1984

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0:00:03.5 Landry Ayres: If there’s anything you need to know before this episode, it’s that war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and this is Pop & Locke.

0:00:13.8 Natalie Dowzicky: I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:15.0 Landry Ayres: And I’m Landry Ayres. Joining us to discuss the origins of the Orwellian and 1984, our Director of Health Policy studies at the Cato Institute, Michael Cannon.

0:00:26.9 Michael Cannon: How are you doing Landry?

0:00:28.2 Landry Ayres: And Director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Emerging Technologies, Matthew Feeney.

0:00:33.8 Matthew Feeney: Hi there.

0:00:35.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Alright, so this has to be one of the most famous books ever written and the movie is fair at best, [chuckle] but I’m sure most of our listeners, if not all, at the very least, are vaguely familiar with the story, but just to get us started, can someone explain the political and social landscape of Oceania and who’s in charge? Who’s running the show?

0:01:00.6 Michael Cannon: So Oceania is basically Britain and a collection of other countries, I believe that has fallen under its sway, they are at war with… Well, it depends on whom you ask and when you ask, we’ll get to that, I’m sure. But the governing, the political structure in Oceania is the party. The party is Ingsoc, which is short for English Socialism, and there are three distinct classes in Oceania, there is the Inner Party, those are the people who really run the show, there’s the Outer Party, those are the people who are devoted to the party and sort of like a middle class in political and economic terms, and then there are the Proles, whom the people in the Inner and Outer Party refer to as animals, and it is a highly repressive dystopian society where the state really is totalitarian, it’s controlling every aspect of life, from economics to familial and even sexual relations, to the way people think.

0:02:19.0 Matthew Feeney: Yeah, and the crucial figure in the whole thing is someone called Winston Smith, who is one of the many of the party members who works in the so-​called Ministry of Truth. In the novel, there are three major ministries that oversee Airstrip One or Oceania, but certainly Airstrip One, which I suppose is 1984’s prediction of what the island of Great Britain will be called under this new regime.

[chuckle]

0:02:49.8 Matthew Feeney: And these ministries are called the Ministry of Plenty, the Ministry of Love, the Ministry of Peace and the Ministry of Truth. And of course, the book has many contradictions discussed in it, I’m sure we’ll talk about doublethink later, but of course, the Ministry of Peace is in charge of war, the Ministry of Plenty seems to be overseeing a rather impoverished economy, and the Ministry of Truth is basically the propaganda wing of the government and it’s where the protagonist, Winston Smith, works, where he works on fixing, shall we say, the old journalism of the world before the revolution.

0:03:33.4 Landry Ayres: I think this is actually a really good opportunity to get into the topic of doublethink that you raised, Feeney, because it is one of the most influential and long-​lasting ideas that has really become part of the vernacular of everyday life in conjunction with things like Big Brother, which have become synonymous with ideas about mass surveillance and particularly state-​run surveillance. Can you explain the concept of doublethink for someone who might be struggling with what it might mean or entail? And I think why does it have such a lasting legacy? Where do we see that in the real world?

0:04:19.4 Matthew Feeney: It’s a good question, and you’re right, I think, to highlight the influence of the book’s vocabulary in modern discussions about surveillance and government repression, Orwell’s own name has become an adjective to describe something as Orwellian, but there are other words and phrases throughout the book that people will pick up on, so for something to be memory holed or Room 101, the Thought Police or thoughtcrime. It’s a real testament, I think to Orwell’s genius that he developed by himself a vocabulary that is now just taken for granted in discussions about some of the most serious of all liberty concerns. And doublethink, I think, is perhaps best encapsulated by the slogans of the English Social Party of Ingsoc, which I have in a poster in my office, the idea being, the slogan is “War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength,” and the basic point of doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory phrases in your mind at the same time as true.

0:05:23.5 Matthew Feeney: And it’s been very, very important in the novel because, as I think, Orwell understands it, language is a political weapon, and once you can get people to think contradictory things, your ability to control them is increased immensely. And there are a couple of times in the book where Orwell talks about the sort of people in this world and how important they are to the party functioning. There’s a part early on in the book where he describes one of his neighbors as the sort of person essential for the success of the party because the man is stupid, an imbecile. And later when he’s talking to one of his colleagues in the Ministry of Truth working on the dictionary for Newspeak for vocabulary, he predicts the death of this person, saying that his loyalty wasn’t enough. He just didn’t quite [0:06:14.7] ____ what it takes to survive even in this dystopian world.

0:06:19.4 Natalie Dowzicky: I think it’s also funny that while we’re talking about the vocabulary that Orwell chose for the book living on and having influence in our world, a big part of the book and the movie is how they’re shrinking down the vocabulary that exists. So there’s this whole concept of, they only wanted three different ways to say “good”, so there was no longer gonna be “great” and all that kind of stuff. They’re gonna boil down the vocabulary so much to the point where people wouldn’t be able to have this… I think there’s a line, wouldn’t be able to have this discussion, the same discussion in 2050, which is interesting, because Orwell added all of these things that you think of, like when someone says Big Brother you automatically think of the book, and in the part of the book, and in the Newspeak is when they’re just boiling down the language so much that everyone… One can’t converse with each other, and it’s so uniform that everyone’s opinions are the same too, ’cause they only have the same vocabulary to explain what’s going on. [chuckle]

0:07:21.2 Landry Ayres: Yeah, it’s a method of control that they are exercising over the people by only giving them so many options about things to converse, and ways to frame, and priming them in a way that gives them a control to prevent another idea that becomes part of the vernacular that Orwell came up with, which is thoughtcrime, which is, you know, there is no law, theoretically, in Oceania, or even practically, they say that outright, but there is a sort of from the… It was instituted top down, but it has grown from the bottom up, this preventative crimestop mentality of getting to the point where something might be dangerous, or going against what the party believes, against Big Brother, and halting that before even the thought of it can occur.

