. Right.

37:07Jeff:He wasn't the one who was like excelling from the get go. And they were like, that guy's going to write the great American novel. But a really interesting childhood. His real name was Eric Arthur Blair. He's born in 1903 in British India. His father worked in the opium department, which is a real thing, but sounds like an Orwellian thing. It really does. Overseeing opium production and sales to China. From the Department of Health, making opium for sale to China. His mother grew up in Burma with a French father and an English mother, and she moved Eric Arthur Blair, later known as George Orwell, to England with his sisters in 1904.

37:44Jeff:So he's just one year old when that happens. He grows up as an English person, was a teacher, a journalist. He reported on oppressive social conditions. He fought in the Spanish Civil War. And you have a note here about how he was shot in the neck by a sniper and was very close to death. He also reported on the Spanish Civil War and then later on World War II. And he became a broadcaster for BBC Radio before he turned to fiction. So just like was always interested in people who were being oppressed. There's some through lines there from Dickens, like the kinds of things that he was exploring in the world make their way into the perspective of his fiction.

38:20Jeff:And then Animal Farm comes out in 1945 after it was rejected by multiple publishers because they saw it correctly as an attack on the regime of the Soviet Union. And then after Animal Farm's success, Orwell's in his mid-40s. He's in poor health. He moves to Jura, which is a region on the border of France and Switzerland, in 46. Suffers through the writing of 1984.

38:48Rebecca:He's in a bad way, Rebecca. Yeah, because he's in a bad way through the right of the night. He's in really bad shape. And it really shows, I guess I'm going to say that at the same time.

38:55Jeff:Yeah. Then 1984 comes out in 1949. It cements his legacy immediately. And sadly, he dies the next year. He dies in 1950 at 46 years old from a pulmonary artery rupture. So this is one where I really feel the loss of, like, what else would this career have done? What else would he have written? How would his perspective continue to expand? And there's just less material here for who was this guy because he died so relatively young and so soon after the book came out.

39:28Rebecca:It is wild. I mean, 1903, he could have lived into the 80s easily, like in seeing the Cold War come to fruition. He coined Cold War in like 1948. That's unbelievable to see it that way.

39:42Jeff:You mentioned Watergate. George Orwell's op-eds to the New York Times on Watergate would have been incredible.

39:48Rebecca:Yeah, it would have been remarkable. I think one thing I want to highlight, too, is his ongoing interest of the conditions and realities of working class people. That's something he really admired Jack London's early writing that were about working class conditions. And his real breakout, Animal Farm is the one that we think of now, but he wrote this book called The Road to Wigan Pier, which was half memoir, half expose of coal mining conditions in the north of England. that got selected by this thing called the Left Bank Book Club, which was super influential at the time. And it sold like 100 ,000 copies just through its own devices.

40:21Rebecca:And so that gave him some clout with some of these other things to publish this weirder stuff. I think that's another thing that's hard to remember is that Animal Farm is a weird-ass book. And 1984 is a weird-ass book today. And it was certainly a weird-ass book in 1948. Sometimes we can forget how freaky these books and writers were in the 50s, 70s, 100s, 200 years after. As they become part of the can, they become more familiar. And that's sort of a through line to think about. I think it's helpful to think about all culture that way is usually the things that are going to last are things that broke tradition, broke new ground.

40:55Rebecca:And at the time of breaking, that feels transgressive. It seems strange and it seems freaky. Even if you're like not against it political, it can feel aesthetically off-putting. And that can be a contraindication of attention-warranting kinds of works of art.

41:11Jeff:Yeah, and this definitely opens the door for the decades-long wave of dystopian novels that we are still living in. But that emphasis on working-class people differentiates 1984 from a lot of the novels that we've gotten since, especially the things that have broken wide, the ones that have gone for YA. This is not the Hunger Games with attractive young people joining the revolution. Like, Winston is 39. He's already in bad shape. He's trudging up and down, like, seven flights of stairs in his falling-down apartment building that's called Victory Mansions, because that's hilarious. Right. He has this like cyst ulcer thing, a varicose ulcer on his ankle.

41:55Jeff:Like the descriptions of Winston's body are really this guy is suffering. He's not in good shape. He thinks that when he undresses for Julia, she's going to think that he's hideous. Just not like this is not a hero. This is not the sexy guy who's going to ride in or do like the Han Solo thing. It's a really different perspective on what it's like to live through one of these regimes that's not about trying to become a hero at all, but just like holding on by your fingernails for a little bit of sanity.

42:27Rebecca:I think it does matter, and I'll get to one of our favorite questions down the road here, but it does matter that we encounter him sort of if there is a beginning of the action, so to speak. It is him having bought a book, which aren't really made anymore, a blank diary, like a children's diary as far as we're told. And he just starts writing in it to document what's happening to him. and that he understands at the moment of even buying the book, let alone putting pen to paper, that he has initiated a sequence of events that will lead to his eventual imprisonment. And he either can't help it or doesn't care.

43:04Rebecca:But either way, that is the moment in which we, his life changes. His life sort of takes on this other trajectory versus just getting through it. And I think it matters that it is a moment of private reflection. It is language, it is art making and it is for its own ends. It's not like he's not thinking I'm going to write this for the future or for publication. He's not even sure why he's writing it, but it is for him a moment, a time and a space where he can be himself outside of the control of the world around him. First exposure, Rebecca, for you, where did you first encounter 1980?

43:44Jeff:A high school English class. And I have to confess that most of my memories of reading it are actually memories of watching the adaptation in class. Which one?

43:53Rebecca:Is that the John Hurt one?

