Orwell's Revenge (25 page)

For the first time in their conversation, O'Brien felt himself smile. “So instead of one censor in the Ministry of Truth, you will now have a censor in every household. People will no longer be able to proselytize or persuade, to solicit, canvas, or agitate. Prudes will assemble only with other prudes, racists with other racists. Today you must confront the homeless soliciting in the subways and seeking shelter in the public libraries. Tomorrow, your libraries will all be electronic, and your subways will consist of fiber-optic glass. The hungry will starve unnoticed outside.” O'Brien leaned back into the red leather of his chair. His weight seemed so great, he found it difficult even to sit without support. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear.”

“If liberty means anything, it means the right not to listen,” the prisoner replied. “Freedom is sometimes intolerant and unwise. Some people will use the telescreen to close their minds. Some will stop listening to unwelcome ideas. But silence and calm solitude, even the silence and solitude of bigots and fools, are as much a part of freedom as sound and furious assembly Freedom is sometimes bland. Free people sometimes live in little box houses just like their neighbors', sometimes dress up in uniforms, sometimes eat only pallid, spiceless food. But more often, free people choose variety.”

The prisoner paused, then continued. “Some, as you predict, will anesthetize their minds with visual opiates peddled over the network. But others will use their new power to choose wisely. The obscene caller will no longer enjoy the shock and fear of the elderly widow. The reformed alcoholic will no longer have to watch advertisements for fortified beer. Parents will be able to insulate their children from vulgarity. The deeply religious will be able to surround themselves with others of similar conviction. In the cataract of information of the telescreened world, the most important right will be the right not to listen, not to speak, and not to share one's thoughts, words, or gestures. Freedom of thought, freedom of assembly and religion, copyright and privacy, all pivot on a single, higher right: the right to communicate by mutual consent with other individuals possessing the same dignity, the same power of choice. That is the promise of the telescreen.”

O'Brien stared into the distance.

“There will always be bullies,” he said at last. “The mass of people will always worship them. And if one must worship a bully, it is
better that he should be a policeman than a gangster. Civilization rests ultimately on coercion.”

“It rests on consent—the consent of the governed,” the prisoner answered. “What holds society together is not the policeman but the goodwill of common men.”

“That goodwill is powerless unless the policeman is there to back it up.”

“The policeman is powerless without public backing.”

“Any government which refused to use violence in its own
defense would cease almost immediately to exist, because it could be overthrown by any body of men, or even any individual, that was less scrupulous,” said O'Brien. “Whoever is not on the side of the policeman is
on the side of the criminal.”

“Consensus is the master of both the criminal and the policeman,” the prisoner replied. “The only durable law is common law, law forged by custom and molded by tradition. Law is ultimately what most people in a society agree that it should be. Agreement is built by communication. It is built by telescreen.”

O'Brien shrugged. “With or without agreement, every utterance, every thought crystallized inside a human skull, has public consequences. Whatever is heard or seen or fantasized, even in utter solitude, may become transformed into an attack on others. By encouraging necrophilic reveries, a depraved artist may do quite as much harm as by
picking pockets at the races. Private pornography inspires public violence. Private scheming and conspiracy culminate in fraud, extortion, or blackmail. The individual's freedom becomes the community's slavery. Freedom is slavery.”

“Freedom is sanity,” the prisoner replied. “The telescreen will give us necrophilic reveries, but it will also create room for the art of angels. It will supply passion but also reason. It will spread propaganda but also private discourse. It will give us spies but also distance to elude them. It will carry the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of fuhrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left wing political parties, national anthems, temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception—and it will also carry the chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these
high sentiments make no appeal. The network empowers electronic thugs at one end and the Thought Police at the other. But in the middle stand the great mass of men, simple, honest, and sane. So long as common men use the network too, their basic sanity will prevail. Freedom will be freedom.”

“But not equality?”

“No.”

O'Brien scarcely heard the answer. The man would be flogged before he was hanged, he was thinking. His skin would be
stripped from his back as
neatly as a skinned rabbit. O'Brien thought of how the corpse would look, scarlet and blue—devilish. But instead of a sense of power, the thought filled him with unexpected disgust. A look of ineffable sadness had appeared on the man's face.

“Only one kind of human equality will survive the telescreen,” the prisoner said. “The only kind of equality that men have the power to affirm. It is equal opportunity—an equal chance to converse, trade, and collaborate with others by mutual consent. The telescreen offers equal dignity, nothing more. All other kinds of equality belong to Big Brother.”

“So your glorious fantasy is not so glorious after all.” O'Brien felt a brief surge of triumph. “Why are you so pessimistic?” he said contemptuously. “Your telescreen will create wealth, it will distribute culture, it will educate the masses. Equality is therefore inevitable. A socialist Utopia is at hand. Why do you stubbornly insist that equality will not come?”

“Education will still not put an end to hierarchy,” the prisoner replied calmly. “Men are still unequal in their native talents. Some men will use their telescreens for education, others for lotteries. The talented or industrious will embrace the new opportunities; the lazy or foolish will sink into tele-induced stupor. Hierarchies will not disappear. They will simply come to mirror inequalities among men themselves.”

“Do you not see, then, what kind of world you are creating?” O'Brien said angrily. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid
hedonistic Utopia that Winston Smith imagined. Your society will be founded upon nothing but market greed and technocratic wizardry. The strong will devour the weak.”