0:08:19.5 Landry Ayres: And this was interesting, because we actually just recorded an episode about Arrival with… The Amy Adams film, which is specifically about the use of language and how it influences perceptions of the world, and the delicate balance between determinism and relativism and… And there is this fight that becomes overt by the time that Winston Smith is abducted by O’Brien and taken to the Ministry of Love’s headquarters, and is undergoing this like chapters long torture, which lasts an indeterminate amount of time for a point, where he at one point asks O’Brien, who has been basically… We find out the book that he had ceded to Winston, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which is supposedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein, this dissident and subvert rebel leader of the group, the Brotherhood, that’s trying to fight against the party and such, you find out O’Brien has essentially parodied this identity and written it all himself, and tried to create a flawed manifesto for a collectivism that will ensnare people who are captivated by the ideas, but is actually, he thinks, kind of just a crock.

0:09:42.8 Landry Ayres: Winston asks if it’s true, and he says, “As a description, yes, but the program it sets forth is nonsense.” But there are similarities in the constructivist view of reality that O’Brien talks about, that are seeded in the supposed Goldstein writings, and I think that’s the description that he talks about. Like, you’re not gonna be able to do much with this because the party, it’s so powerful, but the way that meaning is controlled can allow them to influence what becomes reality, and what constitutes something being in existence. And they know that, and it becomes the tension between Winston’s desire for objectivity, compared to the control that the party wants to influence.

0:10:36.6 Michael Cannon: Yeah, everything, from doublethink, to crimestop, Newspeak generally, and the existence and of Goldstein, the Goldstein manifesto, and what O’Brien and the party do with it, they’re all part of this elaborate system of control. And the Goldstein manifesto is a fascinating component of that, but it’s also a fascinating piece of political sort of analysis, which makes the party’s use of it even more intriguing. So the content of the Goldstein manifesto is basically a description of how the party exercises power, and why it exercises power and what’s the purpose of war, and it’s a very counterintuitive thing. Oceania is at war with Eastasia, or someone else, and you think, “Oh, well, they must be the enemy, and the purpose of war must be to win it.” The Goldstein manifesto explains, no, the purpose is not to win the war, the purpose is to have the war so that the people on top can stay on top. And not only that, but wage war on the people in their own country, who are beneath them. The purpose of war, the manifesto explains, is to keep the Inner Party on top, and let them wage war, not so much on Eastasia as on the people in their own country, the Outer Party and the Proles.

0:12:13.9 Michael Cannon: And it’s a fascinating description of what could emerge, a dynamic that could emerge through political systems, and people’s self-​interest, even if… In fact, I think in… One frustration I have is that that is… It’s possible that that could emerge, it’s very hard to believe that that could happen in an intentional way, like the Goldstein manifesto describes. Still, it’s this really insightful and damning critique of the party. And the party creates it. Orwell’s never really clear about whether Goldstein actually exists, but he kind of makes it seem as though he, Goldstein is just a creation of the party. Certainly, O’Brien says that he wrote the manifesto. And that could have happened whether Goldstein is real or not, but that the party itself wrote such an insightful and damning indictment of their own activities, itself is fascinating, and then they use it, they deploy it in a way that helps them to quash opposition. They let this exists, this manifesto exists, they share it with people they think might be subversives, might be hostile to the party, they use that to identify them, and then once they do, they torture them until those would-​be revolutionaries end up loving Big Brother.

0:13:56.9 Michael Cannon: It’s fascinating on a number of levels, a lot of them having to do with how they exert, how the parties exert control, but it’s also fascinating because Orwell manages to worm into this narrative a really insightful and powerful… Or a lot of really insightful and powerful observations about what drives a totalitarian regime like that.

0:14:23.6 Matthew Feeney: It’s something that struck me while reading the book is… Well, I don’t know which time it was, but Goldstein seems some kind of Trotsky figure, and of course, Orwell, had a whole treatment of the Russian Revolution in Animal Farm, but this is a classic example of someone who could have been an ideological leader of a movement becoming the eventual victim of its own successes, so Trotsky himself ends up with an ice pick in the head in Mexico, killed by the Soviets, and there’s this… But none the less, you’ll still have communists for decades, of course, talking about how great Trotsky was and obviously Stalin was the the one who really screwed it up and true, communism has never been tried, and the usual stuff, but it was… I don’t think it’s an accident that Orwell approached Goldstein in that way. And I think Landry is right to point out earlier that I think especially libertarians, if you’re a classical liberal, you think about the rule of law and how important is to have checking institutions and all of that. But in the first few pages of the novel, Smith says, well, nothing was illegal because there were no longer any law, so you’re in a situation where the only thing that really matters is the will of a party, and it’s not bad laws or bad institutions… It’s… At least from the beginning of the book, Smith is discussing the lack of any laws at all, it’s just power.

