Was O’Brien’s meta-confession in 1984 really believable, or just like Galt’s 30-page speech in Atlas Shrugged, a diatribe in literary form?
I think Orwell actually got it right. Remember that Winston Smith was an upper party sort of person, not your average member who thinks that socialism is about giving people more food, health care or saving the earth. Anyone who has really watched its workings cannot really believe that. Socialist industrialization practically poisoned Eastern Europe. It’s made potentially rich countries poor. It creates gulags, tyrannies and monostrosities beyond belief. I’ll grant that the average leftist naively believes socialism is good for something. But for the socialist who really understands socialism, it must be about something else. The problem facing Orwell was what it could be about?
His answer was as good as anyone’s. O’brien’s monologue is really the Grand Inquisitor speech set in a dingy industrial torture setting. Yet no one who has seen at first hand the love, yes the love of Party Members for an organization which they know is covered with blood can fail to recognize the elements of truth in it. I think the best way to realize how true O’brien’s speech is to preface reading 1984 with Robert Conquest’s history of the Terror.
The really depressing thing about the Left is it takes you to very core of human failure. Something is terribly broken in mankind for him to want something like that. Even in their apparent altruism what many men want is power. Socialism is some man’s idea of kindness. And it is horrible. You begin to wonder whether we are truly capable of love, if even our love kills. It is the historical equivalent of the pathological love affairs which are the staple of horror movies. Oh they love you, and how they love you. This is why the Year Zero camps, the Great Leap Forward, the collectivization of the kulaks, the purges and the rectifications, the endless criticism-self-criticism sessions are so depressing. You see they were meant to be good. I don’t doubt that Zeke Emmanuel thinks his end of life panels are doing us all a favor. An honest attempt at kindness. Instead they are the fleurs de mal.
In my darker moments I fear this is the best we can do. And then it passes. But I think it was Buddy Larsen who said that some people chose to be atheists because they could not bear to find faith and discover it be false. Better for them to leave faith untasted because it left the possibility, even to the end, that truth might lurk in the one corner they didn’t look.
But I should have added that for the most successful players in the Leftist game, O’Briens speech is indeed a rhetorical exercise. They go straight from naivete to greed without ever stopping at where Winston Smith paused. When it stops being about altruism it directly becomes about making money at least for the better sort of person. Those who do it for love, as O’Brien did, and perhaps as Bill Ayers — who never wanted for money — did are the truly dangerous ones. “Guilty as hell and free as a bird!” I think he said. I’ve gone on too long. All I really wanted to say is that the True Believers do exist and they are the greatest proof that so does evil.