The prisoner shook his head slowly. “The telescreen will do all that man can do about equality of human thought and human minds. It will affirm the equality of true equals. Victims of foolish prejudice will do well in the telescreened society, because they will no longer have to confront prejudice face to face. In a telescreened community, it will be economically ruinous to discriminate against the Buddhist, the Anabaptist, or the Jew, the man in the wheelchair or the woman with the thick spectacles, because competitors
from far afield will bid for their talents and welcome their business. But a telescreened market will always discriminate between quality and rubbish. The telescreen will amplify every native difference in our abilities to entertain, educate, design, provoke, amuse, or inspire, every difference between the industrious and the lazy, between the competent and the incompetent, between the provident and the improvident, between truthful people and liars, between honest people and thieves. The telescreen lets people see and compare and choose. It punishes mental cheating of every kind.”

O'Brien found himself thinking again of the hanging to come. There would be six guards. The prisoner would be handcuffed, his arms lashed tight to his side. The guards would crowd very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It would be like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. It was always a good spectacle. But O'Brien's head still throbbed. He felt as if his nose were going to bleed. Where did this shrivelled man find such a fountain of words? O'Brien gripped the leather arms of his chair.

“Do you suppose that democracy will emerge from all of this?” O'Brien said. “Do you think that government by the people will still be possible among the mountains and valleys of wealth and achievement that your network will create?”

“No. The network will destroy democracy, or at least our last illusions about it. Democracy is
only a polite name for capitalism. True government by the people will never be attained anywhere but in tiny, homogeneous communities. Even in the old days of liberal capitalism, political power belonged to the wealthy and articulate, those with the time and inclination to organize and participate. Most people didn't even bother to vote. Political power has always flowed to the great orator, to the tireless stuffer of envelopes, to the indefatigable canvasser, to the obsessive baker of fund-raising cakes. It always will.

“But with the network we will come closer to democracy than anyone has before,” the prisoner continued. “The mass media will lose the vast political power they once exercised. The wealthy will have influence only to the extent they engage society and interact
productively with other people. Power will lie in constantly shifting communities of shopkeepers, housewives, old Etonians, fruit-juice thinkers, nudists, sandal wearers, sex maniacs, Quakers, Nature Cure quacks, pacifists, and
phesbian leminists of England. All of society will be shaped by the accumulation of individual decisions to meet or stay apart, to buy or sell, to speak or to remain silent. The political and social hermit will have no more political power tomorrow than he did yesterday. People who choose lives of parasitic dependence will be disenfranchised, not by any government decree but by their own passivity. In politics, as elsewhere, the telescreened society will discriminate fiercely—on the basis of conviction, talent, and effort.”

“Then you will recreate the Party,” O'Brien said sharply. “Political power will converge once again in the hands of the wealthy, the articulate, and the technically sophisticated.”

The prisoner nodded. In his hollow eyes there also seemed to be a faint, secret glow. “Yes, up to a point that will happen. But the inequalities created by the network will have nothing to do with Party rank. They will spring up among the wealthy and the poor, among fathers and sons, siblings and cousins. The ancient hierarchies of blood or ancestry, the plutocracies that endured from generation to generation, will be swept aside. The new hierarchies will always be changing, because they will be
hierarchies of talent and nothing else.”

“Freedom and organization cannot be reconciled,” O'Brien said. “Without Ministry coordination you will never maintain the air-conditioned, chromium-plated, gadget-ridden existence that is now considered desirable and enlightened. The processes involved in making an aeroplane or running a network are so complex as to be possible only in a planned centralized society. Liberty and efficiency
pull in opposite directions.”

For the second time a shadow of contempt seemed to move across the prisoner's yellowing face. “The telescreen will decentralize authority and simplify all of life. Inhuman entities like the modern city will disappear. The telescreen resolves the apparent contradiction between decentralization and electric power, air transport, the division of labor, or industrial efficiency. With the
telescreen, individuals and voluntary groups can work at any distance
for each other's mutual benefit.”

O'Brien thought again of the condemned man who had clung to the bars. The man had screamed and screamed, and then he had fouled his pants. O'Brien remembered how he had laughed afterward, laughed quite loudly.
Everyone had laughed.

Now, throatily at first, then with great gasps and wheezes, O'Brien was laughing again. He threw his head back. The sagging jowls on his face were shaking. His laugh was a disgusting
bubbling sound deep down in his belly. “Do you really believe that telescreens can function without a Ministry?” Finally his voice settled back to a strained hoarseness. “Whatever you call it, the authority that controls the network will be a collectivist oligarchy of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers,
journalists, and professional politicians. It will be the Party. It will be Big Brother.”

“The network requires no central authority behind it,” the prisoner replied. “In ordinary markets, sausages and sweaters move through dozens of intermediate owners on the way from producer to consumer, without central planning, without coordination from above. Electronic networks link together in the same way. Connections add up. Individuals link into small networked communities, small communities into larger ones, and higher-level networks are overlaid on lower ones, one tier above the next. There are no central planners; central planning is in fact impossible. There will be no Party behind the network. There will be no Big Brother. It is when Big Brother seizes control that the network atrophies and dies.”

The prisoner slumped back into his chair, exhausted. It had been a remarkable performance, O'Brien reflected. The man was too intelligent to imagine he could escape. And yet he had spoken with detached, intellectual interest, and with no hint of fear.

For some time O'Brien sat immobile, gazing again at the broken figure in front of him. Filthy grime covered the prisoner's entire body. There was dirt between his toes. He had a vile sore
running up his right leg.

“You are rotting away,” O'Brien said with contempt. “You are
falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Perhaps with the network you might some day have created markets, memories, money—whatever else you imagined were necessary in your new Utopia. Perhaps you really did know how to control the network. But
the Party controls you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. The network may perhaps belong to you. But you are my prisoner. You belong to me.”