Confronting the Orwellian world of today

Socialism, therefore, becomes not a political philosophy, but a commitment to a spiritual faith that is at the core of humanism. Herein lie the vitality and strength of the people and the exploited ‘proles’ who, in the words of Orwell, “needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.” Understandably, unless the public becomes conscious of its unease, it will never rebel. Sadly, the present state of affairs calls attention to the escalation of the phenomenon of the corruption of consciousness.

Although not totalitarian, a wide range of states have sought to control individual thought and action and to homogenise society by ridding it of difference. — Hannah Arendt

We are passing through the dark and haunted intellectual landscape of the new millennium, a resounding echo of what the world experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. Some who realise this remain intrepidly engaged in a desperate struggle against the inhuman, the non-secular and fundamentally negative and indifferent view of the human predicament.

Confronted by a history that has seen a fair share of injustice and suffering, a lack of transparency in the deliberate stalking of blameless academics and students, and the compromised over-reaction of the state in handling everyday gruesome rapes, many have remained daring in the face of a totalitarian state that has left politics in a state of disdain, perceptible in the open complicity of the state machinery. It is a public reaction to the brutal violation of human rights and civil liberties.

The unprecedented scale of the insensitive escalation of irrational forces visible in the current nightmare of wars, nuclear threats, climate upheavals and the widespread sectarian violence has reached demonic dimensions.

At such junctures, it becomes a veritable act of faith to assert confidence in the survival of not only the human spirit but also the struggle for justice and freedom in an Orwellian world. Winston, the protagonist of 1984, firmly believes in the undying spirit as the only antidote to the tyrannical Big Brother breathing down your neck. Orwell is of the view that “the real problem of our time is to restore the sense of absolute right and wrong when the loss of moral values has become the inherent malaise of the modern-day social and political order.”

Dissident writers and thinkers have not hesitated to express forthrightly a faith in the human ability to speak up and salvage civilisation through the return of traditional moral values.

The ‘religion of humanity’that Orwell speaks of is the religion of loyalty to a cause, even at the existential consequences of self-sacrifice.

Being able to risk your life in payment for self-expression is what one learns from the diary and the crystal paperweight that Winston buys in spite of the criminalising of the act of writing and critical thinking, the raison d’etre of human existence that survives in a culture of fear propagated by the state and, to which, many submissively succumb. To Winston, antipathy for the overpowering state is the essence of freedom.

“Staying human” through exercising one’s freedom to dissent is antithetical to a totalitarian mentality. The all-seeing eyes of the Big Brother cast a spell of interrogation on every aspect of public activity that stands opposed to the state, provoking a secular-humanist temperament, clearly marked in the philosophies of Marx, Freud and the Existentialists.

It is well known that sympathy for the downtrodden underscores the commitment of all liberal public intellectuals conversant with the central assumptions of Marxism. The historical significance of class struggle and the unequivocal condemnation of inequality or racial discrimination accentuate the confrontation with any exploitation of the dispossessed.

Moreover, the relevance of materialism to historical development necessarily gets submerged in the ‘economistic’ obsession of orthodox Marxism, especially when seen in the light of the ideological superstructure that has the connotations of the revolutionary aspect of beliefs as the offspring of the critical thinking of public intellectuals, poets and writers.

In the contemporary nation-state, religion, no doubt, is being made into the “opium of the people” who fall into the trap of religious nationalism, thereby losing out on the moral and spiritual aspect of social behaviour that must be prioritised as a necessary salient of a society not founded on mere realism, ethnic purity or war.

Socialism, therefore, becomes not a political philosophy, but a commitment to a spiritual faith that is at the core of humanism.

Herein lie the vitality and strength of the people and the exploited ‘proles’ who, in the words of Orwell, “needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.” Understandably, unless the public becomes conscious of its unease, it will never rebel. Sadly, the present state of affairs calls attention to the escalation of the phenomenon of the corruption of consciousness that needles us to ask: “Who has the responsibility of upholding the future of our species?”

The answer lies in the responsibility of the writer or the poet who creates the ‘Word’ filled with memory, consciousness and our shared cultural morality. Any corruption of the ‘Word’ by the state would inevitably leave behind uncouth and abrasive politics, the remedy to which would rest in the vivacity and hope of the working class, as well as the affirmative drive for the ‘incorruptible inner self.”

The individual psyche controlled by the subconscious, therefore, stands foregrounded as the last bulwark of our civilisation in the central drama of constant defiance of the public values of the ruling class. A more authentic and engaged public intellectual like Nietzsche, Sartre or Orwell is the need of the hour, especially when the authoritarian state is controlled by a party or a system that imagines its infallible roadmap geared fully to take the people towards happier days of historical fulfillment.

Breaking out of silence, and at the risk of torture and death, the search for justice and freedom remains an ongoing struggle with a marked existential distrust of the Big Lies of the state as well as the deceitful acceptance of the ready-made opinions ingrained in the biased and, to use Orwell’s expression, “smelly little” policies of the state. Indignation, therefore, is often expressed at the innocent, falsely accused day in, day out, of misgivings and revulsion at the scourge of lies and suspicion, accentuating the narrative that anyone who speaks for justice or the oppressed is the antagonist of the state and must be silenced.

Very few realise what it is to be wrongly accused or threatened by confinement or death, especially in a country where one imagines the predominance of public institutions and the rule of law. The most far-fetched accounts of conspiracy, sedition and sabotage circulate our world, giving impetus to the continued resentment against injustice and betrayal by the so-called ‘democratic’ state.

The nation, therefore, needs to awaken to a sense of compassion at the victimisation of the innocent with a national indignation against the ‘protective stupidity’ of the state machinery that obstructs in the name of justice by refusing to face the truth or at least value the inner voice of the wronged and the underprivileged.