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0:16:00.1 Natalie Dowzicky: I think the way that Cannon was saying that the manifest is used in such like an intricate way too, is… I think that’s what gives it the biggest impact, and throughout the manifesto, it has a huge long section that Winston’s reading about the purpose of war, and then Winston puts in his thoughts every so often, like every chapter, so that he reads… And he kept coming back to this idea that the Proles represent the only hope for revolution, and I guess that kinda… It struck me as interesting that he thought that way, I believe the Proles were 85% of the population, so obviously they’re the masses, but I kinda wanted to dig into like, why were the Proles the only sense of hope left when they were like, I guess left to their own devices for the most part, and were kind of like the bottom rung of society, like why were they the only hope simply because they were the largest group?

0:17:05.3 Michael Cannon: Yeah, I think that’s it, the way in there, in a situation like that there are no laws, there’s no reason, debate that’s going to guide political developments its all just gonna be exercises of pure power. And Winston was unsatisfied with the status quo, and he thought, well, just based on numbers, the Proles are the only hope, but I think also he sensed that the Proles had more information than anyone else. The Inner Party, they’re all benefiting from this social structure, the Outer Party, they benefit somewhat, they’re better off than the Proles, which is precisely the problem, they don’t have the information that the Proles have about how repressive the society is, about how much deprivation there is, they are having more of their needs met than the Proles are. And so they have less reason to revolt, but the Proles really understand just how inadequate the social and economic structures are, and so they’re most likely to revolt for that reason.

0:18:16.8 Landry Ayres: And also it made me think, why then make the authorial choice that Orwell does to set the story and tell it from an Outer Party members point of view rather than from the Proles, because you could very easily see this choice, and I think there’s obviously some intent there, and I kinda wanna parse out what it would mean that you could set this story from a Proles’ perspective, and it would have a much more like sort of hero rising through the ranks…

0:18:48.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Well, it’s like Hunger Games at that point.

0:18:49.0 Landry Ayres: Yeah. It’s sort of Campbellian at that point. In the sort of hero’s journey-​esque tinge that it gives to the story, so what do we make of the choice and what does it mean to tell the story from an Outer Party members perspective as opposed to a Prole?

0:19:07.8 Matthew Feeney: The choice, I think is obviously deliberate and a good one because Orwell suggests in the novel that the Proles really don’t have much of a political consciousness at all, really, or many political ideas, and one of the… I think the lessons of 1984, or certainly something I feel like Orwell was trying to get across is the danger of the logical thinking of intellectuals, the kinds of people who end up becoming bureaucrats or working in the state or working in the regime, and why that’s so dangerous. And that’s why I think the novel picks as its protagonist someone who’s in the system, but not very high up, and someone who’s on the fringes, someone who does actually go shopping for a diary in an illicit shop.

0:20:01.1 Matthew Feeney: But in the book, he said… He writes, Winston says, “But if, but the Proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strengths, would have no need to conspire. They’d need only rise up and shake themselves.” And there’s the Proles in Oceania aren’t political animals much at all, which I guess is a testament to just the success of the party. The real scary thing about 1984 is about what this kind of authoritarian regime does to people who work in it themselves. And you can look throughout history and look at people who work for the Stasi, for example, or people who work for surveillance agencies around the world, I think for similar examples.

0:20:44.6 Michael Cannon: And when you think about it, he really had to be a member of at least the Outer Party. Could have even been a member the Inner Party, I think. And this becomes clearer when we consider Winston’s job. Winston worked for the Ministry of Truth. His job, as Matthew said, was to “correct” news reports from the past so that they align with the party’s current needs. So here’s a guy who is helping to implement the party’s system of informational control. This is the party’s system of propaganda to distort reality in ways that are supposed to pacify the public, and he’s wrestling with his conscience that he’s doing this. He’s wrestling with the whole nature of what is true and what is not, and the epistemological problems of how do we know what we know. And he is really the perfect person to be the central character in this story about how a totalitarian society can use the control of information to control people.

0:22:10.5 Matthew Feeney: And I think this is something people observe very often with their political enemies, but not very often with their allies, right? In the sense that something that I think should always be remembered about 1984 is that everyone sees their political enemies in Big Brother and in the party. So wherever you are on the political spectrum, you can point to behavior from your political opponents and be like, “Oh, that’s Orwellian,” or, “That’s something, that’s Thought Police stuff.” And the fact that people from across the political spectrum feel that way is a, I think, a real testament to Orwell’s genius here. Because Orwell, at least in his private life after the publication of the book, did explicitly mention that it’s not intended as a critique of socialism per se, or fascism per se.

0:23:03.1 Matthew Feeney: Before recording, Michael and I, we’re chatting about the fact that that Orwell was one of the only, or certainly among the very few public intellectuals at the time, who was really correct about fascism, and also really correct about the Soviet Union. He went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, took a bullet in the neck from a fascist sniper. This is a guy who wanted to fight fascists, but then he also witnessed stalinistic, the Stalin aligned groups purging other Republicans in Barcelona, so he was always skeptical of totalitarianism of all stripes. And that, I think, makes the book somewhat uncomfortable, because it’s become very in vogue recently for Republicans and conservative activists to cite 1984, especially in the context of big tech social media debates to describe what Facebook did to Trump is Orwellian, or something like that. I remember Senator Lee, I think it was after the Facebook Oversight Board decided to uphold the ban on Trump, tweeted that it was double-​plus-​ungood, using Newspeak.

