[Peace-discuss] Obama's America: from amusement to repression

[C. G. Estabrook]

Published on Monday, December 27, 2010 by TruthDig.com
2011: A Brave New Dystopia
by Chris Hedges

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and 
Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our 
descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as 
Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that 
used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, 
entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced 
by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and 
Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell 
saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley 
foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap 
mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we 
were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in 
check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we 
were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class 
are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves 
transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive 
deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. 
It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy 
and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are 
skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly 
controlled.

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where 
no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. 
Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a 
state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was 
brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by 
trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us 
frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, 
we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the 
process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood 
the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and 
defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered 
and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits 
human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We 
are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not 
wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure 
power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the 
oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even 
those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and 
the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never 
had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they 
even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, 
and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be 
free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with 
the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does 
not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the 
revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is 
persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” 
in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a 
term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the 
sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass 
manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, 
are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer 
society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. 
The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations 
industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer 
society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the 
nation. It feasts upon our carcass.

The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic 
leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. 
Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the 
uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the 
messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these 
tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as 
Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, 
ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic 
force of their creation, to its total impression.”

The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, 
masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and 
patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed 
parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a 
radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are 
banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the 
tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of 
cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy 
ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more 
beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money 
and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, 
whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, 
happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that 
invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but 
always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by 
“continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of 
individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions 
measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and 
possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority 
have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”

Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have 
looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set 
aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus 
and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic 
services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to 
the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who 
refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate 
establishment as freaks.

Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, 
as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, 
Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:

“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.

“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. 
Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children 
that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, 
Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.

The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been 
used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to 
Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very 
unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest 
deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that 
will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social 
protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from 
a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, 
anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of 
our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of 
poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with 
the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and 
bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no 
longer work.

We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama 
bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in 
the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine 
acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day 
on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” 
daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin 
Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against 
evil personified.

The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned 
for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of 
the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a 
“maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in 
Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot 
have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with 
antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced 
with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government 
psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls 
as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s 
dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative 
measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, 
who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to 
trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our 
black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum 
security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically 
astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to 
Orwell.

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s 
torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again 
will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or 
curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you 
empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of 
repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone 
records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on 
citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens 
of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. 
Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at 
airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car 
inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to 
report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as 
Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures 
used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were 
wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear 
message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian 
activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and 
Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s 
official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, 
documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury 
have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting 
“providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist 
organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, 
becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. 
“It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old 
reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of 
trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more 
merciless as it refines itself.”

Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from 
Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent 
for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A 
Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and 
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent 
book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.