Sarah Skwire has a fine article here about the role of love in Orwell’s 1984. She rightly notes how Big Brother’s control of ideas and behavior—through Newspeak, the Anti-Sex League, and so forth—create a fundamental loneliness in the totalitarian subject. This is a point that Hannah Arendt also explores in depth in The Origins of Totalitarianism. But Orwell is making an additional point that Arendt never articulates: the essence of totalitarianism is compulsory love.
Totalitarian domination is a mad simulacrum of love. It’s a fantasy in which the subject is supposed to adore the ruler, and the ruler care for the subject. That fantasy is rigidly inculcated and maintained by controlling behavior in an effort to control thought and belief—a duty with which Orwell rightly vests the Ministry of Love. What makes Orwell the most insightful of all critics of totalitarianism is his recognition that the innovation of the Communist and Nazi regimes was that unlike previous tyrannies, here the Parties did not require mere obedience; they did not the mere recitation of Party dogmas. They were not even satisfied to require of their captives mirth. These rulers demanded that subjects love them. They required devotion of the soul, not just compliance with dictates. The subject was expected to marry the state. For Winston and Julie to love each other is therefore suspect, just as loving someone else isn’t allowed to the married. Thinking about someone else, or about other subjects, or just your own personal needs separate from Big Brother’s—these are all betrayals in the same way that a person in love doesn’t do those things.
As I argue in my article “Love and Solipsism,” genuine law actually has much in common with genuine love. It is a form of willing union for the benefit of each and both. The totalitarian tries to mimic this by compulsion. Of course, the compulsory mimic of love is rape, and rape has long been a literary analogue for tyranny. When you’re genuinely in love, devotion, union, and cooperation flow naturally from within. Big Brother forces the subject to do these things from without. That’s why it’s a Ministry of Love—it is responsible for manufacturing love. But since that’s not actually possible, it’s really just manufacturing rape. What happens to Winston Smith in Room 101 is that he is mentally raped—but because he is stripped of his very grasp of reality, there is no truth outside of the “love” for Big Brother that he can cling to for hope, or point to as grounding any distinction between rape and love. At last he learns to love Big Brother because there is absolutely nothing else. 1984 therefore is a sort of love story—the most perverse of all love stories.
This linkage between compulsory love and absolute tyranny has never, to my mind, been better expressed than in the lyrics to R.E.M.’s song “Losing My Religion,” in which the totalitarian subject confesses his secret doubts; Winston Smith’s criminal, private realization that the Party’s angels are fakes wearing toupees.
Oh life, it’s bigger;
It’s bigger than you,
And you are not me….
But the totalitarian state merges the subject into “the masses.” Self-definition and self-generated purposes are anti-social. You not being me is thoughtcrime.
Oh no, I’ve said too much.
I’ve said enough.
That’s me in the corner.
That’s me in the spotlight,
Losing my religion;
Trying to keep up with you,
And I don’t know if I can do it.
Oh no, I’ve said too much.
I haven't said enough….
This is the terror of the totalitarian subject who must always think happy thoughts—because he must love Big Brother with “every whisper / of every waking hour.”
Although R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe has said that the song is intended as a “classic obsession pop song,” he’s also compared it to The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” which members of a certain generation will recall as the musical version of Orwell’s 1984. In the earlier song, the singer has perverted his devotion into a demand for the other’s soul—a demand for love. The singer here is the dictator. But, of course, a person cannot literally be forced to love. You are not me. That indefeasible quality of selfhood that makes it impossible for a person to be forced to love (or in Richard III’s case, for him to force himself to love himself)—is the same indefeasible personal quality that we call the “inalienable” right to life. We cannot alienate our capacity to love—no matter how much Big Brother demands it, and no matter how hard the subject tries to force himself to believe. This is the shameful confession of R.E.M.’s song. There, the singer is realizing he does not actually love Big Brother. The imagery in the song’s video makes the point inescapable.
In a marvelous off-hand comment in his First Treatise, John Locke challenged advocates of absolute monarchy: do monarchs also have the right to eat their subjects? He might just as well have asked whether the ruler also has a right to his subjects’ love. Lucky for him, he could not imagine to what depths tyranny would sink two centuries after his death.
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