0:24:12.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah [chuckle]

0:24:14.5 Matthew Feeney: But I think Orwell would have laughed at the idea of American conservatives reading this book and thinking it was written with them in mind.

[chuckle]

0:24:22.5 Matthew Feeney: As the good guy, it’s a real… But that’s part of why the book has endured for so long, it’s everyone, regardless of your political ideology, can read it and feel a deep sense of unease and familiarity.

0:24:35.5 Michael Cannon: Familiarity, because they see their opponents in it, and never see themselves in it, which is, I think, an equally important insight. There’re these wonderful experiments where the researchers who were conducting this study, presented people with claims about… With claims that involved mathematical errors. Some of the claims were about gun control, and some of the claims were about say, hand lotion. One of them’s very political, one of them’s not, but they contained the same mathematical errors, and the people who noticed those mathematical errors when it came to gun control, did not notice them as often when it came to hand lotion. And what the researchers surmised, and I think this is valid, is that when something… When you make a claim about gun control, or another hot button political issue, the challenge is my priors. The challenge is my view of the world. I’m very good at detecting when you’ve made a mistake there.

0:25:50.5 Natalie Dowzicky: When you’re wrong. Exactly.

0:25:51.4 Michael Cannon: But when you make a claim that is, that doesn’t challenge my priors, ’cause who cares, it’s about hand lotion, or even more so if it is a claim that doesn’t challenges my priors because it validates them. Maybe it’s a claim about gun control that I agree with that. I’m much less likely to find the error in those… In those claims, because I have no incentive to, because it doesn’t present any threat to me or my worldview. And so that’s what’s fascinating to me about the fact that everyone sees their political opponents in 1984, or sees a little bit of 1984 in their political opponents. They’re all right.

[chuckle]

0:26:33.5 Michael Cannon: Matthew and I were talking about this earlier, and I joked, “Except for libertarians. This doesn’t apply to us.”

[chuckle]

0:26:40.5 Natalie Dowzicky: It never does.

0:26:43.5 Michael Cannon: But they’re all… They’re all right. This is a natural human tendency to look for threats and ignore things that aren’t threats. And it is why the free flow of information is so important because we’re never, by definition, we’re never gonna see our own blind spots. And like it or not, we all have them.

0:27:05.8 Matthew Feeney: Yeah. And often, I mean, it’s not directly related to 1984. But nonetheless to do with Orwell and language and… The essay that Orwell wrote, Politics and the English Language, I think, does a good job of showing how sloppy people can be with language. And in politics, I think sometimes people seek out vocabulary to justify certain policies. So an example might be, America doesn’t wage war and drop bombs on innocent people, it has kinetic military actions that sometimes yield collateral damage, right?

[chuckle]

0:27:40.3 Matthew Feeney: And that is… And if you don’t like reality, right? It’s sometimes comforting to have a vocabulary that makes you feel slightly better or to make your policy sound good. And that I think, is something we always have to be on the lookout for, especially in policy and politics, that people do this all the time. I’m constantly thinking of ways to dress up policies that the allies might use, in order to make them sound better. But the precision of language is very, very important. And something I think shouldn’t be overlooked is that the novel comes with an appendix that it actually has a whole discussion on Newspeak that is worth…

0:28:18.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

0:28:18.5 Matthew Feeney: Worth unpacking because Orwell does a very good job of pointing out that you don’t have to get rid of the word necessarily, you just sometimes have to get rid of the concept. Whereas even in Newspeak, the word “free” is a word, as in a dog is free of lice. But the important thing of Newspeak is to get rid of the word “free” meaning anything politically free, or to have real freedom, in that sense.

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0:28:44.3 Natalie Dowzicky: I think, too, we were touching a lot on this idea of familiarity, whether it’s while you’re reading the book or watching the movie. And what struck me kind of Feeney was hinting at earlier, with the Big Brother being used in the larger tech and surveillance conversations that are going on in the policy world, now everyone has Alexas in their homes, or like the little Google Dots and their TVs. And I was just kind of wondering, when this book was first written, I’m sure there was a larger fear than is now, because we’re more familiar and used to these types of products in our home. But this type of tech posed a larger threat, people thought that the government was always watching.

0:29:31.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Now we’re just like acutely aware that we’re always being watched. But I think before it’s more of a legitimate panic probably when this book first came out, but it’s just… I guess that made… I guess, the existence of all these products in our lives now kind of made the 1984 story is a little bit more surreal, I guess, ’cause I could see, I was like, oh, I can see us having all these types of products where it’s always on, it’s always listening, or in their case, they talked about turning the telescreen off for only 20 minutes, or then it would be suspicious. So I guess that type of familiarity, I think, especially since surveillance has been such a larger discussion going on for the last decade or so, I think makes 1984 even more harrowing or relevant, at the very least.