43:55Jeff:Mm hmm. That it's like it's not shot in black and white, but like the whole color palette of the movie is like really like deep, dark blues and very washed out. And it's creepy and weird. This is my first time revisiting it since.

44:11Rebecca:Yeah. That has a different ending for those of you who have seen the adaptation or have read the book. It's notable and it's interesting. I think it does something different. I won't spoil its ramifications here. High school for me, then college, then grad school, again once more, and then this time. So I guess that brings my reading of 1984. I actually don't have a memory of not having read 1984, and that's probably because I'm getting old. But this idea, like, I kind of knew it. I felt like I knew it before I'd actually read it. I remember reading in high school and feeling like I knew the beats of it, though it's a stranger book than I think people think is often the case with these kinds of.

44:46Rebecca:It is.

44:46Jeff:And five reps now, like, this is just part of your reading DNA. Yes.

44:51Rebecca:Yeah. Well, I have a meta point about that. What is it like to read this, Rebecca? We've talked a lot about the big ideas. We're going to bleed back and forth here. But an actual reading experience, how would you describe this?

45:02Jeff:V.S. Pritchett reviewed it in the New Statesman when it first came out and said, I do not think I've ever read a novel more frightening and depressing. And yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down. And I second all of those emotions. It's just really compelling and immersive. Orwell tells us so much about the world that Winston lives in right from the jump. The opening line, it's a bright cold day in April and the clocks are striking 13, tells you that this is a different kind of world. And then right on that same first page, we get the irony of Victory Mansions.

45:39Jeff:We learn about hate week. We learn about the all caps signs that say Big Brother is watching you. And then we find out about Winston's age and this varicose ulcer on his ankle. We know that this is hard living, like physically, emotionally, spiritually, right from the beginning. and that from there Orwell captures how effective this pervasive surveillance is or at least the threat of being surveilled that when you don't know if you're being watched at any moment but you know in all moments that you could be being watched, you can never let your guard down.

46:11Rebecca:That extends all the way out to the middle of fields. I think there could be mics in the wheat or something. They don't think so, but it's possible. And so it really is a fire suppression ecosystem on any spark is so subject to be quenched in the moment. You know, one thing I kept thinking about, too, and you see it here in that first page, how dense this book is with terrible creativity. Orwell's dark imagination creates things that haven't percolated up into common understandings of 1984. But the hate week, the Goldstein documents, like all these little bits that are part of his ongoing imagination, I found to be stunning.

46:55It's always stunning to see how dense this is with dystopian skunk work thinking from Orwell.

47:02Rebecca:Like, I'm glad Orwell was on our side. Let me put it that way.

47:05Jeff:Yeah, no kidding. And that he, I mean, it's fully realized. He really lets himself go to what would this world be like to live in and what would it do to you? It's dehumanizing. Like the point of it is to be dehumanizing. And one of the components of that is that it's very misogynist. Like he, I think, correctly imagined that in a totalitarian society, misogyny would be rampant. And we get a really stark moment of that when Winston and Julia are, it is a pillow talk moment. And she says, what did you think when we first met or when you first saw me? And he confesses to her without even thinking about it.

47:41Jeff:Like he doesn't clock it as bad or scary. Neither does she. That he fantasized about raping and murdering her. And that's just the world that they live in. And she's like, of course you did. And it's not Orwell signing off on it. I did come across some almost intentional misreadings of this book that are like Orwell must have been a misogynist. But I think Orwell, you know, we can interrogate that in a different way. But in this book, this is a world that's horrible to women. And Winston, even with his ideas about rebelling, has absorbed enough of it, has been dehumanized enough that he sees other people as objects in this way.

48:22Jeff:And enemies and objects. Yeah.

48:24Rebecca:Conflated into one.

48:25Jeff:Yeah. And that there's just all this undercurrent of rage that needs somewhere to go and that violence is the outlet for that. Yeah.

48:33Rebecca:As you have here, it's impossible not to try to pin the tail on the relevance of any particular moment or idea onto contemporary American life. And I'm sure this is true in other countries as well. They have their own manifestations of it. Because I think this is important and maybe we'll get to a little bit later. Like this is obviously an overtly patterned on Stalinist Russia, but it's about all authoritarian regimes. Like one thing Orwell says is like, I'm a democratic socialist. This is patterned. Like Goldstein is very much, he's the boogeyman for the party and he's very much modeled in the book on what happened to Trotsky.

49:14Rebecca:but he's like what's important is all of these zones of influence end up with the same kind of regime because there's a certain inexorable logic to control and power that this is the end result of any regime which has turned into an ethical or moral movement into one of control and self preservation where the ultimate end is power and so Orwell is very skeptical of revolutionary rhetoric. He wants things to be good, but he is very skeptical, having seen it in Mussolini, having seen it firsthand fighting the fascists in Generalissimo Franco in Spain, and then seeing it in the communist and Hitler, of course.

49:53Rebecca:Those are coming from multiple angles of the quote-unquote political spectrum. But there is a all things merge into one element that Orwell is very, very, very, maybe his single most important for him idea was ultimately all things rise into one if taken to their extreme on these ends. So it's about moderation to some degree, but he calls himself a democratic socialist. Freedom of speech, a certain kind of ability to speak out and resist can create a plurality that is not then susceptible to this hegemonic monolithizing the boot of one on the neck of the many thing that can happen here. So that's something to keep in mind, too.

50:33Rebecca:It's very easy, and it was very easy in the mid-century in America to say that's what's bad about Russia. Look what Orwell told us bad about Russia. But I think what we've come to see is that can be true in multiple political landscapes. And I don't know if the reading would have been different in like 1972. Yeah, right.

