Big Brother Image Frederik Guimont free art license. It is tempting to suppose that Orwell has intuited the kind of electronic data-processing that did exist in the last decade of his life, even though it was highly classified. However, at the time Orwell was writing computer signified a person who processed data Agar. Winston is one such person. Julia, by contrast, is more like a modern IT engineer, tending a machine that does the actual work.
Winston is still using some nineteenth-century IT, such as the pneumatic tubes that carry messages around the Ministry of Truth. He is an organic component of the ministerial machine for rewriting history.
Possibly, the disposal of Winston should be seen in the same light. Notwithstanding his disillusionment with the regime, for much of the novel he remains committed to his work of elaborate falsification. It is work that is likely to lead to burn-out: covering up the past with elaborate falsifications both implies the existence of an historical truth and denies one access to it.
The possibility of becoming drawn to trying to establish the truth one has helped to obscure is an occupational hazard the Party would be well-advised to look out for in its functionaries. In retrospect, the dated photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, torn from a copy of The Times , that turns up, seemingly by accident, in a bundle of papers sent to Winston in Minitrue, and that appears to prove they were innocent of the crimes to which they confessed, looks less like an accident than a test.
The other possibility that some readers have noted about Julia is that she may be a member of the Thought Police. This is what Winston suspects at first.
This is the nursery rhyme, whose attempted reconstruction by Winston symbolizes his attempt to recover the meaning of his childhood.
Is he duping Winston and Julia when they come to his flat to join the Brotherhood? His forecast of the consequences of membership for them proves fairly accurate.
In a world in which people are components in a system what matters is how they function, not who they are. This blog summarises a case that will be published as an article in due course. I am grateful to Daniel Pick and the Hidden Persuaders project for inviting me to write it, to Simon Jarrett for deft editorial advice, and to the members of the Guilt Group, especially Sam Ashenden and Thomas Docherty, for constructive observations and suggestions.
Agar, Jon Orwell, George [] Taylor and Peter Davison. We commonly believe that we have more strength to resist behavior modifying attempts than we really have.
That is the belief in the power of dispositional determinants of behavior, good and evil residing within individual psyches.
But at the same time, we entertain a second misperception by underestimating the true power of social pressures to make people conform, comply, and obey. This dual tendency is called the Fundamental Attribution Error, overestimating personal power and underestimating situational power, when we try to understand the reasons for any behavior, or try to predict behavioral outcomes Ross, Paradoxically, we, like Winston Smith, become more vulnerable to mind control attempts to the extent that we deceive ourselves into believing we are personally invulnerable and can will ourselves to resist, so we do not realistically appraise the ubiquitous influences that operate in social norms, rules, roles, uniforms, contracts, peer pressure, authority models, authoritative signs, and so forth.
The first lesson of social psychology is that social situations can exert powerful influences over human behavior. The situation matters more in controlling behavior of individuals and groups than we suspect or possibly believe it could. Behavior always takes place in a context, and that context shapes and defines what behavior is appropriate, gets rewarded or punished, gets modeled by others or ignored.
The second lesson underscores the importance of the personal meaning of the situation to the actor. The third lesson is that individuals behave differently when faced with group pressure and have a group identity than when alone — groups matter. In the most notable demonstration of situational power, my colleague, Stanley Milgram , demonstrated how easy it was to get the majority of research participants — a thousand people from all backgrounds — to believe they were electrocuting a stranger on the orders of an authority figure, and to carry out his command to deliver the maximum of volts of shock to a mild-mannered, pleasant man, the victim.
They did so not from malice or evil motives, rather they did so from distorted pro-social motives, wanting to help science, to help education, to help this researcher. Only the sadists, they said. How could these expert judges of human behavior have been so wrong?
The answer: the fundamental attribution error at work, since these professionals are trained to see pathology in the minds of individuals and not in situational forces.
Across a series of 19 separate experiments, Milgram was able to reduce this obedience to ten percent or escalate it up to 90 percent by varying one variable in the situation in each study. The effect vanishes when the victim demands to be shocked and it is highest when the subject first witnesses a peer modeling the blind obedience to authority see Blass, College students made to feel part of an anonymous group were much more likely to hurt innocent victims than did comparison research subjects who felt individuated in that setting.
Women participants administered twice as much shock to other women when they felt anonymous, wearing hoods, in the dark, in a group, than did those who were in the same situation but not anonymous Zimbardo, Anthropological research reveals that the majority of societies that prepare young men for war by first changing their appearance through painted faces or masks, tend to kill, mutilate, and torture their captives more so than other comparable cultures that do not undergo this anonymity-inducing ritual.
