A few takeaways from re-reading 1984 by George Orwell. Other books I'm currently reading can be found here: https://lexfridman.com/reading-list/

Book:
1984 by George Orwell: https://amzn.to/3Cxo726

Artists:
Caroline Songi Cook: https://facebook.com/drawingsbycaroline/
Juliette Fogra: https://juliettefogra.me/
DALL·E 2: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
Midjourney: https://midjourney.com/

Archival footage:
British Pathé: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ3N_2r6R-o
British Movietone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tNlP2UmxCo
Mike Guardia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMMG917d_-8

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Intro  
1:02 - 1984 world & characters
4:20 - Love
12:42 - Hate
17:21 - Power
25:56 - 1984 applied to today
47:14 - Twitter reading list drama

And if you clung to the truth, even against the whole world, you were not mad.

It has been widely used and misused in political discourse by all kinds of ideologues.

Into that discourse, it entered terms like Big Brother, Thought Crime, Double Think, Newspeak, Thought Police, and Orwellian, strangely enough as a synonym for the very thing that the author Orwell was against.

It's been translated in over 65 languages, has sold over 30 million copies, has been banned in many countries, especially authoritarian regimes, has been banned under Stalin, and as recently as 2022 in Belarus.

In this video, I'll give a quick summary with spoilers and a few takeaways.

I'd like to try to make it somewhat interesting to people who both have and have not read the book.

The world in the book 1984 is a dystopian future society, nation, maybe you can say super state, named Oceania.

It's fully controlled by a totalitarian political party called Inksock.

It's led by Big Brother, who, as we might discuss, may or may not be a real person.

He might just be a symbol used by the party.

The party wants only to increase its power, also something we might talk about.

It uses technology, telescreens for mass surveillance.

It's creating a new language called Newspeak, which removes words from English that could lead to rebellion.

It uses doublethink to control thought by perhaps you could say, forcing you to hold contradictory beliefs and accept them as true.

If not, the thought police arrest you for committing a thought crime.

Examples of double think are war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

And finally, The party constantly rewrites history.

As the quote goes, who controls the past, controls the future.

Who controls the present, controls the past.

Ministry of truth, it's responsible for propaganda and like I said, rewriting history.

Ministry of love is responsible for brainwashing people through torture.

Ministry of plenty is responsible for rationing of food, supplies, and goods.

And ministry of peace, of course, is responsible for maintaining constant state of war.

The inner party, the outer party, and the proles.

The inner party is tiny, the outer party is a little bit bigger, and the majority of the people, I forget what the percentage is, maybe 80% is the proles, the working class.

Winston, the main character, is a low-ranking member of Inksock.

He works at the Ministry of Truth where he rewrites history like I mentioned.

Julia is a dark haired girl who Winston falls in love with and she with him.

They have sex and this is maybe a good place to mention that passionate sex, love and passionate sex are forbidden in this society.

Good sex, I think, is a term under Newspeak, hashtag good sex, is the kind of sex that leads to procreation, which is the only kind of sex that's allowed and the only kind of sex that's allowed and the only kind of sex that's good.

He's the member of the inner party that convinces Winston he's part of the brotherhood, which is a lie, and he eventually is the man who tortures Winston and breaks his mind, breaks his heart.

Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein are these symbolic characters that we never actually get to meet.

Big Brother is the head of the party, Ingsoc, and Emmanuel Goldstein is the leader of the so-called Brotherhood, which is this supposed mysterious group that lurks in the shadows and works to overthrow the party.

We'll maybe talk about the importance of that in a totalitarian state.

So a few key takeaways, and I'll try to do my best.

I have disparate notes that I took for myself.

I'll try to do my best to try to integrate them together to make some cohesive thoughts.

And part of the reason I wanted to do this, while I have read 1984 many times in my life, and many of the books I've put on a reading list that I want to read, I've read many times, I haven't often really concretized my thoughts about the books.

I just take the journey and just let the thoughts kind of wander around in the background as I live my life.

I wanted to kind of put on paper and maybe share with others to see what they think, what my concrete takeaways are from the book, what my thoughts are, if I could try to convert them into words.

So the first 1 for me, especially later in life as I've been reading this book, is that when everything else, or most things that make you human are taken away by those around you, by the totalitarian state, the last thing that's left that is the most difficult to take away, is love.

Love for other human beings, love for life itself.

That's the little flame from which hope springs.

That's the key revolutionary act, is the act of love.

So when the ability to speak is taken away, when the ability to think, rational thoughts is taken away, the last thing that's left, and the thing that ultimately gives hope is love.

That's a big takeaway for me, and the note that Julia gives to Winston, the note reading, I love you, is the kind of revolutionary act that leads to a society beyond the 1 they exist in.

