Quote of the Day (Stephen King, on ‘The Best Men’ in 2025)

“In the year 2025, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives.”—American novelist Stephen King (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), The Running Man (1982)

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on The Party’s ‘Final, Most Essential Command’)

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”—English novelist essayist Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell (1904-1950), 1984 (1949)

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on How Speculative Fiction Is Actually About the Present)

“People think, wrongly, that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t…What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present. Taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and What Science Fiction Is and Does,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

Gaiman references Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in his essay, but perhaps a better example of the speculative fiction genre is 1984. (In fact, George Orwell came up with the title by reversing the last two digits of the year in which he wrote the novel: 1948.)

The image accompanying this post comes from the movie adaptation of Orwell’s dystopian vision, released in, appropriately enough, 1984, starring John Hurt (pictured here) as Winston Smith.

The key to Orwell’s nightmare comes from this quotation from the novel: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on the State’s Inversion of Reality—or, ‘1984’ at 70)

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

When it was published 70 years ago today published in London by Secker & Warburg, then five days later in New York, 1984 struck a chord in the Free World, a transatlantic alliance that, over the last two decades, had experienced the rise of totalitarian regimes. 

The dystopian fantasy from George Orwell took the real nightmares through which people had just lived to another level entirely: a world divided into three “spheres” (much as Orwell had feared that Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin were creating at the Teheran Conference in WWII). The three slogans in today’s “Quote of the Day” were carved into the walls of the “Ministry of Truth” in one of these “spheres,” Oceania.

During the years when the Soviet Union wrongly appeared to be not only on the march but unstoppable, 1984 was considered a spot-on critique of how such dictatorships could come to exercise complete tyranny of thought over the individual’s mind. 

Four decades later, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defiance flung by Chinese students at their own aging rulers, the sense of urgency transmitted by Orwell had faded. The year 1984 had passed with no regime possessing anything like the hegemony he had imagined with such terrifying authenticity.

Rather than being an indispensable lever of dictatorship, as in the "telescreen," technology came to be seen as a weapon of defiance, perhaps best symbolized by the TV ad for Apple’s Macintosh. 

Typical of this new way of thinking was the characteristically sunny prediction by ex-President Ronald Reagan, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, that “the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.” 

How naïve we all were. Not only does the gerontocracy endure in China, but it has used the nation’s vast clout to persuade telecon companies not to push content opposed by the regime. From the flotsam of the USSR has emerged Vladimir Putin, who has applied the disinformation techniques he learned as a KGB officer to the social media, sowing confusion and division in the Western democracies he loathes. 

Even the United States has not proved impervious to the Big Lie that is the ultimate product of Orwell’s ironically named Ministry of Truth. Although the ubiquitous indoctrination that represents the final stage of this ministry’s thought control process has not yet arrived in America, the black arts of propaganda are flourishing in the highest office in the land. 

“Doublethink”—defined, in a penetrating essay on the novel by clinical psychologist Natalie Frank, as “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind simultaneously” —is created by a President who calls climate change “a hoax” but whose company has used the phenomenon to press for constructing a seawall to guard against erosion at his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland. 

That denial of what ordinary citizens can see and hear for themselves has been facilitated by adviser Kellyanne Conway coining the phrase “alternative facts” to justify the President’s silly insistence on record-setting crowd sizes for his inauguration; by personal attorney Rudy Giuliani claiming that “Truth isn’t truth”; and by their boss himself telling a crowd, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

For a novel that took root when Orwell grew enraged over Soviet agents discrediting Trotskyists in the Spanish government as fascist spies, then became bleaker as he fell victim, one cold winter on a Scottish island, to TB, 1984 has, not surprisingly, taken on unexpected relevance since January 20, 2017.  When the leaders of a democracy seek to rewrite its past and deny its present, they imperil its future.

For the citizenry manipulated by such leaders, it is all too sadly the case that “Ignorance is Strength.”

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on Power and Control Over Time)

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (1949)