Orwell's Revenge (24 page)

“The Party has always understood the danger of machines. From the moment when the steam engine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for
human drudgery had disappeared. Within a few generations, those machines might have eliminated hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease. They produced wealth. You understand that, of course.”

“Yes.”

“The
living standards of the average human being improved steadily. If we had allowed the process to continue, the all-round increase in wealth would have destroyed the hierarchical society, and our favored position in it. Once it became general,
wealth would confer no distinction. Given leisure, the poor would become literate. Sooner or later they would realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was
only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”

O'Brien paused, slightly surprised at how much he had said. “You agree?”

The prisoner looked at the floor, his head drooping farther. Then, very carefully, he lifted the glass O'Brien had given him, and holding it in both hands like a child, he sipped it. He seemed to have difficultly swallowing. He sipped again, then drank greedily, emptying the glass. His eyes closed, and his face seemed to relax.

“Do you agree?” O'Brien repeated.

“No,” the man answered, in a firmer tone. He seemed to be collecting thoughts that had once been coherent, but had become fragmented and broken.

“Why not?” said O'Brien.

The prisoner took a long breath. His eyes wandered around the room, then he looked straight at O'Brien and replied with a soft resignation.

“Inequality is the unalterable law of human life. Liberty is
incompatible with equality.” The prisoner seemed to ponder. His eyes burned under the transparent lids.

“Please explain,” said O'Brien. “There is no hurry.”

The prisoner looked back, and for an instant his stillness seemed full of strength.

“Even at the apex of the old machine age, human equality had not become technically possible. Men were still not equal
in their native talents.” His words seemed to give him new energy. “Functions still had to be specialized
in ways that favored some individuals over others. There were still sharp distinctions in ability, in achievement, in accomplishment, and thus in social standing and wealth. None of the industrial engines of mass production changed any of that. They steadily reduced drudgery and increased wealth. But they could not abolish inequality.”

He sat back against the chair. O'Brien reached once more for the wine, and refilled the man's glass. “I am surprised to hear you say this,” he said with a smile. “But you are quite right, of course. The division of humanity into rulers and ruled is unalterable. In their capabilities, as in their desires and needs, men are not equal. There is an iron law of oligarchy, which would operate even if democracy were not
impossible for mechanical reasons. So you agree that Smith was wrong? We are not entering a new age of human equality?”

“Not material equality,” the prisoner answered in a low voice. “Not equality of intellect, achievement, or material success.” There was another pause. The prisoner looked at O'Brien with a curious kind of reservation, as if he could not understand why he asked these questions.

“What kind of equality then?”

“Equal opportunity. Equal dignity. Equal freedom to succeed or fail.”

“And what will bring that about?”

“The machine.”

“You have just said that the machine will not bring about human equality.”

“I mean Orwell's machine. The telescreen.”

“What will it do?”

“It will give every man equal power to choose.”

O'Brien felt a twinge of annoyance. Was it all so obvious? He wiped his eyes. When he spoke his voice was even softer than before. “You know a great deal about the network. Far more than I do. I should like—” He paused, unsure for a moment just what it was he wanted. “I should like to understand. Explain to me please how the telescreen will bring about equality of any kind.”

The man gazed back hollowly; for a moment his eyes seemed to be sinking back into the shell of his skull.

“I am starving,” he said at last. “I am terrified of my own body. I am a skeleton; my knees are
thicker than my thighs. My spine is curved; my neck can hardly support
the weight of my skull.”

O'Brien sat still, expecting the plea for food, or perhaps just for the bullet. He wondered vaguely how the man would conduct himself on his way to the gallows. He remembered one man in particular, who had urinated all over the floor of his cell. Another had clung desperately to the bars, and it had taken
six guards to pry him loose.

“I wish I were free,” the prisoner said. “I wish I were free of hunger and disease, and free to leave this evil place.”

O'Brien sat quietly. He had learned years ago that in some interrogations the trick was to say less, not more. The prisoner continued.

“But you are not free either. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, or a fornicator, but you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the Party's code. Every kind of freedom is given to you except the one that counts most. Your whole life is a life of lies. As a member of the Inner Party you are tied tighter than a monk or a savage by
an unbreakable system of tabus.”

The man was obviously mad, O'Brien thought. A raving lunatic, and suicidal too. The prisoner continued to speak.

“Real freedom is now at hand. The telescreen gives man the power to decide for himself whom he will approach or avoid, what he will divulge or conceal, by whom he will be entertained or employed, what he will say or hear, show or see, think or believe. Man
now holds in his hands the power to share his own thoughts precisely as he pleases, with friends near or far and with no one else.”

For a moment, the prisoner seemed to subside and grow feeble again. In the silence O'Brien saw the man's body melt out of focus, and then split into two. What was remarkable was that the two images were seated a couple of feet apart and were quite distinct. O'Brien shook his head, bringing on a burst of pain. A single body reappeared in front of him again. He looked at it with contempt.

“Suppose your fantasy comes true,” O'Brien said. “Suppose you do create a world of perfect communication, with telescreens at the disposal and under the control of every individual citizen. What then? If the private citizen can communicate at will, so too can the Thought Police. If eyes can see they can also watch. Improve your power to communicate and you improve your power to spy.”

The prisoner shook his head. “Improve your power to communicate and you improve your power to create privacy and solitude. If a spy can see a hundred miles, his target can range farther still. When communication is poor, a man must deal with the same small group of neighbors and associates day after day. He cannot move, so he cannot hide. The telescreened world offers the ultimate privacy—the privacy of distance and the crowd.”