0:30:25.8 Michael Cannon: I didn’t read this book until I already had an Amazon Echo in the kitchen and a Echo, Spot in the room where I was reading where it has a camera on it. So I’d look over at the book. And then I look over at the camera and then I’d look at the book and I’d look over at the camera.

[chuckle]

0:30:41.8 Michael Cannon: And so that was interesting, but I think Natalie’s point is really important. It’s difficult to put yourself in the place of someone who is reading this book when it came out in 1949.

0:30:54.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:30:55.5 Michael Cannon: Maybe easier for me than for the rest of you because I was born closer to that date. But, almost none of the… Televisions were still new, and the idea that you could have two-​way video communication very far off, but everyone’s world was smaller as a result of the more primitive telecommunications technologies. And so to introduce it to that world, the idea that everything about you is suddenly going to be exposed to members of the party who are gonna be watching you and critiquing you was, yeah, it was even scarier than it is today. We have… And yet… And so we have a lot of these technologies now in our homes that in theory could be used to watch us. But generally, they’re not, so I think. And so it seems…

0:31:52.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Keep telling yourself that.

0:31:53.8 Michael Cannon: Seems less scary to us now. But you have to recognize that the potential is there, and it does lend… That potential does lend itself to legitimate concerns that someone is listening even though we think Alexa is over there being dormant, she’s actually taking notes on the political conversations we’re having around the dinner table.

0:32:15.3 Matthew Feeney: Yeah, I was struck on rereading it that… When I first read the book, obviously the the horror of the telescreen seemed to be that it was a surveillance device, right?

0:32:26.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:32:26.8 Matthew Feeney: That it’s always watching, always on. But what really hit home this time is that it’s simultaneously a surveillance device and a broadcasting device. So it’s broadcasting propaganda from the party while also watching you. And again, maybe because of what I do for a living my first thought was, this is how many people on the American right view social media these days. That it’s a…

0:32:52.8 Matthew Feeney: Facebook and Google for example are not just mechanisms for surveillance, but they also have political bias and are trying to influence how you think. And I wouldn’t go that far, but I think many on the political left would look at something like the telescreen and see an Amazon Alexa or something as similar, the idea being, if these companies can learn more and more about you, then they can advertise more accurately to you. And how free are you really, like when Amazon or Google suggests, “Oh, you want this new speaker.” How much do you really want it? Or how much is it that they’ve just figured out a way to make you think you want it, right? And that is, this kind of surveillance, capitalism critique that has become very in vogue recently. But it raises interesting questions of how much control can you have when there are people insistently trying to tell you things all the time. And the book 1984 begins with Winston Smith finding a small corner of his apartment where the telescreen cannot see him, and he can start writing this diary.

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0:34:00.9 Landry Ayres: Beyond examples of doublethink that we have talked about, and if anything comes to you that you’re like, “Oh, this is definitely an example of doublethink that we see concretely today.” Whether it’s with social media, or it’s with the way people vote, or view politics or et cetera, you could think of many, many ways to sort of view these themes in today’s political landscape. I’m also interested in modern day examples of things like crimestop. And this is something that Feeney had touched upon about the sort of value to the party of imbeciles or morons, to the cause, and what that can do, how would something like what they define crimestop as a sort of protective stupidity, how is that used today? Whether it’s as an instrument that people try to influence others with, or intrinsic in the way that people think to sort of shield themselves.

0:35:05.4 Michael Cannon: Well, I think the clearest examples probably come from US foreign policy. Where there is this reflexive, well, there’s this belief that the United States is a city on… Shining city on a hill, and we are an exceptional nation because we were founded in liberty, and when we intervene around the world, it is to spread freedom and democracy. And if you point out, as Matthew did, that some of our kinetic military actions end up killing people, then, and you try to equate that with similar things that other countries have done, that our opponents have done, our enemies around the world, then people will say, “Absolutely not, there’s no equivalence to be drawn whatsoever.”

0:36:02.1 Michael Cannon: And it inhibits that idea that it is so important to so many Americans, prevents them from doing even-​handed evaluation of our behavior on the international stage versus other countries’ behaviors on the international stage. And I think that prevents us from resolving conflicts and prolongs them. Another example is, recently President Biden said that… He made some comments about how the United States does not intervene in, or tamper with elections in other countries and that earned him a pretty stern rebuke from a lot of foreign policy scholars. But, and whether this, there could be some crimestop and some doublethink in here, because crimestop would be when people say, “No, United States does not do that. Just by definition, we’re the United States, we’re for democracy.”

0:37:00.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:37:00.2 Michael Cannon: Doublethink would be, “Well, when we do it, we’re promoting democracy, that’s what we’re doing.” Whereas when other nations do it, it’s election tampering.

0:37:09.4 Matthew Feeney: Some… A recent example comes to mind is some of the recent rhetoric about the COVID pandemic, where it seems, more recently people seem to hold two views at once in their mind. One is that this coronavirus was manufactured in a Chinese lab and potentially is a bio weapon, but also that this virus is not a big deal at all and what was all the fuss about and we don’t need lockdowns. [0:37:32.2] ____ and you’ll take this… These two seemingly to me contradictory views that it’s a really dangerous bio weapon or tool that should be investigated to the death and oh, by the way, it’s authoritarian that I should ever have had to wear a mask going to the grocery store and people are blowing this out of proportion and get a grip. That seems like one example. Another is discussions on immigration where immigrants are simultaneously taking our jobs and our welfare at the same time, seems to be another one.