50:51Jeff:Yeah, the fascist playbook just is what it is. And it's enabled by technology, certainly today, but Orwell even imagines some of that very presciently. Yeah. To get more into other aspects of the reading experience, I think you could do a whole graduate thesis on the connection between uniformity and loneliness that happens in the book. Orwell calls it solitude, but Winston's first diary entry says, from the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of big brother, from the age of doublethink greetings. And that was so potent to me because people comply with fascist regimes and they join movements that they don't recognize at first as being about controlling even themselves, seeking belonging that they will not find because you cannot find belonging and connection inside of something that's ultimately about power and control.

51:42Jeff:And Orwell says it overtly many times here, but that the point of the party is just power. It's not ideologically driven. There are not values at the heart of it. There's nothing to say, I just disagree with your values. Here you're coming from the wrong place. The whole point is just the perpetuation of power.

52:00Rebecca:Yeah. We talked about the idea of language and thought. We'll get into that a little bit more later. I think you have, I had this quote too, and I'll hand it over to you because you had it first here. I think this one about intelligence being dangerous hit me harder than any other, and maybe it's because I hadn't noticed it before. I don't know if it's the political world we're in, But this one feels like it could be written tomorrow somewhere, you know.

52:23Jeff:Really relevant to me that intelligence is dangerous for you and stupidity is kind of insulating in this world, or at least to a point. And the quote is, in a way, the worldview of the party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding, they remained sane. And it's tempting from our shared political perspective to want to look at one group of people and say they're doing that.

53:02Jeff:But there are plenty of people on our end of the political spectrum who are pointedly disinterested in public events, pointedly not paying attention to the news. And that lack of understanding allows them to feel that they're maintaining their sanity in some way, but at what cost? and Orwell's not letting anybody off the hook here.

53:24Rebecca:And that the point of all of it is power, right? And I think, again, we so don't want to make this into a let's apply this onto what's going on now, but I think it's so helpful to understand the power of Orwell's imagination and why it's endured to see how applicable it can be where it's like, yeah, it's sort of laid bare that this is not about much of anything except fleecing people and staying in power for as long as you can. Yeah.

53:50Jeff:The nakedness of that is so easy.

53:53Rebecca:So many other places that you can do there at the same time, too. I also want to say this. The strangeness is not just the world, but even the construction, too, where we get this long excerpt from Goldstein's book, which is like a handbook to understanding what's going on in the middle that he apparently is reading to Julie and she falls asleep, which seems like a meta commentary from Orwell. I know this is the boring part and it's OK. I get that you are maybe bored by this. And this very bizarre coda after we get the final line, which is not the final line of 1984 of He Loved Big Brother, which is a fake style guide to how to write in Newspeak and why to do so.

54:32Rebecca:That's like pretty long, Rebecca. It's very strange. I'm sure a lot of people skip that. Orwell himself was, of course, very interested in style and its ramifications for political and imagination. If you've never had a chance to read Politics in the English language, go Google it right now. Read the whole thing. It is as good a bulwark against, I don't know, sloppy thinking and, I don't know, other kinds of ambiguity than you're going to see. It's even recommended reading in a lot of newsrooms still. There's these six rules. It's really good. And then there's more to it than that. It's the Paradise Podcast.

55:11Jeff:I am your host, Raya Michelle Bathe. With my husband, Sterling.

55:15Rebecca:What's up?

55:15Jeff:Join us here on Hulu and Hulu on Disney +, where we'll discuss each episode with the cast and crew of Paradise. I'll be getting all the secrets from Dan Fogelman, James Marsden, Shailene Woodley, Julianne Nicholson, and Sterling Kelby Brown. Paradise, the official podcast, is now streaming.

55:34Rebecca:And stream Paradise on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. All right. I think that kind of brings us through the actual experience. Let's do Stray Thought Time. Boy, do we have a bunch. I don't know. We're going to get to all these. Where do you want to go?

55:46Jeff:I mean, war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength are presented in all caps throughout the text. And I'm so conditioned by all of Trump's posts now that I almost expected to see. Thank you for your attention to this matter in all caps at the end of them. Also, the fiction department in the building where Winston works. I need a Wonka-style tour of that because it's wild to see Orwell prefiguring, formulaic, basically machine-generated music and text. the machine that creates music for the proles is called the versificator. But this idea that we should create entertainment to appeal and distract the lowest common denominator feels very relevant today to what we're doing with algorithms and TikTok especially.

56:41Rebecca:I've got to say that for a minute. What if Hitler was Willy Wonka is not the worst way of understanding 1984 in like a one sentence formulation.

56:52Jeff:There's also a thing in the book called face crime, which is just like you pull an expression that betrays that you disagree. And I spent a lot of time thinking about how boned I would be in a world where face crime

57:03Rebecca:is all poker players remaining. Just can't do it.

57:08Jeff:There are some really good character descriptions, but Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet. Ampleforth. The hairy-eared poet, just God-level shorthand for a character. And I also thought about how Orwell would have loved the absurdity of truth social. Yeah.

57:26Rebecca:I mean, that's one that I have a little further down is like the future turned out to be so much more overt and dumber than or well imagined. Yeah.

57:33Jeff:These fascists are so much more efficacious than the ones we're living through. Yeah.

57:38Rebecca:They've got their shit together. But also maybe even more terrifying that you don't have to be this competent for some of this stuff to work. Right. Which is its own sort of waking nightmare. I find it very difficult to read this now without having a meditative experience of reading, of thinking like I am reading 1984 right now. And I don't know if that makes any sense, but I find myself very much like looking at it, almost like looking at it through a microscope than having an authentic reading experience of it because it's so familiar. It's so out there. And it means so many things. Yeah. And I've read it several times.

