The perfect prison is the one you can’t imagine leaving
If you were to build a totalitarian society from scratch, where would you start? What would the brainstorming session throw up? “Let’s just toss around some ideas, team. Anything that comes to mind. Doesn’t matter how left field it sounds.
“Round-the-clock surveillance, yes. That goes without saying. External threats and false flags. Well, obviously. Sweeping censorship. Social division. Racial hate. Those are an absolute given. Yes, yes, yes. Keep them coming.”
All of these are familiar to anyone who has followed the news these past ten years. Much has been written about the slide towards authoritarian rule, with some even going so far as to argue that we’ve already reached that point.
But what is it that characterises a truly totalitarian society? And, more importantly, how do we maintain any semblance of individual freedom within its walls?
The standard bearer of dystopian fiction, George Orwell, believed the moulding of language into an instrument of political domination was essential to the totalitarian state. With the ability to shape reality according to the changing political priorities of the Party, the Big Brother state could literally rewrite history by the second, and thus deny the very existence of objective truth. Alongside what Orwell termed ‘Newspeak’, tools of surveillance, terror and coercion ensure totalitarian rule becomes entrenched.
In his dystopian novel We, a precursor to Nineteen Eighty-Four by some twenty-five years, Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin portrays a world of glass apartments and highly regimented schedules, where citizens are under the constant eye of their rulers. Zamyatin identifies the elimination of imagination and the very capacity to question as the basis for absolute social control, with mandatory medical procedures to remove this seditious human trait. Ira Levin adopts a similar premise in This Perfect Day, with citizens subjected to chemical dissatisfaction inhibitors to maintain compliance.
All three novels have at their heart the notion that individual judgement is the principal obstacle to totalitarian rule. Without the ability to question, to see oneself in opposition to the mass, we no longer pose a threat to the totalitarian order.
Yet such literary dystopias as these were surely meant to be interpreted as warnings, not literal predictions of what was to come. Orwell himself said precisely this about Nineteen Eighty-Four.
As the twenty-first century moves into its second quarter, are we moving closer to the day when autocrats acquire the means to make such hellish imaginings reality? In a world where the boundaries between surveillance and privacy have been blurred, is it inconceivable that we may be on the precipice of deeper intrusions into the mind itself? Intrusions that could allow a totalitarian regime to finally achieve what the twentieth century’s worst tyrants couldn’t manage: securing direct access to the individual mind itself, with the power to monitor and mould at will.
What technological advances would have to happen to make that possible? Perhaps something along the lines of immersive virtual reality simulations, human consciousness uploaded onto a cloud, digital cloning—the kinds of things brought home to us by the best (or worst?) of Black Mirror. While none of these in themselves threaten to bring about totalitarian rule, the arrival of such technologies on a mass scale could well herald an era in which creeping technologically enabled totalitarianism rapidly becomes reality.
The question is: if such intrusive technology ever becomes available, how could the individual maintain autonomy? If the very basis of free will is removed, does this spell the end for the self?
Perhaps Zamyatin offers a diagnosis: a self without the urge to rebel or question is no self at all. Once it becomes immersed in a homogenised mass of experiences and thoughts, does it cease to exist in any meaningful form?
In my speculative novel, DEEP: Tide Rising, I’ve created a maritime setting on a post-apocalyptic archipelago, with threats to social stability coming in the form of violent seas. The only thing protecting the citizens of the Archipelago (or the Descendants as they’re known) is the giant sea wall surrounding them that must be protected and maintained at all costs.
What lies beyond the wall remains unknown, with all talk of it forbidden. The Descendants’ perception of reality is shaped to coerce them into obedience. But as powerful as the ability to control perceptions of reality may be, is it enough to ensure totalitarian rule?
I’m an optimist, so I believe it would still be possible to preserve the self under such conditions. But how? Is there some part that remains irrepressible no matter what tools power has to inhibit, dilute or vanquish it?
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 film Dogtooth explores this tension. A domineering father confines his children to the family home, inculcating them with a terror of the world beyond. Yet once the eldest son develops sexual urges, the father allows an outsider into the children’s prison to sate them. Cue the unravelling of the tyrant’s carefully cultivated reality.
With the introduction of seditious Hollywood material brought in by the outsider, alongside the latent curiosity of the elder daughter, all hell breaks loose once the latter’s inner rebel awakens.
The moral of the tale? Stick a bird in a cage from birth and it may never demand to be free, until it sees beyond the cage or feels an urge to fly. But which is it that sparks rebellion in the first place? The introduction of a worldview that challenges everything you’ve been taught to believe? Or an irrepressible part of you that has always been—and perhaps always will be—there?
As much as I would like to believe in an indomitable self, I suspect there has to be some external trigger to fully awaken it. If the bird knows nothing but the cage, what would the bird make of its urge to fly?
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