0:38:03.0 Matthew Feeney: I think crimestop is not quite the same thing, but the phrase or the use of it in 1984 reminds me of how partisans across the political spectrum view journalism outlets that they know they can stop thinking immediately once they know the source of what they’re being told, which is if it’s something from CNN, it’s like, okay, stop. There’s kind of a barrier that hits certain people or when, on the flip side, when, I don’t know what the equivalent would be, but if Fox News report something accurately, there’ll be people who nonetheless, take rather dim view of it. So it’s not quite crimestop in the sense of it being productive stupidity. But there was, I would say, during the Trump years, the ongoing use of the phrase “fake news” it seemed to me was a desire among some people who were allied with the administration to get people to stop investigating it. Like the idea was once you label something as fake news, there is a huge number of, say, Trump allies who will stop their own investigation of whatever is being discussed, right? As long as a figure in authority says, “Oh, that’s fake news.” You can stop worrying about it, you can take comfort in the words of the leader, right?

0:39:16.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

0:39:17.4 Matthew Feeney: That you’re right. So yeah, those are a few examples that come to mind or at least are 1984 adjacent, shall we say?

0:39:24.1 Michael Cannon: It comes up in my area’s health policy, it comes up… Crimestop does or crimestop adjacent behavior when you try to question the idea of whether the government should be guaranteeing access to health insurance for everyone or access to health care for everyone via health insurance, some people, for some of them that’s a conversation ender. Even if… Because it’s just not an idea we can entertain. That’s… It’s a thoughtcrime. One of my favorite examples of this, and it comes up with the Medicare program as well, Medicare, people in health policy circles revere the Medicare program, even if it drives them crazy sometimes, and some of the biggest critics of the US Medicare program are its supporters who actually dig into the details of what the Medicare program does.

0:40:23.8 Michael Cannon: My favorite example of this was, a little more than a decade ago, a couple of the top health economists in the country studied how much Medicare protected seniors from wild variations in out-​of-​pocket health spending. So, measured the insurance benefits of Medicare and also measured the health benefits of Medicare, try to find some mortality benefits, and what they found was there is no evidence that Medicare saved a single life in its first 10 years of operation. They could not find any evidence of that. They did find that… It found that Medicare protected seniors from high out-​of-​pocket expenses, so there was some insurance benefit, but the insurance benefit, it could justify at most 20% of this total social cost of the Medicare program. So you still got… Oh, I’m sorry, 40%. It was 2/​5ths. So you still got 60% of this… The cost of this emerged, that they were now able to justify and the point of all this is that they originally titled their study, their working paper, and you can still find this online, the original title was “What Did Medicare Do and Was it Worth it?” By the time this article got accepted at the Journal of Public Economics, they had changed the title from “What Did Medicare Do and Was it Worth it?” to “What Did Medicare Do? The Initial Impact of Medicare on Mortality and Out of Pocket Medical Spending.”

[chuckle]

0:41:56.9 Michael Cannon: It’s as if… It wasn’t even allowed to ask the question “Was Medicare worth it?” When really, this is the best… That should be a valid question that people should be able to… It is a valid question. People should be able to ask that but that was too much for the pages of one of the leading economics journals in this country.

[music]

0:42:19.7 Natalie Dowzicky: I have more of a fun question to ask, I guess. So Matthew, earlier had mentioned how 1984 has the Ministry of Peace which wages war, the Ministry of Plenty which actually is the one who is overseeing economic shortages, the Ministry of Love that’s the center of the Inner Party’s activities, and I was kind of curious which ones you guys thought were the most dangerous or the worst of the three ’cause they’re all pretty bad, or kind of the ones maybe that have the largest impact if you can’t think of which one would be the most dangerous.

0:42:58.3 Matthew Feeney: Well, I always… I remember having this kind of fight… I’ve had fights like this with the Libertarians, ’cause… Some Libertarians, I wouldn’t name names, still insist on this kind of…

0:43:10.2 Landry Ayres: Name ‘em. Name ‘em.

[laughter]

0:43:11.8 Michael Cannon: Hey, Mitch, name. What’s his name?

[laughter]

0:43:14.7 Matthew Feeney: They insist on this distinction right between social freedom and economic freedom which is a distinction I don’t think makes any sense but… And people will say, “Well, what use is the… What’s the point of being wealthy and prosperous if you don’t have the freedom to write a news article or to protest your government or to have jury trials or whatever?” And then other people say, “Well, what’s the point of being able to found a newspaper if you don’t have any money to do it?” I don’t want to live in a society where any of these four ministries have any power over me, because even if I have the… Even if I lived in a peaceful country where there’s no censorship and I’m allowed to say what I want, but there’s still food rationing, that’s not great. I don’t wanna have to worry about that.

0:44:05.1 Matthew Feeney: On the other hand, if I’m very, very wealthy and I never have to worry about being hungry, but nonetheless, I could have the Thought Police come after me and I’m not allowed to have private thoughts or to buy books or to work at a think-​tank or anything like that, that’s a pretty miserable existence too. I view them all maybe four sides of the same instrument, really. I hate them all equally, fear them all equally. Ultimately, they all have the same authority behind them. In 1984, there are no laws, it’s just the will of the party, and it’s gonna be someone in a uniform with a gun or a bludgeon enforcing the rules of all four of them, so it’s a bit of a cop out answer but, yeah, none of the above, please. If I can.