58:16Rebecca:It reads so much. I really felt a kind of, I don't know if you'd call it critical distance, but almost a mediated experience of reading 1984 this time that I'm having a hard time articulating, but that's why it's a stray thought. Here's a couple. TVs were not invented yet, and we get telescreens. Modern surveillance was in its infancy. And I think how terrified Orwell would be about what's possible now. Though, like many technologists who predict the future, the uses, abuses, and futurity of technology is almost unpredictable in a fundamental way. Because the very thing that makes surveillance possible from the state, at least in our society, if we go back to Minneapolis for the moment, means that everyone has a camera and microphone in their pocket.

59:00Rebecca:And that's a world that Orwell could not really have imagined at the time or did not imagine at the time. So that, I think about his own prescience, but also the limits of his prescience are fascinating to consider. I think this is my highest highlighted passage to total page ratio for this podcast we've done so far.

59:19Jeff:I had that down in the notable quotes, in my notes for quotes. There are so many passages marked.

59:24Rebecca:Like probably 140 total out of a 310 page book for me is quite a lot. and extended passages because I forgot that the whole first paragraph is a banger, not just the iconic, bright cold table in April and the clocks were striking 13.

59:38Jeff:I don't know how you sort of process your notes, but what I do is like when I'm, I read it in print and then when I'm done, I sit down and go back through the book, like page by page for what I've noted and sort of transcribe into my personal notes document. And then all that stuff gets boiled down into what we're working from. And it took me like two hours to go through everything that I had noted in the book and, you know, sort of contextualize it for myself and weed through what I wanted to present. And that's about twice as long as it normally takes me just to go through the annotations in the book itself.

1:00:12Jeff:Like so much feels as you're reading it, like, oh, this might be important later. This might be a big piece. Like it's very substantial. There's no, there's really, he doesn't waste any time for us.

1:00:23Rebecca:I could do without the dreams myself, but I mean, that's a

1:00:26Jeff:I don't think that I realized really how often dreams come up in fiction until we started doing this podcast. And like half of the books that we've read have had dreams as plot devices. And I think we share.

1:00:38Rebecca:I don't. My power ranking of the most memorable dreams in fiction is zero. There's zero entries. We're not taking any entries in that category right now.

1:00:46Jeff:I never want to hear about the dreams. Can we do something else, please? I just can't think of one that really

1:00:49Rebecca:Anyway, as I said before, I was struck more this time by individual ideas and observations in a total package. I think the farther we get from 84, it feels more like a little bit of a museum piece of an idea of a hellscape dystopian future. But the building blocks that he – sort of the central ideas and observations he used to build and extrapolate, those still feel relevant. Maybe even more relevant than either. And to be struck again, so many of them seem fresh and new and useful. I saw that. I had this thought of like, the danger is not identifying things as Orwellian. It's not even registering them as bad in the first place, right?

1:01:26Rebecca:As long as you can say something is Orwellian, you're not in 1984. But I think it is not that. One thing we're missing in this book is the transition moment from the pre-Big Brother days to the post. What are the intermediate steps? They have to have been something like, you know, the missing link on the evolutionary chart. We don't get that. Orwell can't really imagine that. But at some point, some of these things people stopped calling out. And I think that is important to note as a missing piece of this and what that might look like, because I think that is one of my takeaways that I'm going to I'm going to use this moment to presage that a little bit is the totality of the party in a big brother is so compelling that it almost becomes counterproductive because anything that is not that doesn't seem that bad.

1:02:14Rebecca:Right. And that, I think, is really hard to wrestle with, where if something is not, quote unquote, capital O Orwellian, but still on the road to it, but not it, it gives people a sort of, I don't know, a rationalization or a denial possibility. Well, we're not there yet. Well, you have to go through this phase, I think, to get there eventually, because I don't think he woke up overnight and I was like, well, I guess what we're doing now.

1:02:40Jeff:Well, there's also Orville really puts his finger on the power of limiting people to just being concerned about their own individual situations. And even Winston meets up with an old timer at one point who did live through the revolution. And he tries to ask him, like, is it really better now than it was before the party took control? And the man, Winston tries a couple different ways of asking the question and the man's answers always just come back to the thing he's mad about in the moment and what his own situation is. And I feel that was something that I wanted to pay a lot of attention to because I think it's easy for any person to fall into like, I'm just concerned about my own situation or I'm just going to vote for the person who protects my paycheck and my 401k in this election cycle.

1:03:31Jeff:And that... And narrowing down to just like having us have blinders on to just our own situations is itself a form of control along this pathway. That if you can convince people that there's no point in trying to take collective action or that they're going to be too busy worrying about themselves, that it won't even occur to them to take collective action, that is a step along the way. Yeah.

1:04:00Rebecca:I would be fascinated if Orwell woke up today and I handed him my iPhone, what he would say about this thing.

1:04:07Jeff:Oh, God. I feel like Orwell is rolling in the Zadie Smith Club where he has a flip phone and he probably thinks about throwing it into the sea twice a week anyway.

1:04:18Rebecca:Because this passage exists in 1984, written in 1948. Winston stopped reading chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading in comfort and safety. He was alone, no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. And so even then, the idea of reading was seen as a kind of a resistance to a thing. And we're living in a telecom social media hegemony that he could not have imagined. His was a political one. But I think structurally, there's a lot more there. There's a lot more similarities than not at the same time. I don't remember.