I think a lot of the book has an interesting hypocrisy to it where the main character, Winston, is almost in an animalistic way obsessed with destroying the state in rebellion and revolution.

But I think love is the thing that allows you to believe in a place beyond the state in believing that you can build something better versus destroying the thing you're in.

I think you have to be careful as a revolutionary not to obsess 100% with destruction because beyond destruction, there could be chaos that leads to something much worse.

I think love is the thing, the basic human thing that connects all of us, the messy thing that connects all of us, that allows you to build a better society after the totalitarian 1 is overthrown.

There's an interesting tension there between love and sex or lust.

I think there's a quote that pure love or pure lust was impossible or forbidden.

Pure here meaning sort of unadulterated, uncensored intensity of feeling, maybe intimacy.

And that was an interesting question raised by the book, both by Winston and Julia is, what is ultimately the thing, the most powerful act of rebellion?

Is it between us humans when everything is forbidden?

The kind of love you have for a romantic partner, but even love for family, love for friends.

I think the book almost claims that it is sex, but I think what the book also shows is if sex is your manifestation of rebellion, that that ultimately leads to something that doesn't last, that ultimately leads to a focus on destruction versus building beyond the horizon when the state falls.

The more men you've had sex with, so Julia admitted to have sex with quite a lot of people.

He says, the more men you've had sex with, the more I love you.

I want everyone to be corrupt to the bone.

This kind of rubbed me the wrong way, because again, this seems to be obsessed with the hatred towards the state versus a longing and a hope, which I think hope is really important here.

A hope for a better future beyond the state.

Again, another quote from the book, "'Their embrace had been a battle, the climax of victory.

So there, again, I think sex is a political act, an act of political rebellion.

I think that's not the deeply human thing here.

The deeply human thing is, again, the act of love.

It's a source of hope, it's the catalyst for building a better future beyond the revolution.

An interesting side note here, and there could be a million interesting side notes, and I'm desperately trying not to go on a million tangent and to hold myself together here to stay focused, is on family.

So there's all kinds of love, and I think family love is a really powerful bond that connects us.

And that's 1 of the things that the totalitarian states really go after.

And I should actually mention sort of loosely using term authoritarian and totalitarian here.

But I think to me at least, I don't know what others think, but to me authoritarian means where there's a government, a centralized, complete centralized control of political affairs.

And a totalitarian state is a complete, is beyond that, is a complete control of not just politics and the functions of government, the basics of the functions of government, but also social, economic, everything.

It's Nazi Germany's example of that, I think, to me, where there's just complete control of every single thing, from the war effort to the social interactions, the rules that govern social interaction to the press, all that kind of stuff.

So I think this book is more about, at least in my definition of the term, about totalitarianism.

Anyway, as I was saying on family, I think the way they destroy family, 1 of course with your romantic partner, forbidding passion, passionate sex, but really just passion, longing for another, for another human being in that romantic way.

And they also really reward and encourage children at a young age, they indoctrinate them, to turn their parents in for thought crime, whether real or not, which of course is a silly notion because there's no nature of truth.

There's no, you can just accuse anyone of anything and they're guilty by just existing.

And I should also mention on the topic of love is that I think the goal of the party, the final destination as used by O'Brien through the process of torture is for, to break your mind, to break your heart and soul completely so that The only love you can have, and it could be felt as a pure love, is for big brother.

This is the kind of thing you see in North Korea, is that the only love you're allowed to have, the remaining inklings of feeling that might still exist in you, you can channel only, not towards family, not towards romantic partners, not towards friends, but towards this leader, this godlike messianic figure, in this case, who may or may not exist.

In all cases, that figure, while there is a human associated with it, it's really much bigger than the human.

And that's the only love you're allowed to have.

So the other takeaway I have is on the topic of hate.

I think all humans have the capacity, almost an animalistic craving for hate of the other, the enemy, whether it's individuals like Emanuel Goldstein or nations like Eurasia and East Asia, which I should say are the 2 other super states described in this book that are constantly at war with each other.

Again, the fascinating thing about the way this book is written is you don't know if Eurasia or East Asia exists.

You really don't know what exists or what is true beyond the local little interaction, local little world of the main character.

When you don't really know, there's no steady footing on which to construct a worldview from which you can have hope about a better future, that longing for a better future.

And so this animalistic craving for hate or the capacity to have hate, especially when we're in crowds, I think is most powerfully illustrated in the 2 minutes of hate, which is practiced by the society.

And the quote is, The horrible thing about the 2 minutes of hate was not that 1 was obliged to act apart, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.

Within 30 seconds, any pretense was always unnecessary.

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seem to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning 1, even against one's will, into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

And yet, The rage that 1 felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from 1 object to another like the flame of a blow lamp.

That's the point, is you get the crowd together, you get them to hate Goldstein or Eurasia or East Asia, You get them to hate anything.

