An Anthem to 1,984 Clockwork Oranges on an Animal Farm in a Brave New World at 451 Degrees Fahrenheit

Have you ever considered what a cool word “fahrenheit” is? Just chew on it for a while, you’ll see what I mean.

I recently finished reading the big government/mind control trio of 1984, A Clockwork Orange, and Brave New World. I had heard about these books all my life, but somehow never read them before this month. Earlier in life I had read Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451, and in reviewing the first three I feel it’s important to include those two as well, because they all focus on the same themes, which is control. You might throw Ayn Rand’s Anthem in there as well.

It’s an age-old problem. If you let people be free, then they do things that are unpleasant, to say the least. And so from the dawn of time, leaders, dictators, governments, etc. have tried to figure out the best ways to build a society in which the greatest percentage of the populace could have the “good things” of life. These methods can generally be divided into three camps; 1) total control (authoritarianism, totalitarianism, tyranny, etc.), 2) no control (anarchy), and 3) some mixture of both. What all these books deal with are the theoretical consequences (I say “theoretical” because they are fiction, after all) of high levels of #1, that is, almost total control.

For a leader, control is very appealing. I mean, we all know what people need, right? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just…well, you know, force people to be good? For their own good? I mean, wouldn’t that be a great thing if we could set things up so that everyone did what was right, everyone had what they needed, nobody was poor, nobody was rich, everything was fair, everyone was nice, treated their neighbors well, etc.? In 1984 this is achieved through fear, pain, and mental conditioning (through various methods, including torture, fear, education or lack thereof, etc.). In Brave New World it is through pleasure, distraction, and mental conditioning (primarily education and drugs). The clockwork orange in A Clockwork Orange is made into that orange via mental conditioning constituted of drugs and torture, although the torture is not the kind used in 1984, and the purpose of the drugs is quite different than that in Brave New World. All those in leadership positions in these three books are reaching for the same goal with their methods; getting people to do what you want them to do.

Getting people to do, or controlling them, is really such a nice thing because it’s safe. It’s predictable. Heck, I’ve felt the temptation to control people myself. I run a small business, and I’ll be darned if sometimes employees don’t do what I want them to do. If I had a way to condition them to do exactly what I wanted, when I wanted, in the way I wanted, then yeah, that would sound pretty good to me. I could get a lot more work done and get somewhere with my business, right?

But what if we could control an entire country of people? What if we could control the whole world? Wouldn’t that be great? We could get rid of poverty and war, hunger and disease, and especially all those mean people. There’s just two problems with all of this “control” stuff; 1) the only way to prevent humans from doing unpleasant things is to take the “human” out of them, and 2) it doesn’t work.

The books do a fair job of making these points, at least to a point. In 1984 and Brave New World the conditioning or other means of control does not work on everyone, and those who don’t conform must either be exiled or killed so as to not spoil anyone else. In A Clockwork Orange the conditioning is only done on one person, and the experiment ultimately “fails”, although it’s left to the reader to ponder whether further reform of the conditioning might not yield the desired results in a more permanent fashion without rendering the subject suicidal. Each governmental entity in the books has a certain measure of success and failure when it comes to control of its subjects. But whether or not a control system would work cannot be conclusively established by a work of fiction. It is all hypothesis, and even though the ultimate results may seem logical and clear, one cannot know for certain of their outcome. More about that later.

What all books can and do prove to an extent, not through storytelling but through logic and reason, is that if man is inherently free to choose, then man may choose to do “bad” things, and if we wish to stop man from doing bad things, we must take away his ability to make choices. However, we can only remove man’s ability to make bad choices if we also remove his ability to make good choices, and in essence, turn him into an automaton, a robot, a machine. This is clear to anyone who has the ability to think it through, and requires no proof beyond an explanation of the concept.

A man who is restricted from all activity other than thought cannot commit physical violence, but also cannot use his physical abilities to do good. But this is not the point on which the argument rests, for you might then ask “But what if we could control a man’s body so that he could only act to do good, and not when he desired to do evil?” or to take it a step further, what if we could control a man’s mind so that he could choose to think good thoughts, but as soon as his mind moved towards a bad thought, his thought process was interrupted and he forgot the evil thought so that it was though it never existed?