1:04:57Rebecca:So there's this phrase, it's always one bloody battle after another, and no one knows the news. No one knows what the news is. It's all lies anyway. That's Julia. is this where the phrase one battle came from i don't think it was in vineland we talked yeah

1:05:10Jeff:it's not in vineland but he says one bloody war after another in 1984 and so either it's in pension's brain or like it's also just early in the script of one battle after another um but i i snagged on that also like wait this one bloody war after another is this where pension or where Paul Thomas Anderson was coming from with that. But he hasn't I haven't heard him mention Orwell at all in any of the one battle after another press. I guess we'll never know.

1:05:40Rebecca:We've got too many quotes that we can do. We already did the first line. Vanessa can capture a bunch of them in the newsletter.

1:05:48Jeff:The one that social media loves is the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. And we see attempts at that, I believe, or really attempts at collective gaslighting. But the thing the party successfully gets people to do is gaslight themselves. And that's a thing that our technology is a bastion against. Like, you can't tell me that that's what happened because I am watching my video of the thing and I can see the truth. The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal. Nothing was illegal since there were no longer any laws.

1:06:25Rebecca:Can I pause there? What a parenthetical. Nothing was illegal since there were no longer any laws. The ramifications of that, I don't think I ever clocked before this reading. Like, it's all ambient. There is no law to resort to. It's just you're so subject all the time. Anyway, sorry. I didn't interrupt you. No, I'm glad you pulled that out. Yeah.

1:06:44Jeff:Yeah. But if detected, it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death or at least by 25 years in a forced labor camp. To mark the paper was the decisive act. Sick.

1:06:57Rebecca:Yeah.

1:06:58Jeff:And then we got to do a shout out to Rage Against the Machines Testify, which takes up lyrics from 1984. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. And if you had told me in like 1996 when I was screaming those at the top of my lungs, driving around with my friends in high school and not fully understanding them, that in my mid-40s in 2026, I was going to be reading 1984 thinking like, man, I'm glad we had Rage Against the Machine and that it's still relevant. I mean, that is maybe –

1:07:31Rebecca:That is the second most zero-to-well-read coded reference you could make where it's Rage Against the Machine lyrics quoting 1984. The only thing more than that is something else you had that I had too, which is Winston woke with the word Shakespeare on his lips when he's sort of dreaming of rebellion and sort of finding within himself some objective correlative to something else that matters. And Shakespeare becomes a sign both of himself, but like of all of culture. Yeah. You want to do some more? You want me to go? Yeah, let's see.

1:07:59Jeff:The only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. And that really struck for me today because we, I think, tend to talk about the billionaire class today as they're a bunch of individual guys acting on their individual interest. But in reality, they are working for and with each other. And I think we're starting to see that more. The press is starting to cover it more in that way. But they're doing collective action. And so the people need to be doing collective action.

1:08:28Rebecca:Yeah, I have that down. The so-called abolition of private property, which took place in the middle years of the country, meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before. But with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. The billionaire class, did I have that my straight thoughts or hot take? The idea of the mega rich is something that he didn't quite understand yet. He thought it would have to be achieved politically, not through the acquisition of private capital, which he saw as that was communism's move to abolish private capital.

1:09:01Rebecca:I think he did not anticipate, because he couldn't have, because we didn't have the kinds of stock market and capital execution markers that we have now, that someone could own the means of communication, for lack of a better term. I've got a couple here. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. That could be written right now and be completely relevant. The party seeks power for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others. We are interested solely in power. Freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four.

1:09:42Rebecca:If that is granted, all else follows. That one hit me hard this time too, Rebecca. I think I kind of skipped over that. I think the 90s kid that I was and the grad student, whatever, didn't feel that this could ever actually really be in danger. I guess I didn't feel the reality of this could be in danger. And I don't think it is in a durable way. But it is out there. These moments are happening, which would, again, would have to be a necessary step on the way to something like this. Yes. But this one hit me hard. Let's see. Don't you see the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

1:10:23Rebecca:In the end, we shall make thought crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it. That's the goal, that you can't even think. There's no idea of thinking for yourself because you don't even have that idea to reference as something to be driven for. Okay. Is it for you, Rebecca? Why might it be for you?

1:10:45Jeff:I think if you want the whole experience of the book instead of just the decontextualized quotes, that's the best reason to go for it. Also, it just, it really hits. Yes. This really hits in a variety of ways, but it's fully realized, a really impressive work of fiction. And if indeed it is the most influential novel of the 20th century, which I think is the case we're making today, you may be to the top of the list then on the zero to well-read syllabus.

1:11:16Rebecca:It's going to have an unbelievable zero to well-read score here in just a minute when we get to it. I'll preview that there. Yeah, there's some, I mean, very tough stuff in terms of torture, body. Yeah, torture scenes are rough. Really tough. I'm not the kind of person that finds this kind of thing anxiety-inducing. I think it's tapping into a river that's already flowing within me. But if you were to find themselves very affected by these kinds of books, watch out. I think, I don't know. I think probably on the whole, it may offer more respite, at least intellectually, than people might anticipate.

1:11:55Rebecca:Because at his core, Orwell is a humanist, even calls himself a humanist multiple times in his life. And he thinks there's something worth saving. He does not think this is inevitable. I guess that's important to say. I don't know if we said that. Yes. This is not a version of like, we're just going to like, he wants this to be a shield that we use to defend ourself from it happening.