One had to
admire the man's impudence, O'Brien thought. His life was running down, like seconds ticking off a clock, and yet he was not afraid. “Even with the telescreen, your privacy will still be at the mercy of every nosy neighbor and officious tradesman,” O'Brien replied. “Sellers will track your every purchase of carrots and condoms. Bankers will record your every visit to the brothels in Soho. Your electronic footprints will be followed by every peddler of disgusting
American breakfast cereal.”

“You are wrong,” the prisoner replied in a low voice. “When people shop face to face in a small town there is no privacy. With the telescreen, they can do business with complete strangers a thousand miles away, who have no interest in anything but the sale. The telescreen supplies the privacy of the metropolis on demand, even to residents of small communities. When cash becomes a reliable medium of exchange once again, the telescreen
will support cash machines next to every brothel, casino, or opium den. The power to communicate is the power to keep your distance and cover your tracks. The telescreen does not destroy privacy; it gives people the power to mold their own privacy at will.” He looked up at O'Brien again. He seemed calmer, and his voice no longer cracked at every syllable.

“The telescreen will become the instrument of extortion,
blackmail, fraud, and libel,” said O'Brien. “If someone denounces you as a deadbeat, you will be commercially ostracized. If your spiteful neighbor whispers into the network that you thrash your wife, the entire world will hear it at once. Whatever empowers honest people also empowers criminals.”

The prisoner shook his head again. “The telescreen makes possible new forms of lies, deceits, and frauds, but it also offers vastly more choice, and creates new standards of comparison. When one credit company falsely denounces you as a deadbeat, its competitors will quickly expose the lie; the market punishes sellers of bad credit reports just as it punishes sellers of bad eggs. Libel of any kind will be corrected quickly, because the responsible and well intentioned gain more from truths than the irresponsible or malicious can gain from lies.”

“You are a fool,” O'Brien replied sharply. “The market itself will not survive the telescreen. In your telescreened Utopia most property will consist of information. But there can be no private ownership of expression, no true marketplace of ideas, in a world where words, sounds, and pictures can be copied effortlessly by anyone. The first buyer of your film or software program will flood the market with pirated copies. Books will get cheaper and cheaper, and the cheaper they become, the less money will be spent on them. You will have to choose between art and money. Cheaper communication spells disaster for every publisher,
compositor, author, and bookseller.”

The prisoner looked back. His emaciated face seemed hungrier than ever, but to his amazement O'Brien now saw a shadow of contempt under the yellow skin of his eyes. “Do you really suppose that the power to communicate will destroy the market for thought and speech? If the telescreen makes it easier to steal art,
wisdom, or entertainment, the telescreen is what imbues those things with value to begin with. A printing press can be used to steal a book, but it is the press that makes the copyright valuable to start with. And in any event, there are defenses against pirates and bootleggers. With a machine as powerful as the telescreen, information can easily be encoded. The honest seller can sell openly in the mass market created by the network, while pirates who follow have to lurk in the electronic shadows. Theft and dependence always trail behind industry and wealth, but they never catch up.”

The man had a drizzly voice, O'Brien reflected. Listening to his monologues, with all their rambling speculations, was very English in a way. Hearing his monotonous voice was like
walking down a wet street. And O'Brien was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate—his head seemed to be throbbing in time with his heartbeat. He grimaced at the prisoner and rubbed his forehead.

“You will be astounded at how quickly your new world of free choice becomes ugly and depraved,” O'Brien said. “People will claim, on behalf of the so-called artist, a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist will be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word Art' and everything will be O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them will be O.K.; kicking little girls in the head will be O.K.; a film of a woman defecating will be O.K. So long as you can paint or sing or write well enough to pass the telescreen test,
all shall be forgiven you. Your artists will spend on public sodomy what they have
gained by private sponging.”

O'Brien leaned back in his chair but continued to speak. “The greatest impoverishment of your world will be self-inflicted. Free choice on the telescreen will bring about a frightful debauchery of taste; it will do for the mind what mechanization has already done for the human palate. Thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavorings, and so on, the palate is almost a dead organ. Machines will kill human thought too. There are already millions of people to whom the blaring of a telescreen is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or
the song of birds. Place every telescreen under private control, and the masses will wallow in filth far worse than
the rubbishy entertainment and spurious
news the Party supplies today”

O'Brien stopped, breathing heavily. His head was hurting more and more. It felt as if something was pushing his eyes out, and expanding behind his ears.

“You are right,” the prisoner said intensely, leaning forward. “On the telescreen, everything shall be forgiven, whether or not called art. Some forms of telescreen expression will be unspeakably vile. They will be tolerated not because all art is beautiful but because all Thought Police are ugly. There is room enough on the network for
every form of diseased intelligence. Freedom includes the freedom to be foolish, to be sick. Free choice includes the freedom to choose badly.”

“For others as well as yourself?” said O'Brien. “Your free choice of women defecating will appear in my living room too.”

“With the telescreen, people can create their own censors and keep their own thought police on private retainer,” the prisoner replied. “The editors of the
Times
will serve as private censors employed at the pleasure of their readers. A credit company will supply private protection against fraud. Copyright will be protected not by laws and courts but by private encryption. For every possible private fraud, for every private oppression, there will be private protection. With the network, people can join together to coordinate private police forces as they never could before.”