Big Brother Couldn't Forsee
the Big C - Consumerism
Jay Scott
In a way, everything George Orwell predicted in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has come true. In a way, nothing he predicted has come true
. ("Doublethink", he wrote, means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." The power to doublethink has come triumphantly true.)
When Orwell predicted that Big Brother would have technology to watch us, he was right. He was the Jules Verne of sociology. But he was wrong. He did not predict that citizens would be keeping tabs on Big Brother. He did not predict -- how could he? Who would have believed him? -- that two reporters would watch a U.S. President so closely he would be forced to resign, that a woman comedian would call a U.S. Secretary of the Interior an "idiot" on nationwide television and refuse to apologize ("Oh grow up, America!"), or that Big Brother would watch other Big Brothers - that politicians would live in mortal fear of having their secrets discovered by other politicians, the press, the people. Orwell predicted the equivalent of government dossiers, FBI files, CIA snooping. He did not predict That's Incredible, People Magazine or the National Enquirer
. Orwell was a pessimist, a dystopian suspicious of Marxism's promise of Eden on earth, and he was able to imagine all too well a society in which everything was sacrificed to the state, a society in which every move was monitored and engineered to echo every other move, a society in which individualism was extinct. For Orwell, the future could be found in what Mao's China was at one time thought to be, a vast panorama of - to use the term that became popular in the fifties, the decade Orwell did not quite live to see -- conformism. "If you want a picture of the future", he wrote in Nineteen Eighty Four, "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever".
Maybe. But what about Pac-Man? Orwell reckoned without capitalism's confounding capacity to avoid confrontation by merchandising it. Capitalism, like Pac-Man, can munch up anything. Control and conformism, the two Orwellian bugaboos, reckoned without behavioural psychology, which teaches that the most effective form of control is achieved by rewarding the organism, not by punishing it. Capitalism understands behavioursim as totalitarianism does not. In totalitarian countries, there are coups and revolutions and liberation movements. In capitalist countries, there are sales.
Consumer capitalism hopes to attract consumers to things that make them feel good, to things, that, in the language of behaviourisms, are "reinforcing". (The dark side of the system is that the search for profits leads capitalists to market things that look good but aren't good -- cigarettes, the Corvair, militarism -- and to resist discarding them as long as somebody is making a buck from them.)
Consumer capitalism stands ready to push ideas, ideologies and revolutionary strategies with the same acumen it brings to marketing perfume and defence contracts; in street lingo, consumer capitalism is an equal-opportunity whore. If it makes consumers feel good to avoid Big Brother. If it makes them feel good to think they are fighting against the system, the system will sell them that feeling.
Hollywood makes movies that call into question the morality of the corporations that own Hollywood, rock singers sing against the corruption of the record companies that record them, TV talk shows talk about TV as a menace. (Try to imagine it: each morning as the characters in Nineteen Eighty-Four get up, Big Brother announces over the loudspeaker, "Beware, Big Brother"). The law Orwell never took into account when foreseeing the future was this: If somebody wants it, somebody will sell it. And the corollary: if somebody sells it, somebody will buy it.
Orwell himself is marketed: Newspeak, doublethink and the adjective Orwellian are part of the culture. Individuality is accorded prime importance in the West, in the belief that individuality is the thing the West has that the East wants, the thing that spells the secret of its unprecedented ability to market life with such demographic exactitude that it is called a style. Lifestyle. The system has institutionalized the diversity Orwell feared would die out. The system is devoted to the proliferation of variety - to superficial variety (are those buns by Calvin Klein or Valente?) perhaps, but to variety nonetheless.
The desires of minorities generate marketing strategies - Jet and Ebony magazines for blacks, Blueboy and Numbers for gays. Within limits, the outsider is honoured and occasionally revered, especially if his jacket is black and made of leather and especially if he dies young and in it, with his Frye boots on.
Orwell's novel is a cautionary fable about a land in which everybody in the same class had the same things, did the same things, a land that exterminated any variation from the norm. (The Outer Party members lived by strict rules: the Inner Party members had rules slightly less strict; and the proles, the uneducated lower class, lived by few rules except that they were exterminated, if they showed signs of intelligence or of causing trouble.) The sequel he never lived to write could have been about a land where nobody was the same. In this non-Orwellian strange new world, there would be one law, and it would not be to revere Big Brother, and there would be one measure of success, and it would not be the ability to conform. Success and its measure would be found in one slogan, a slogan that would be found for a time on T-shirts sold only at the chicest of boutiques in the chicest of burgs: "whoever has the most things when he dies, wins."
Reprinted with permission from the Globe and Mail, Toronto.