1:12:16Jeff:Right. It's a cautionary tale. And Orwell is a satirist, as we know from Animal Farm. So he's spinning this out to the end, like the logical end of its absurdity as an exercise in maybe we should stop things like nip it in the bud as soon as you see any sign of it so that we don't go this far down the path. But he by no means think you don't write this kind of book if you think this end is inevitable. You write this kind of book because you think that that drive to connect and experience and think for yourself is more powerful than the desire to avoid pain or go along with the crowd. And, you know, it would have been wonderful to be able to get Orwell's own, like, 30th anniversary reflections on the book at some point.

1:13:03Jeff:But I do think his view of humanity is expansive. I think he was in touch with a realist way of seeing the deepest, darkest possibilities of humanity, but that ultimately believed in the power of an individual recognition, individual resistance, and that connection then opens the door to collective resistance. Yeah.

1:13:31Rebecca:The Immortal Questions Art asks, which of these are primary here? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no?

1:13:45Jeff:Yes. Yes to all of them.

1:13:49Rebecca:Which are primary? We've importantly added this because we know so many of these books are about so many of them. Yeah.

1:13:54Jeff:I mean, what's the deal with good and evil is all over this.

1:13:58Rebecca:Yeah, I think we were talking last time about adding how did we get here.

1:14:01Jeff:Yeah. How did we get here is a good one.

1:14:04Rebecca:I think interestingly, it's clearly about free will, but it can be destroyed.

1:14:10Jeff:Yes. I really think it's about what is the good life and what do I owe my neighbor.

1:14:16Rebecca:Yeah. Yeah.

1:14:17Jeff:Because if this is the good life for me and you're not having it, what do we do with each other?

1:14:23Rebecca:How do I know what I know is clear here as well? Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. What else do we have? Yeah, all of them. I think all of them. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing, Rebecca? Maybe?

1:14:35Jeff:I mean, it opens with a guy who's beginning to write in a diary. The party's power is anchored by control of language. And then it's absolutely about the uses and abuses of art. Like, I could not stop thinking about how so many of these types of stories include screens as vehicles for distraction and dulling of consciousness that lead to control. And that this means that in Orwell's imagining of it, the lowest class, the proles, they get entertainment and media that the members of the party don't get.

1:15:06Rebecca:The prola feed, I think it's called. It's like made for them.

1:15:09Jeff:Then he thought of a feed.

1:15:11Rebecca:Yes, the feed. I didn't think of that. Is it called? Yeah, it's called the prola feed. Yeah, it's called the prola feed. Wow, yeah.

1:15:17Jeff:Yeah, that he imagined this feed of media that would be a mechanism of control. And the quote is, it was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism, which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And if you're not looking at your TikTok situation as a form of the parole feed. Rough. Definitely.

1:15:47Rebecca:Yeah, absolutely. About 1000 % about the relationship of language and thought. I think the point you made, though, is so many times when we ask this question about art and writing, it's in a positive sense. I think this is the first one of these where there is an abuse of art to negative ends. It is not an end in itself, and all manifestations of it are towards the good and beautiful and true. Yeah, again, read politics in the English language. Okay. Could you get most of the gist with watching the signal adaptation? I have never watched this 84 film. I watched the very end when we were doing, sorry, the Richard Burton and John Herwin.

1:16:22Rebecca:I watched the very end when we did that annotated episode. It's on Prime. I'm not interested at all. Just read the book. Just read the book. Movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets? You have the right take here.

1:16:36Jeff:Yeah, I'm deeply uninterested in this as anything but a book. I could see maybe a really faithfully adapted stage play. Yeah. But this is a book that does things that books can do.

1:16:49Rebecca:I think the progeny of 1984 collectively is much of a testament to its adaptation potential. Like Blade Runner or The Matrix or The Hunger Games, they're all in the shadow of 1984. I think, well, maybe I'll save it for my hot take, but we'll come back to that in a second. Trivia, adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes, and more. What did you find, Rebecca?

1:17:16Jeff:Oh, all kinds of random stuff about Orwell and this book. But more recently in 2024, Book Talkers, this is upsetting. But I was scarred by it, so everyone else has to be scarred by it. Book Talkers took a clip from a new audio production that has Andrew Scott playing O 'Brien torturing Andrew Garfield playing Winston, and they turned it into like spicy listening, which remains one of the weirdest things that Book Talk has done with a book. Like it's truly like actual torture porn. In other trivia, the most popular quote on Goodreads is perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

1:17:53Jeff:Never change Goodreads.

1:17:55Rebecca:Just completely drain it of any efficacy or political import.

1:17:59Jeff:Stitch it on a pillow and call it a day, my dude.

1:18:01Rebecca:Which is the most pillow friendly line. That's going to be the most popular quote on Goodreads.

1:18:06Jeff:What did you have?

1:18:08Rebecca:A lot of speculation about why the year 1984. Again, it's so familiar now. it seems inevitable. But the short answer is we're not sure. The one that people reach for just because it's there is its transposition of 1948. There's a bunch of other things we don't really know. I think now 1984 is the most famous year in literature, and it's not close.

1:18:29Jeff:And if he had called it 1997, that's what we'd be talking about.

1:18:32Rebecca:There was an alternate title that is so banal and boring, I can never remember it. And I thought that was funnier to say that than to actually include it. You can look it up if you want to. Yeah, I said more directly satirizing Stalinist Russia than most people think, like directly versions of people that were part of the Russian Revolution that have been ostracized, like versions of them. Most people are never going to get that in millions. It doesn't really matter, except that that's true. And it's about all totalitarian regimes. The U.S. Book of the Month Club was going to pick it, and it was hugely influential in the mid-century.

