The Anabiosis of Hope

The sleep of intelligence breeds monsters.
  May 5, 2003

Pynchon on Orwell in the Guardian: “The interests of the regime in Oceania lie in the exercise of power for its own sake, in its unrelenting war on memory, desire, and language as a vehicle of thought.”

Once memory, desire and language have been conquered, could the Party still claim to have power?  To elaborate: power here is the ability to direct memory, desire and language, to steer them where they need to be against their propensity to go astray.  As long as steering is necessary, the power is not absolute: dissent is still possible, people haven’t been conquered.  Yet as soon as the power becomes absolute, the need for it to be applied disappears.  What good is power that can never be used?

There are two ways people can be conquered.  They can retain the spark of rebellion inside but have that spark be doomed to burn forever under the airtight seal of state oppression—a potentiality never realized.  They can also have the spark extinguished forever.  From the view of the power-hungry, the first outcome is the more desirable, since the second one plunges them into defeat just as they snatch the ultimate victory.  “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face—for ever.”  But the face must be contorted with pain for the boot wearer to enjoy the stomping.  All of this reverberates with the Christians’ claim that god gave man free will because man’s devotion to god otherwise would be meaningless.

This means that no tyranny, however horrible, will stomp out the last embers of what makes us human.  This conclusion holds true as long as the tyranny’s goal is the domination, rather than extermination, of its subjects.  So hope will never die.  But there are many ways, and many more will be invented, of preventing the hope from living.  To the mind of the powerful, it is best preserved in suspended animation.

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