0:44:53.0 Michael Cannon: I have a non-​cop-​out answer.

0:44:54.8 Natalie Dowzicky: He’s taking option E. He’s taking option E. Alright.

0:44:56.8 Michael Cannon: I have a non-​cop-​out answer, but I reserve the right to change my answer, but my answer is that the Ministry of Truth is the most dangerous, and it has to do with… There’s this wonderful, and by wonderful I mean horrifying quote from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, that says that if you really wanna get people to do evil, you have to give them an ideology. You have to make them believe that what they’re doing is right. And the Ministry of Truth and the propaganda it puts out touches on everything. First of all, it distorts people’s idea of reality, it hides reality from them, it gives them an ideology to explain the world around them, to explain the… Why the party is good, why they should ally themselves with a party, to do what the party wants, this… We can see Newspeak and all of these propaganda activities as an example of the party trying to… It instill in the people this ideology that will get them to do evil in the party’s name, and we can see it in the way that the Winston’s neighbor’s child reports on his own father to the party’s… And his father ends up in Room 101 as a result.

0:46:31.0 Michael Cannon: And so I think it’s because the Ministry of Truth is able to shape the reality that the people on Oceania see, it is even more powerful than the Ministry of Peace even though it’s supposedly able to wage war, we don’t really know how much of a war there is. All we know is that Winston sees these newsreels on the telescreen, he sees some people paraded in front of him that the party calls prisoners of war, and he is doctoring articles to recast the war in ways that the party prefers, but just as Goldstein may be an invention of the party, some or all of the war could be an invention of the party, if it controls all the information flows, how do we really know how much of what is going on there is true? So yes, the fact that all of the party’s activities by the… Oh, and the Ministry of Truth also controls what people think about the harms that the… What’s the… The Department of… The word’s escaping me, the economics one…

0:48:00.0 Matthew Feeney: Plenty.

0:48:00.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Plenty.

0:48:00.3 Michael Cannon: The Ministry of Plenty, that’s what it was. I wanted to say scarcity because I’m an economist.

[chuckle]

0:48:06.2 Michael Cannon: But the Ministry of Truth is hiding the harms that the Ministry of Plenty is imposing on the people by making a reduction in chocolate rations, [0:48:19.0] ____ increase in chocolate rations so that people will celebrate that. Yes, all of this stuff is backed up by the threat of physical violence from party members if you commit a thought crime or whatever else, but the Ministry of Truth, and so the state uses violence against the people, or all of the Ministries use violence against people, but the Department of Truth is really a force multiplier there, because the more people the Ministry of Truth gets to imbibe this ideology, the more foot soldiers the party has among the general public to quash any dissent to make people retreat into their own minds and not do anything that threatens the party’s hold on power.

0:49:09.7 Matthew Feeney: I think that’s a compelling argument in favor of the Ministry of Truth, in favor of it being an answer to Natalie’s question. It reminds me though of something I should have mentioned earlier, which is people should read the book and realize it’s not as fantastical as a lot of people might think. I remember my friend and colleague Trevor Burrus mentioning a discussion he had with a North Korean dissident, or at least an interview that he’d heard, I forget the exact context, but anyway, there was this North Korean dissident who explained that she grew up actually thinking that Kim Jong-​il could actually read her mind, could actually hear her thoughts, and that was not… That was purely the product of something like the Ministry of Truth, which is if you… And we don’t know exactly what’s going on in North Korea in these kind of context and how much of it is just so much fear makes you think that way as a defense mechanism, right, or if it’s something they’re really being told. And certainly the reports out of North Korea do suggest that the leadership sometimes do take on what appear to be supernatural abilities, viewed almost like deities themselves. It’s probably the closest we’ve ever come to a real Oceania or a real 1984 society is North Korea.

0:50:35.1 Matthew Feeney: But others come, you can see features of it in totalitarian states all across the world, but importantly, as we’ve discussed, there are also features of it you can see in peaceful liberal democracies as well.

0:50:47.5 Michael Cannon: If we can find and put it in the notes for the podcast…

0:50:52.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Yes.

0:50:52.7 Michael Cannon: There is a wonderful… And by wonderful, I mean horrifying video that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times puts together from his trip to North Korea, and the most harrowing part of this, he’s interviewing people, and they didn’t even notice until they were reviewing the footage later, that there was a man who kept walking behind the subject of his interview, apparently whispering things to this person, he was so good at it, they didn’t notice until they were back in the States reviewing the footage, but the most harrowing part of this was when they were interviewing some children, and I can’t remember if the parents were there or the children were there by themselves, but they were asking the children just some basic questions.