And because that feeling, that drug, that hypnotic, it's in that mass hypnosis that you feel can be directed by the state into any direction.

And because you have complete control of history, you can direct it on a day-by-day basis towards any target.

And as long as the hate is catalyzed through these kinds of rituals, as long as the hate is there, it can overpower the individualistic feeling of love we have for each other.

So that hate is a more animalistic desire.

Of course, it's also important to say that this book, I think I've read many places that it was intended originally by Orwell as a satire.

Although a satire that has quite a lot of torture at the end and doesn't seem to have much humor.

But I think if you read it as a satire, that's the way it's better to understand its relevance in our society today.

Because a lot of things like 2 minutes of hate is almost like a caricature of what hate looks like in a mass gathering.

But if you take it as a caricature, it can now reveal you some of the elements that already exist in human nature that are there and that we should be very cautious about.

So it reveals the very thing that, if not monitored by ourselves, can result in a slippery slope that leads to destruction of the tribalism, destruction of other groups, and then control of the collective intelligence of our species through a totalitarian state.

I think there's elements of this that are just under illustration in social media today.

I think just like comparing things to Hitler, comparing things to

But social media does reveal this kind of mass hysteria, this capacity of humans to be outraged, of outrage based on tribalism.

So we have to understand it, we have to resist giving into it on the individual level, and I do believe we have the responsibility to create technology that helps us resist it, that incentivizes us not to be cruel to each other just because all the people in whatever tribe we define ourselves in are being cruel to a particular person or a particular group.

Inksock, the totalitarian states, wants only 1 thing, and that is power.

Power is both the means and the end, absolute power.

That's what O'Brien describes, and there's a lot of quotes about this in the torture part of the book.

O'Brien says, the real power, the power we have to fight for night and day is not power over things, but power over men.

Power is inflicting pain and humiliation.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

1 does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution.

1 makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

The object of persecution is persecution.

This, of course, is another aspect of human nature.

The will to power and the tendency of that power to corrupt.

O'Brien says also, the weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.

Through the torture of the individual, through the breaking of the individual, through the death of the individual that doesn't exist according to the history.

And there's been a lot of brilliant comments throughout social media and on Reddit.

I just want to highlight something about this because I had the exact same feeling as I was this time rereading it.

There's a comment from a Reddit user whose name is BraveSky6764.

He said, the conversation between Lex and Michael Levin, who is a brilliant biologist, engineer, came to mind when O'Brien made an analogy to an organism which survives even as the individual cells pass away.

And the great purges are analogous to the cutting of a fingernail.

If you see society as an organism, and which I think is the way a totalitarian state sees it, then the destruction of a large percentage of that society, the murder, the torture, all kinds of atrocities and genocide become justifiable as long as the organism flourishes.

And that's how you get to the ideas that Stalin had, it's okay to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

This devaluation of a human being as of fundamental importance in a society.

It's not just deeply unethical from our understanding of morals and ethics.

And the human spirit is essential for building of a great society of constant progress.

I think that's also 1 of the other messages of the book is about utopia.

That totalitarianism results when you chase perfection.

When you chase, when you present this idea of utopia.

There is no utopia, there is no perfect society.

I think, at least for me, that's takeaway.

I think the optimal state of being for an individual and for a state is a constant, constant turnover, constant change.

And in the case of a state, it's a constant turnover of leaders, of ideas, and always hopefully in the long term making progress towards a better world.

Perfection only exists in a oppressive state.

Perfection only exists when you remove the basic humanity of the individuals that make up that state, when you destroy the human spirit, or when you suppress and you destroy all the freedoms, because freedom's going to be messy, it's going to be very chaotic.

But that freedom ultimately, is at least in the long arc of history is going to create progress.

says, that does actually give you a perspective of a biological system where it's a bunch of living organisms.

Each 1 of us are made up of a bunch of living organisms and we take that for granted of all the atrocities that are happening there.

I think that's a really good metaphor for us to help.

If you want to put yourself in the mind of the inner party, a big brother of the people that are in power in those situations, I think a lot of them, if most of them, if not all of them, see themselves as doing good for the world, as doing good for the society.

And they're able to justify that the way we justify the murder of the different cells in our body.

You don't even think of them as worthy of consideration.

You don't think of them as living beings of having the same value as you.

And that's 1 of the really powerful ideas at the founding of the United States that all men are created equal, that there's an equal worth to a human being, no matter who that human being is.

That idea, at the very least, as flawed as its implementations have been, is a really, really powerful idea and it's a non-trivial idea.

And that idea resists the drug of totalitarianism, the drug of power.

I do believe that on the topic of power and politics, that 1984, as I've mentioned, has been, I would say misused by political ideologues.

