How to Think Like Orwell
The Object of Power is a Plastic Straw
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.” — George Orwell
Above is a quote whose meaning is rather opaque for most adults, especially. This is because adults owe our mental maturity to a narrowing of perspective which consequently blinds us both to microcosms and broader truths.
Let me explain.
Our eyes are our most potent sense organs, because they give us the most important information about our environment. Their ability to focus on select distances and objects is only a fraction of their focal potential. They also focus on what we call visible light. It’s their greatest focus. But their potency comes as much from what they don’t see as what they do. They don’t see infrared or ultraviolet lights, they don’t see the other side of the universe, they don’t see through objects. Their limitations give us the ability to focus on the immediate, and to function in the moment, while filtering out the noise of visual information that’s actually bombarding us.
Human maturity likewise brings a mental focus that we need to filter out noise and function in the social environment. This focus comes at the expense of our comprehension of many other mental objects which could otherwise be very valuable. But we focus all the same, so that we can orient our mental resources towards our environment, where the threats wait and the opportunities arise.
What if our eyes could see more than just visual light? We wouldn’t be able to see at all, because we’d be blinded by the vast spectrum of radiant energy surrounding us. We can’t see everything in the literal sense, but our minds are quite capable of superhuman sight. We can see everything from the 30,000 foot view. The big picture. Tribalism, which is a co-factor in physical and sexual aggression, and which was an important bias for our primal environment, just happens to suppress this power.
What I have come to call “animal prejudice,” those biases we incur at the onset of maturity, are necessary to reproduce, to fight, to survive. But they are also a self-fulfilling prophecy and, in the modern environment, harmful to harmony. This prejudice was described differently by Einstein when he reportedly said, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.” Common sense, then, is a prejudice for the practical, which can come at the expense of real truth.
The big objective truth wrings all the blood out of you, and you need blood for fuel to motor your way through a long, short life. Kids enjoy the glorious ignorance of bliss, right before they lose it’s ironic wisdom in the mad dash for common sense. Soon enough we transform into the feral adult form of our species, and we absorb the adolescent lessons and hormones that confer us with the common sense of animal prejudice.
The point of that lengthy preface is that one of Orwell’s most famous passages contains in it his entire way of thinking and, whatever his biographers may claim, his incapacity of tribal thought. His quote, below, defies the average person’s comprehension because it is at once so simple, and lays naked the pretension of civility.
What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from 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 around 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. Now you begin to understand me.” — Orwell, again. 1984.
When Orwell says, “the object of power is power,” he means it, while also knowing otherwise.
One employs excuses and explanations to describe motives, when the reason is really, to the best of our understanding, something that can be reduced to instinct — almost to binary code, when you trace it down far enough. In today’s hysterical and sensationalized online media, we see articles on quasi-tabloid news sites that purport to show video of “Wife Stabs Husband Over Plastic Straw.” But it’s not about the straw, is it? You can mute the audio, watch the video through, and you won’t even see a straw. You’ll see a person attack another person — usually with bits of the video blurred out. You’ll see two animals fighting.
We have to be taught — programmed, really — to believe that the straw started that fight. We can spin in neverending circles analyzing the object of motive, and who started what, who is to blame, and some of our explanations will even have a kind of merit. But ultimately, the truest, bluntest, thing we can say about the stabbing is that the stab was the object of the stab. We witnessed a person do what people do. (Though obviously, thankfully, with far less frequency than older times.)
We use explanations of our behavior to attribute a quality of willfulness to our actions that do not exist. We may say we need power to accomplish things, but this is an afterthought. We seek power as an instinct. We use it to do things once it’s been obtained, but we wished to obtain it whether it was later to be used or not.
People resist recognizing this obvious truth, because we need it in order to maintain our own mental models. We need to believe that bad men have a civilized motive, even if we call them monsters. We need to believe that the worst men are something more than animals, even when their message board posts make us very angry.
When Orwell says the object of power is power, he knows there’s more to it, but he also knows that our eagerness to imagine deeper ambitions in the power-lustful leads to a dangerous deception, while also lending authoritarians a convenient cover for their atrocities. The pretext of elaborate motives grants tyrants undeserved comfort in their own lies. Because the tyrants always convince their followers that they really needed to invade this country or had no choice but to liquidate that village. This is no different than a fight over a plastic straw. Turn the volume on mute, and you’ll find everything there is to know. Such videos don’t truly even require headlines.
This is a powerful way to recognize the world. It requires that you give up one illusion of meaning — the hubris of “common sense,” and all the deceits that go with it — but the trade is a unique power of vision that extinguishes the destructive myopia of tribalism, and one step closer to shedding off animal prejudice.
