No one cares if the boots exist...

Orwell's 1984 novel is MUCH more relevant than the more simplified versions we see in movies.

What struck me last time I read 1984 was how much I had missed in it. It's much much more than the images of brutal repression we tend to remember.

I was struck by how familiar the Party's mind control methodology now seems - with the emphasis on invented, irrational narrative and willing suspension of critical faculties.

The war doesn’t need to actually happen…

No one cares if the boots exist….

"...The Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than a hundred and forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all...."

Reality is whatever the Party says it is, as O’Brien tells Winston…

"We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature."

You see, the Party has divined that events don't need to have any physical reality in order to be effective as propaganda, they just need to exist in the minds of the people as a believed consensus reality.

In fact O'Brien is aware that manipulating people into accepting a fictional 'reality' gives the Party even more control, since it divorces them from any possible check or balance. In this world O’Brien can float off the floor like a soap bubble, victories can happen and un-happen again, chocolate rations can get bigger while decreasing, boots can be created - just by saying so.

And even the subversives are lost in the matrix.

O’Brien is the real author of Goldstein’s book. Winston was ‘permitted’ to read it, while being watched all the while. His ‘rebellion’ carefully managed, monitored and eventually extinguished.

So, even the anti-establishment narratives are based solely on the fictions generated by the Party and can therefore only take the people reading them ever deeper into helpless delusion. They live and die without ever contacting veridical reality. They are all lost, even those who think they aren’t.

How close are we to living in this world? How many of our rebellions are already managed and cultivated?

Simpleminded binary narratives are now the currency of so much debate, a lot of them contrived so that both “sides” end up promoting the same establishment agendas. It’s increasingly hard to navigate them and more and more people seem not to even try, succumbing to the lure of that pre-packaged outrage and the easy sense of virtue and comradeship acquired by adopting the flavour of your choice.

Will there be a point of no return, where objective truth is finally snuffed out of everyone’s awareness and all we have is O’Brien’s curated “alternative news”, served up to us as a harmless little virtual reality entertainment for contrarians?

What must we do to hang on to those precious threads of real, organic resistance and real, unpolluted independent thought?

The narrative managers probably don’t intend to make that easy for us that’s for sure.

I think a small first step might be to go read Orwell’s book again.

If you’re like me you might find it surprises you and resonates more with you now, post-2020, than it ever did.