I've seen it, for example, on conservatives in the United States, have used 1984 to call left-wing policies Orwellian.

I think that's an overstatement, of course used for dramatic effect, but it should be at least said that Orwell was a democratic socialist.

And I think the point is a warning against totalitarianism in all forms, that all political ideologies can succumb to the allure of power and be corrupted by it.

And I think people on the left in the United States and people on the right can both be corrupted by power.

So this kind of one-way criticism of left-wing policies as Orwellian is a very kind of convenient shorthand, but the reality is all men and politicians are capable of creating an Orwellian world.

And I think 1 of the things that is highlighted in the book very well, I would say, if I interpret it correctly, is the hypocrisy of Winston.

When O'Brien asks Winston what he's willing to do to overthrow the party, what he's willing to do for the brotherhood.

Winston admits that he is willing to do atrocities.

He's willing to do evil onto children, onto anybody, murder, anything.

And I think this is a really powerful illustration that both the totalitarian and the blind immoral resistance, rebellion against the totalitarian state, can both be evil.

And I think that's where I return to love is the thing that carries hope for a world beyond this battle.

It's a very important battle for freedom, but you have to have that.

Otherwise, it's the Orwellian state and the resistance to Orwellian state can both destroy basic human rights and freedoms.

I think sort of in the character of Winston, that's illustrated well.

I should also mention that there's interesting writing, now I'm not obviously a scholar of Orwell, and there's a lot of books been written, and I should probably recommend them somewhere.

There's just great books written on 1984, on Orwell, on the historical context in which he was operating and all that kind of stuff.

But as far as I see, Orwell also in 1984 and himself politically, he was not espousing the complete opposite of totalitarianism.

There is, again, with democratic socialism, that there is value to the connection between human beings, that you have to lean on each other, help each other, that society is fundamentally a cohesive collective than a completely sort of disparate set of sovereign individuals.

And I think he was torn about that idea because in order to resist a totalitarian state, you have to fight for those basic individual freedoms.

But at the same time, a society, a well-functioning society allows for that freedom to manifest as collaboration.

And so that's the difficult challenge there.

Again, that's why he was a democratic socialist and the criticism of the book was against totalitarianism, of a centralized state that controls speech, thought, you know, the press and all the basic human freedoms, controls truth.

And I think a lot of people would ask the question, and I hear this tossed around, do we live in the world of 1984 today.

And I think that's used as a shorthand to sort of criticize different policies and different governments.

I generally don't like the use of that kind of language because it's basically crying wolf.

If everything is 1984, if everybody is Hitler, then you're not going to, there's no way to kind of properly normalize the discussion of what's, of the lesser of 2 evils kind of thing.

Which is ultimately what democracy is about.

You have a collection of things you're picking, they all kind of suck, but you want to pick the 1 that sucks the least.

That's human society, that's human nature, it's messy.

And so I don't think we live in a 1984 state, but there's a lot of elements that this book reveals about human nature and about the operation of a totalitarian state that we should be on the watch for.

So surveillance, a state of double think, of controlling language, of being in a constant state of war as a way to control the population and the flow of resources.

All those things have elements of, almost like a useful tools for the establishment of complete control of a populace.

And the moment you notice those elements, it's our job to resist those elements.

So I think the point is we have to be vigilant to the slippery slope of the will to power in centralized institutions.

Another thing I want to mention is that I think a lot of people rightfully compliment Orwell to have predict some of the elements of future society, especially with technology, technological capabilities that are with, for example, telescreens used by the state to control the population.

Maybe I can make a few comments on technology in general.

People who criticize technology will often use 1984 as an example that technology is a tool for a totalitarian state.

It's a way that can achieve full control and we should be extremely cautious of it.

And I think there's a kernel of truth to that, but it's not obvious to me that on the whole, technology is a tool for totalitarian control.

That I think it is also a tool for freedom.

The internet is an incredible tool for freedom.

And so of course We have to fight for that freedom, but I believe in general, the greater, let's just take the internet broadly as an example, and there's a lot of sub-elements of that, and like a more sort of platonic sense of what the internet is, which is digital interconnectivity.

We have to fight for the freedom, but in general, the greater reach and access that the internet has, the more powerful the resistance to totalitarianism.

It provides the tools for oppression and the tools for the ongoing fight for freedom.

And as long as the will to fight arises in the human heart, technology, I think, helps humanity win.

And of course, there's been a lot of discussion about free speech and the freedom of thought.

And there's a lot to be said there that's much more nuanced than the book

I think 1984 just shows the end, horrible conclusion of complete totality and control over speech, over thought, over feeling, over everything.

But in general, my view of it is this kind of inspiration to, in order to prevent ourselves from slipping into an authoritarian, into a totalitarian state, you know, Orwellian type of dystopias.

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1984 by George Orwell | Lex Fridman