In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” George Orwell writes, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” Orwell was a democratic socialist in the sense that he believed in addressing social inequalities through democratic means rather through authoritarianism or revolutionary violence. Therefore, as he understood it, it was not the way progressives and social democrats use that term, i.e., command of the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus, including the education system, to compel individuals to ape the language of the Party.
Orwell would not have stood with the side claiming to be “on the left” today. He was clever enough to sniff out even the softest totalitarianism. What progressives and social democrats seek is what Orwell named “Ingsoc” in his masterwork Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ingsoc is Newspeak, i.e., short for “English Socialism,” the totalitarian ideology that governs the fictional society of Oceania, where the Party holds absolute control over every aspect of life. Ingsoc is a distorted and perverted form of socialism, co-opted by the ruling Party to maintain its dominance. Although it uses the language of socialism, such as equality and collective control over the means of production, it is ultimately a system of extreme oppression where the people have no real power. This tells you what Orwell understood as the true meaning of socialism, and it was not what the progressives have on tap.
The defining feature of Ingsoc is its totalitarian nature, with the Party exerting absolute control over not only political and economic life but also the personal lives and thoughts of citizens. Under the leadership of Big Brother, a figurehead (likely a third-order simulacrum) who symbolizes the Party’s omnipotent power, every action is monitored, and dissent is crushed through manipulation of information, surveillance, and fear of what will happen if one doesn’t obey Big Brother. The Party’s control is so complete that citizens cannot even think freely; the Party manages not only their actions but also their very thoughts. The famous formulation of “2+2=5” does not merely represent the desire that the people repeat the “truths” of the regime, but that they believe them, and do so without hesitation. Acceptance of the Party’s line is to mimic reflex.
Ingsoc uses Newspeak, a language designed to limit the range of thought. By simplifying language and eliminating words that could facilitate subversive thinking, Newspeak prevents rebellion by removing the means to express dissent. This manipulation of language is coupled with doublethink, the ability to accept two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. These methods allow the Party to control the perception of reality itself. Citizens are taught to accept the Party’s version of truth, no matter how obviously false or contradictory it may seem.
This desire is exemplified in the Party slogans, such as “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” These exemplify the contradictory thinking the Party encourages. Likewise, the modern slogans and demands of today’s Party—“Transwomen are women,” the rebranding of discrimination as “diversity,” the exclusionary demands of “inclusivity,” all which invert reality, as well as fallacious claims that “speech is violence” and “words are weapons,” and the pursuit of speech codes, cancel culture, and deplatforming—is authoritarian desire achieved through the control of thought via the manipulation of language.
There are many parallels between woke progressivism and Orwell’s nightmare dystopia world of Oceania. In that world, the Party rewrites history, using the Ministry of Truth to continuously alter past records, ensuring that the Party’s narrative always aligns with the present power structure. By erasing or changing historical facts, the Party ensures that it can never be questioned, as there is no objective past to compare against. Ingsoc’s control over history is a key method by which the Party asserts its dominance over the people, as citizens are unable to look back at past events for clarity or understanding. The constant surveillance by the telescreens and the ever-present threat of the thought police make it clear that no aspect of life is beyond the Party’s scrutiny. Big Brother represents the Party’s absolute surveillance and control, symbolizing the fear that the Party instills in the Proles, reminding them that they are always being watched, even in their private thoughts. And, of course, those who deviate from the line are sent to the Ministry of Love for rehabilitation.
The way this manifests today is through the establishment of something along the lines of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), albeit not explicitly. The core premise of NLP is that the way people use language shapes their attitudes, cognition, emotional state, and ultimately their behaviors. According to NLP, by changing the language patterns of individuals, it’s possible to shift how they think, feel, and act. For example, if children are likely to grow up with an understanding of gender as binary and immutable, which children have since time immemorial, and the goal is to interrupt that naturally emergent pattern, something like NLP can be deployed to, through techniques like anchoring and reframing, alter those patterns, which leads to changed attitudes, emotions, thoughts, and thus behaviors sought by elites. By altering language, elites reprogram popular responses to various situations.
One of the ways individuals are so reprogrammed is to confuse corporate statism and dependency on the government for democratic socialism. However, in Orwell’s novel, Ingsoc, while using the rhetoric of socialism, is not concerned with improving the welfare of the people. Instead, it’s an authoritarian system that seeks to maintain power at any cost. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, this power is sought for its own sake, much like the situation in the Soviet Union. If the corporate state context, power is sought to secure an endless source of profit and privilege for the capitalist class.
In either case, Orwell’s depiction of Ingsoc is a warning about the dangers of any ideology—whether left-wing or right-wing—hijacked by authoritarian rulers who manipulate it to justify repression. Through the Party’s totalitarian control, Orwell shows how ideologies are constructed serve the interests of those in power, leading to a society where freedom and truth are obliterated in the name of maintaining absolute control—for whatever end.
We see this today in the demand for obligatory use of preferred pronouns in government and public agencies. I just finished arguing with somebody on X who deployed all the Orwellian tricks to argue that compelling children to use a teacher’s preferred pronouns is not only fair but necessary in order to avoid discrimination—as if speech acts signaling the truth of things and situations can be discriminatory—as if it is not a fundamental violation of the child’s right to freedom of conscience and speech.
Is compelling children to speak the language of gender ideology for the sake of power itself? Part of it, for sure. There are people who delight in forcing or shaming others into affirming their delusions. We describe such person with several words—narcissists, sadists, sociopaths. And they need this affirmation since either they themselves know they are not what they claim to be or the constant reminder they are not triggers their dysphoria. But the other part of this is the source of profit and privilege children represents to corporate elite. It’s the same thing that feeds the pharmaceuticals and foods industries, and the toy companies. This is why elites are eager to put children on the path for physiological and morphological modification in the medical-industrial complex: the profits are massive and, since they make permanent medical patients of the individuals ensnared, sustainable.
Orwell was pro-working class, as I am and have always been. Orwell was a populist, deeply concerned with the welfare of ordinary people, and therefore he believed, as I do, that economic systems should be structured to ensure equality and fairness, as well as to have provisions of care for those who could not take of themselves. But, then, even a hardcore neoclassical liberal like Friedrich Hayek believed that the state had an obligation to take care of the elderly and the affirm. In the end, Orwell believed in the common man and his right to free conscience, speech, publishing, assembly, association, the right to keep and bear arms, privacy, and the rule of law—and the democratic-republican process necessary to change the law.
In the X debate I referenced earlier, Trump and Musk were portrayed as “fascists.” If in their collective guts progressives sense Trump and Musk as the enemy, it is because Trump and Musk actually stand closer to Orwell, whereas progressives stand closer to the administrative state and technocratic control over populations, which they do not only because we can see them, but because they admit to what we see. This is why they have no trouble compelling speech in public schools. What is “misinformation” and “hate speech” is the information they want corporations to censor because it undermines their authoritarian ambitions. They see indoctrination as education. They see technocracy as democracy. They’re fascists hiding behind the language of sympathy.
I have quoted this passage before, but it’s relevant here given what I just said. CS Lewis: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
freedom and reason 