0:51:43.0 Michael Cannon: These foreign reporters from… These Western reporters came into North Korea and were asking these children just some basic questions, and the children had these absolutely horrified looks on their faces, and I’ve seen children nervous in social situations or with adults they don’t know, and this was different, it’s as though… And maybe this is my projection, you watch this and you tell me if you have the same interpretation. But it was as though the children were fearing for their own lives or the lives of their parents if they said anything they weren’t supposed to say. What I imagined is that these are children who had received lectures from their parents that you never… That there are certain things you do not do. And when I watched the film 1984, in preparation for this discussion, I kept thinking of that Nicholas Kristof video and thinking of those children and wishing that I saw more of that level of terror on the faces of Winston and Julia or other characters because that, as I say, it was really harrowing and worth watching if you… Because as Matthew says, probably North Korea is the closest thing that we have in the world right now, at least, to 1984.

0:53:07.9 Matthew Feeney: Another society worth keeping in mind in these discussions is East Germany which had a pretty extensive police state, and while doing this discussion, you just pull up, say the Wikipedia page, ’cause I was trying to find the exact estimate, but the estimate was that between the Stasi and the secret police and their collaborators… So the Stasi and their collaborators apparently made up something like 1 in 63 people or 2% of the whole population of East Germany, but then once you add other informers and people who are friendly, you’re closer apparently to something like 1 in 7 people in the country. And then I think it’s just all of us thinking, how would we behave if every time we went to work or went to a happy hour or to a neighborhood barbecue, and you looked around and thought, 1 in 7 of these people wouldn’t be opposed to writing a letter to the government about that joke I made about the president or that comment I made about the mayor?

0:54:06.2 Matthew Feeney: To imagine that you can behave in a normal way or to have a functioning democracy in that situation is laughable. And so yeah, we have, unfortunately and tragically, some real life examples of the sort of thing Orwell was talking about. Something that you can do today is look at examples of how there is still stark divides within Germany, that go… That are almost strictly broken down by the old border between East and West Germany, and there was a few years ago, I think it was the Washington Post published polling of questions about things as mundane as political views and attitudes towards recycling and trust of neighbors and these sort of things. And even only a few years ago, you can look at the map of that polling and they’re still a divide in East Germany and West Germany. Something that our conservative critics, I think, may be onto something is to remind us that cultures are pretty fragile, and that just because you replace a totalitarian regime doesn’t mean you’re gonna have within a generation a liberal democracy prop up. It takes a long time for these kind of behaviors to be ironed out. And I hope the day is soon, but when the North Korean regime collapses, I think it will be very tragic but interesting nonetheless to see how long it takes for a society that’s been living under that sort of regime for generations to “catch up”, to see what it’s really like outside of that little bubble.

0:55:49.7 Michael Cannon: And there are other data points here. I wanna see what that looks like in North Korea. We have seen how it occurred in places like Russia and the other Soviet Bloc countries. Romania was a particularly brutal regime under the Ceausescus, but now, if you look, they have some measure of press freedom. If you look that up, that’s one indicator that is hopeful, but I also want to see… Another data point we have is Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve seen in those places, by US intervention, the toppling of some pretty awful and repressive regimes. They tend not to just enact constitutions like the one we have in the United States, and spring… Flourishing liberal democracies tend not to spring forth. I also wanna see… And that could be as a result of external intervention, but we can tell similar stories about Saudi Arabia, or we can say about North Korea what we… What we say about North Korea we can say about Saudi Arabia. I would like to see what it looks like when that regime gets toppled. I would like to see what it looks like when a number of African regimes get toppled. But these things have been happening for millennia, this dynamic, and it’s actually a very rare thing that you end up with dramatically more freedom after revolution. There are those who think, and I think one of those people is on this call, on this podcast, that the best recipe for freedom is first to have a monarchy and then to sort of slowly…

[chuckle]

0:57:37.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh my God. [chuckle]

0:57:37.1 Michael Cannon: Sort of slowly crawl your way out of it. It’s not a… To the point where you have like a constitutional monarchy, and it’s not a ridiculous theory when you compare it to what has happened in other parts of the world. If you look at Western Europe, you had a lot of monarchies, where, over time, people began to ascertain more and more rights against this central government, and individual freedom is broader and more firmly established in those countries because of this slow process of people claiming their rights against that central authority. And there’s even some of that in the United States. You can see the American Revolution that way, and then you can see the Civil Rights Movement that way. Yeah, it is a really interesting question, what happens once a totalitarian system comes down, and the answer is not always the one we would like it to be.

0:58:51.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Feeney, do you have your rebuttal to his monarchy statement?

0:58:55.0 Matthew Feeney: No, not at all. No, God save the queen, long may she reign. No, I don’t have… Well, look, I do think Michael is right to highlight American foreign policy and, shall we say, disappointing results from the point of view of liberalism. I think we have to be careful to assume that there’s an easy answer to questions about what to do with people who are unfortunate enough to live in these societies that exist today. In 1984, the suggestion really is, there’s no way to run, right? There is no refuge. There’s a rather bleak outlook. Libertarian me takes the view that if anyone who lives in these societies is fortunate enough to be able to escape or to get out, that immigration policy should welcome them with open arms. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and I wish it was, and we have people at Cato working on making America’s immigration policy more like that, but it’s certainly true to say… I would say whether you’re a republican democracy or a constitutional monarchy, both of them seem compatible with small L liberalism, at least at the moment.

[music]

1:00:21.9 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod. That’s Pop, the letter N, Locke with an E like the philosopher, Pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen as well. We look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres, and is co-​hosted by Natalie Dowzicky. We are a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.