1:19:04Rebecca:I think we've mentioned before that Winnipeg Native Son in 1940, it sold 400 ,000 copies and launched Richard Rice's career and really made a difference in the inclusion of some black stories, at least then, into the American literary canon. They wanted to pick it for their selection when it came out, but they wanted to take out the Goldstein chapter and the Newspeak coda, which I think I understand from a readability perspective and totally don't from an artistic one. Orwell refused, missing out on hundreds of thousands of guaranteed sales, which he could have used because he didn't know, A, he was going to sell very well, and B, that he was going to die.

1:19:37Rebecca:But it turns out not to have mattered. But he didn't know that. I don't know. It sold so well so much so quickly. I don't think this actually matters. But an interesting moment of an artist sticking up for his work.

1:19:49Jeff:Like a deep dive episode into the Book of the Month shaping books or trying to shape them. Because researching the Warmth of Other Suns episode, I learned that the Book of the Month had a lot to do with how Richard Wright's novel was shaped when it came out. And, like, they could give you notes and you would take them if you wanted your book to be a Book of the Month selection, which I don't believe Book of the Month is still that powerful. But for a long time, there was a buyer at Barnes & Noble who was. Yeah.

1:20:18Rebecca:All right. It's time for hot takes, Rebecca. Let's alternate.

1:20:20Jeff:I mean, I've talked about this a little bit through the episode, but this made me less concerned about the particular fascists that we're dealing with today. Like, and don't get me wrong, I am still concerned. But the contrast between the party's all-consuming efficacy and the like obvious, overt bumbling of Trump vans and their lackeys is really helpful. And that the party is aware of itself as only being interested in the perpetuation of power. But we're still dealing with fascists who think that they have ideology. And those, the tension that that creates makes them less effective. It opens doors for resistance that, you know, we're no longer available to Winston and his folks.

1:21:03Rebecca:Orwell's attribution of sustained and near total competence on the part of authoritarianism is maybe his greatest conjecture. Yeah.

1:21:12Jeff:Like what's the quote that went viral last year was like, I always knew something like I always knew that the world was going to be taken over by like evil men, but I didn't know they would all be such losers.

1:21:21Rebecca:Losers. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I have a few here. This activates my Rush decoded freedom of speech gene in a major way. It does really seem like a first principle here. as we've people haven't heard us talk about Rushdie we when we were reading knife which is his account of him being attacked for his political beliefs the thing in that book that he really stands by is he would not see the speech of even his attacker curtailed or the people that activate his attacker because that would mean also saying to other people you can't say that and he believes. And I, in my dark night of the soul, am afraid of this idea.

1:22:01Rebecca:I guess I'll say that out loud here. But this idea that the ability to say two plus two equals four means that you have to let people say all kinds of things and not let the government decide what two plus two equals. Like, have it be adjudicated in the marketplace of ideas or what else you want to say. And from there, all good things flow when it comes to freedom and rebellion, resistance and cultural and political. change.

1:22:26Jeff:And the older I get, the more I lean in that direction as well of like, let them say it and let that be its own illustration of what the problem is.

1:22:35Rebecca:Right. Yeah. Engage with it. You don't have to let it go unchallenged, but to foreclose it from the beginning suggests a totality of understanding that is sort of Jurassic Park levels of scientific and intellectual hubris.

1:22:47Jeff:To foreclose the public expression of it does not actually prevent the thinking of it. It just pushes it into underground, scarier places.

1:22:55Rebecca:Unless you're going to go all the way, right? You're going to go all the way and put rat cages on people's faces. Yeah, I said this before, but the multi-million dollar, billion dollar class was an unforeseen development. His own experience of like the BBC Democratic Socialists, he just wouldn't have thought of like Sumner Redstone and all these people that own a company and can shape it by themselves, the Zuckerberg, the Elon Musk of the world, worse than he would have imagined, differently worse. self-organizing outside of a political regime, but as pernicious and powerful in almost a global way that I don't think you would have seen either.

1:23:32Rebecca:That leapfrog over the political boundaries would be something you'd have to contend with a little bit differently. I'll just read my little... I think the totalizing nature of the world in 1984 actually can be counterproductive because laws, practices, beliefs, and et cetera that don't rise slash sink to the level of Big Brother don't seem as bad, sort of like how the phrase concentration camp where Nazi becomes a yes-no standard. And we just sort of haven't realized that the Overton window has shifted. And it just sets the bar too high or low, depending how you think about it. This is something we should be really upset about and really mobilizing about.

1:24:07Rebecca:That kept occurring to me. And it's like, there's a lot of bad stuff between, I don't know, 1994 and where we are today and this possible future that you should put a stop sign up on. My last hot take is sometimes in art, the bad guy should win because it's more powerful. Things in its wake. I was talking about The Matrix or The Hunger Games. Eventually, the rebels win in those situations. And that's cathartic.

1:24:37Jeff:Star Wars.

1:24:38Rebecca:Star Wars, right. One of my read-alocks I don't have here is Andor for 1984 because it's dealing with a lot of the same ideas. The Empire as Big Brother is so much more overt in that particular manifestation, and we've got a lot of interesting—there's even a manifesto that I would read myself if I had the idea of the whole thing to me. But I think this idea that the bad guys win matters, and it has a different political, cultural, intellectual affect. If at the end it's not Katniss, like she's injured or whatever, and sitting along with PETA, I think, is where she has spoilers for Mockingjay. I think it matters that at the end of this, the bad guys win.

1:25:17Rebecca:And I think this should happen more in art.

1:25:19Jeff:Yeah, it's chilling in a way that it should be.