This would ensure proper behavior, even down to proper thoughts (if you will indulge me in including thoughts as a form of behavior), but now I have proved my point, for we have removed from man the ability to choose, because in order to make a choice, he must have options presented to him. If the only options presented to him are “good” options, then he is not choosing between good and bad, but between good and good. Not only is this no choice at all, but if any “bad” option is removed, then “good” has no meaning, since good implies comparison. That is, you cannot have something that is good unless you can say that something else is bad.

So, the fault of the governments described in the three books is that they can only create an ideal society for man by removing man from it, in which case the society serves no purpose. Only if the society becomes corrupt, wherein the needs of some are subservient to others, does the society serve a purpose, but then we have a condition which we all generally agree is not good, which is slavery–the subjugation of one group of people by force and without consent for the benefit of another. This is the result of the society created in 1984, in fact, it is its purpose, although it is a purpose generally unknown by the people living in it.

Rarely can we see the results of a hypothesis such as is put forth in these three books played out in real life, but we have seen it, many times over, in many governments around the world during the past 100 or so years, although perhaps not so fully in any country as in the former Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was founded on the idea that a perfect society could be created. A utopia, where there would be no poor. Where all would be treated fairly. It failed, and it failed miserably. The legacy of the Soviet Union is tens of millions of its citizens murdered, starvation, poverty on a grand scale, and untold human suffering the likes of which we, in the United States, would have trouble imagining possible. During the same time period, the United States produced ever-increasing standards of living, unparalleled scientific advances, and a host of other achievements we generally agree are “good”. It wasn’t that the United States had access to more or better natural resources. It wasn’t a question of culture. There was no major difference between the USSR and the USA, other than the roles assumed by its respective governments.

What then, is the purpose of a society, civilization, or nation, and what is the role of the government that manages it? It is simply this–happiness. And what is happiness? It is whatever one decides it should be. And if happiness for one man is different than what it is for another, then man must be free to choose his own form of happiness and pursue it. It then becomes the role of government to maximize the potential for its people to achieve their individual definitions of happiness. The USSR did not concern itself with the individual’s definition of happiness. Such an idea was laughable. It was all about loyalty to country, to the whole. Equality was deemed more important than individuality, and order more important than freedom. The results couldn’t be more stark.

And the experiment wasn’t confined to the USSR. Every country that has had a government with a similar philosophy has failed miserably to the extent that philosophy was implemented, and if that philosophy has been modified to include aspects of individual freedom (as is the case in China), then we have seen a commensurate benefit to the people.

Some have tried to make the case that the socialist experiments in China and the USSR only resulted in the deaths of tens of millions, not to mention other symptoms of failure, because of corrupt leaders. “If only they had good leaders,” they say, “then those countries would be much more successful than the USA.” But it is not merely corrupt leaders that have led to failures in these countries, although that is certainly a large part of it, it is the fundamental nature of authoritarian regimes to lead to civilizational failure because they ignore human nature and are therefore doomed from the start. Humans desire the freedom to define happiness for themselves, and any government that tries to force a one-size-fits-all definition of happiness upon its citizens (which can only be done by restricting choice) is destined to be rejected by those citizens. This is why socialism does not work. If any form of “socialism” or “communism” is to work, it can only work if every member of the society participates of their own free will and choice, and those who do not want to live by the rules of society must be exiled, rather than forced into submission. But this is impractical in today’s world on anything but a small scale, and certainly impossible on the large scale attempted by the USSR.

In other words, successful socialism, if there is such a thing, can never be forced upon a society or it is doomed to fail in the long run. This is the error of modern-day liberals/progressives just as it was the error of Lenin and Marx. If people are to be good, they must choose to be good, and passing laws that restrict freedoms  and control people do not lead them to be good, only to exhibit the “correct” behavior. The slave-owners of the old South were also effective in their own way at producing the “correct” behavior.

What worries me in this day and age is I think there are those who might read 1984 or Brave New World and in looking at those authoritarian governments think “Yeah, this is what we should be doing, this would be great!” I’m afraid the rest of us might suffer at their hands, in some degree of similarity to how those who didn’t two the party line in the USSR or the China of 1950 also suffered. It seems more realistic now than it did just two years ago.