Living With the Monster

As a late-blooming college student in the 1980s, I took a course called, The Implied Reader in the Text. The thesis of the course was that, when reading, we participate in the texts we read; that is, as we read, by our reactions to and interpretations of the text, we are involved. In being so involved, we have opportunities to discover ourselves or, at the very least, to discover facets of ourselves — preconceptions, biases, prejudices, strengths, deficiencies — in short, whatever we might have the insight and the courage to realize and confront. In discovering our own expectations and presuppositions, then, we are, in effect, reading ourselves.

One of the books we read in the course was Language as Symbolic Action by Kenneth Burke. Burke’s premise is that words, as reflections or deflections of reality, direct our attention one way or another as a combination of the author’s intent and our own terministic screens [Burke’s term]. Burke likens terministic screens to lenses, citing photographs he once saw of the same object that were different because they were shot with different lenses.

Much of the book’s clinical, philosophical theorizing has since escaped my decreasing capacity for retention. This never did:

An “ideology” is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways: and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it. (Kenneth Burke)

Pass the Bricks, Please

We live in an age of media bombardment, of snap judgment, of ideological interpretation and justification, and of self-mortared prison walls comprising screens and keyboards almost as impregnable as our ill-founded convictions. If you don’t think ideology pervades and directs everything, consider this:

I came across a book by Dan Lyons — Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble — shortly after I finished re-reading George Orwell’s 1984. You can tell me that’s accidental. But I won’t buy it. Consider the similarities in these two passages:

Exhibit A: “Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language — even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech startups seem to be especially prone to groupthink.” (Dan Lyons)

Exhibit B: “The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”
(George Orwell)

In both of those citations, uniformity and homogeneity are hidden under the guise — masked by the illusion — of creating rules, rituals, religions, languages, systems of codification, and regimens of indoctrination. But no such creating is taking place. Rather, all those rules, rituals, religions, languages, systems, regimens were created a priori. All the new arrivals do, all the masses do, is conform to the existing ideology. While conformity is the norm, it’s a safe bet two of the verbs in the prescribed language will be innovate and disrupt. It’s an equally safe bet that one of the senses no longer permitted in these invariant environs is irony.

If it Walks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck …

What’s that? You don’t think the passages above are about ideology and prescriptive conformity to it? Au contraire:

Exhibit C: “The code depicts a kind of corporate utopia where the needs of the individual become secondary to the needs of the group — “team > individual,” one slide says — and where people don’t worry about work-life balance because their work is their life.” (Dan Lyons)

Exhibit D: “Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” (George Orwell)

It’s a little tough to make a case for creativity and individualism in circumstances in which the needs of a group, any group, trump the needs (or creative urges) of any individual; in which team = individual; and in which unconsciousness is valued over thinking. And in addition to groupthink, the very notion of team equating to individual is a stark manifestation of doublethink.

Consider this next set of exhibits:

This is not spam.

Exhibit E: “What we’re creating is not spam. In fact, the official line is that [we hate] spam and [want] to stamp out spam. We want to protect people from spam. Spam is what the bad guys send, but we are the good guys. Our spam is not spam. In fact it is the opposite of spam. It’s antispam” (Dan Lyons)

Exhibit F: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” (George Orwell)

If you don’t think it’s possible to hold two contradictory beliefs in your mind simultaneously — and accept both of them as empirically true — without ideological conviction, you’ve got another doublethink coming.

Pick a Topic, Any Topic

In 1984, George Orwell also wrote this:

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act … The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

Since politics is the realm least conducive to truth-telling, and since nothing incites hatred more quickly than speaking truths in the midst of ideologically charged and dogmatically separated factions engaging in political rhetoric, I’ll choose politics as a topic and propose an experiment.

Please contemplate the equation to the right below:

(A) Illegal immigrants cost a hypothetical sovereign nation more than $200 billion a year + (B) 61 million elderly citizens of that nation live on its social insurance program alone = (C) $200 billion would give each of those elderly citizens an extra $3,278 dollars a year.

Now, please write your cognitive response (not your emotional response) to that equation in the comments section below, as objectively as you can, being sure to include (1) your thoughts (not your feelings) on the product of the equation, (2) your thoughts (not your feelings) about the borders of any sovereign nation, and (3) your thoughts (not your feelings) about where and how finite resources — the finite resources of any sovereign nation — should be best allocated in the interest of the citizens of that sovereign nation.

Take This to the Pharmacy

While I’m not a doctor, and while I don’t even play one on TV, I’m going to propose one more thing. Let’s call it a Universal Prescription, which I’ll grant myself the liberty of writing:

Take one Animal Farm, one 1984, one One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and one Frankenstein and call me in the morning.

Since we’re going to have to live with the monster we’re creating, we may as well have some indication of its nature.

Welcome to the the Brave New World.