1:25:21Rebecca:I did one of my read-alikes or recs. I think Andor, especially season two, but the whole thing, it's only two seasons. You could knock it out in a long weekend if people wanted to. And I said I kept thinking about Rushdie here, also Kafka and some of the classics. Sure. But The Matrix is very much a part of this. Like this is another version of totality, of a total regime of control. What did you have, Rebecca?

1:25:41Jeff:I think this is a really potent combo today with Brave New World because Brave New World explores control through mechanisms of hedonism and pleasure.

1:25:50Rebecca:I'd be interested in tackling that one again for sure.

1:25:53Jeff:Well, yeah, it'll be on the list at some point. Right. And then I thought a lot about Parable of the Sower, which we have an episode about from last season for a story inside a form of resistance. Because Orwell's people are talking about God as power and Butler's characters talk about God as change. And just an interesting read-alike. And for something very recent, the Dream Hotel by Leila Lalami, which came out last year, imagines a future from today that is deeply built on surveillance, including one in which people allow a corporation to put an implant in their brain that is supposed to help them sleep but also records their dreams.

1:26:31Jeff:And so that's certainly a form of thought crime there that you can be arrested before you have committed a crime just if you had a dark dream and they're going to put you away to protect everyone in case you decide to do it. Yeah, that's a good one.

1:26:45Rebecca:Our cocktail party crib sheet, three to five takeaways. My one that's, I think, the most important, I guess, on my stump speech is the extreme versions of any political orthodoxy have the same ends. the switch, the maintenance of power versus any putative moral ethical goals. And also, I'll do one more. I think this is going to be shrunk down to organizational levels as well. You don't have to be a party or a government. I think this could be a company. I think it'd be a church. I can think it'd be a friend group in which the maintenance of the status quo to the benefit of those who benefit from that status quo, the structure is all going to be the same.

1:27:21Rebecca:You see this in universities. Famously, Google takes down its don't be evil mantra. I think that's the most Orwellian thing I think that's happened in the public markets in the last 50 years.

1:27:30Jeff:Yeah, a great get. My top line one is intellectual freedom is the foundation of all other freedom. That you have to be able to think your own thoughts and express them for any other expressions of freedom to happen. And then it follows that resistance begins at home inside your own mind. And then it has to extend beyond individual rebellion. and it has to extend beyond your own thought crimes into collective action in order to become meaningful.

1:27:58Rebecca:Our final beat, our zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to ten, with ten being the highest. Our five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read credit, no damn factor. One is a ten. There's no question about this.

1:28:12Jeff:Yes, absolutely.

1:28:14Rebecca:I don't think readability is quite a ten. It's weird. It's strange. It takes a little getting into. It's not a page turner. And like he's inventing language alongside of it and he takes some risks. So it's a little more bumpy as a reading experience than an absolute 10. But on the other hand, it has its own compelling in its own way. Like you'll rip through it.

1:28:35Jeff:It is very compelling. Yeah.

1:28:37Rebecca:Yeah.

1:28:38Jeff:Eight and a half. Current relevance of Central Questions. Five billion.

1:28:43Rebecca:Yeah. Yeah. Ten. Clearly there. Book Nerd Read Cred. This is an interesting one because it sold so many copies and so many people know it. But I also think a lot of people still haven't read it because most people still haven't read most things. Yeah.

1:28:54Jeff:I think this one, yeah. Well, it has five and a half million Goodreads ratings. That's about as high as it gets. Yeah. It's not one of those rare ones, but actually, I think if you have read this outside of high school. Yes, absolutely. On your own, outside of a classroom, as a fully formed adult, you get book nerd read cred points for it.

1:29:18Rebecca:I think a four if you were assigned it and you made it through it, but I think it's like eight if you read it on your own.

1:29:23Jeff:Yeah.

1:29:24Rebecca:Oh, damn factor. This is a 10.

1:29:26Jeff:10. Absolutely 10.

1:29:27Rebecca:No, no one's no one's done a work of political imagination like this ever. There's been a lot of great things. Yeah.

1:29:35Jeff:All other dystopia flows from 1984 at this point, you know, like not the first dystopian political novel, but they're all influenced by it now.

1:29:45Rebecca:The list of influence is really short. Like Brave New World did exist. Like it was out there like 10 or so years. I didn't find any reading about Orwell referring to it directly. I don't know that he knew Huxley at all. I don't really have a sense of that. But once you do that, it's not like, oh, yeah, you can see how it has origins in the Iliad or something or Dickens. It really feels like it comes out of nowhere. Yeah. A techno, techno dystopia. And we get, you know, we get things that have happened like the Neil Stephenson's of the world and William Gibson and other kind of techno punk stuff.

1:30:21Rebecca:But like to create a way of understanding the world. And in a lot of ways, I think the Oceana of 1984 is the imaginative substrate with which all dystopians have to wrestle. Right. Right. They're either going to be a version of it or react against it directly. You can't get outside of it in that particular way. All right. We're going to stick around and do a little office hours. For those of you who signed up on the Patreon for that membership level, you can go to patreon.com slash zero to well read for detailed show notes, our free newsletter and membership options. You can follow us on the socials at zero to well read podcast.

1:30:57Shoot us an email, zero to well read at book right.com.

1:31:01Rebecca:Thanks to thrift books for sponsoring this season of zero to well read. And also, we are a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, a relief to have gone through this again. Yes. I hope for the day in which this seems like a museum piece, but I don't think it's going to be my or my children's lifetime, unfortunately.

1:31:19Jeff:Yeah. One to hope for and keep working towards.

1:31:22Rebecca:Thanks, everybody.