Similarly, anonymity conferred not by masks or costumes, but by living in an anonymity-conferring setting, increases the probability of destructive vandalism, as I showed in a field study in which cars were abandoned in the Bronx, New York, and Palo Alto, California, all near a local college.
Only in the anonymity of life in the urban setting of the Bronx was vandalism unleashed immediately and furiously — within minutes of leaving the car on the street with its hood lifted and license plate removed. In the course of two days there were 23 separate destructive contacts with that car, all but one by adults in the daytime, many well dressed or driving by in their own cars. In the Palo Alto community, no one touched the similarly abandoned car left on the streets for a full week, and when I removed the car, three neighbors alerted the police that an abandoned car was being stolen Zimbardo, That is one definition of a social community, where neighbors care about the person and property of others within the realm of their territory, with the assumption of reciprocal caring.
College students enacted randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards within the setting of a simulated prison, planned to run for two weeks. But I had to terminate the study prematurely after only six days because it was out of control. Boys we had pre-measured and selected because of their normality across many dimensions were suffering emotional breakdowns, irrational thinking, and more if they were the powerless mock prisoners.
Those enacting the mock guard role became abusive, hostile and some even qualified as sadistic torturers, despite being avowed pacifists, and average on all prior personality measures.
The inhumanity of the evil prison situation had come to totally dominate the humanity of most of the good people who were trapped in that total situation. Can we demonstrate that our mental construction of social situations influences significant behavioral outcomes? Some patients were asked to make active choices about minor aspects of their dinner menu or movie schedule and given the responsibility of caring for a gift plant, while comparable others were randomly assigned to a no choice, no responsibility condition.
These controls functioned under standard care procedures of the institution, to remain passively cared for. Finally, the researchers discovered that those with this rather minimal, new meaning in their generally bleak existence lived significantly longer than those peers without such a sense of choice and responsibility.
The mind matters even in issues of life and death. College student participants found themselves in a perception study of judgments of the relative sizes of lines.
When alone their judgments were very accurate, but when in a group their judgments were very distorted. The group was composed of experimental confederates who, after several honest trials, gave consensus false judgments that diverged from the obvious perceptual reality. Long lines were judged to be the same size as much shorter standards or vice versa on various trials. The group norm exerted a powerful influence over the individual judgments even in this highly structured, unambiguous situation.
On 70 percent of the critical trials there was at least one conforming error and a third of the participants conformed on the majority of critical trials. Seeing is not believing when your group says big is small or black is white.
The major weakness in the mind control armament that Orwell sold to the Party is the visibility or transparency of its coercive power. Winston and his countrymen knew they were being controlled, both the How and the Who, since the Party wanted full credit for its victories over their psyches. Coercive controls create compliant conformists while the boot is in your butt or on your face. They surrender, they yield, but they do not internalize the new ideology. To become a True Believer requires attitude and value change under conditions where there is at least an illusion of personal choice and insufficient extrinsic justification for changing.
This point has been amply demonstrated in the overthrow of Eastern European Communist nations that had ruled for decades with an iron boot on the backs of citizens. They conformed but did not internalize the ideology and rebelled at the first sign of weakness in the might of the Party. It is not exotic tactics, like hypnosis and drugs, and hi-tech devices that influence attitudes and values in directed paths as much as do the most mundane aspects of human experience.
It comes from the power of desired social groups that can reject deviants and embrace believers. Let us then recast the definition of the Fundamental Attribution Error, as a mental bias underestimating the true power of these mundane social-situational determinants of human action, while over-crediting external physical forces and nebulous dispositional qualities of the actors in our analysis of human action.
To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them. And your behavior, to us, means your political views. In all other respects your behavior is perfectly normal. Your illness consists of dissenting opinions.
The current practitioners of the Ministry of Love come from the ranks of the mental health establishment, social welfare, education, and even business. As the fabric of the national social life becomes frayed in our time, ever more Americans are being turned over to institutional care providers from preschool to senior citizen homes.
Orwell, like the Totalitarian Soviet State, had no use for religion in But in our time of ontological insecurity, religion plays a major role as a social influence institution, not only the old time religions, but the plethora of more than non-traditional religious groups and cults in America, and untold numbers of them throughout the world. Many of these New Time cults are big business, with billion dollar revenues, tax exempt, of course see Hassan, During a visit to his TV studio for a book promotion tour, I discovered that his church educates and informs his followers on which side of that fight is the right side, through the auspices of the only two academic departments in his university in Norfolk, Virginia — the Departments of Education and Communication.
I think Orwell would have chuckled over that narrow view of the essentials in a university curriculum. MK-ULTRA was the code name of its most notorious program, designed to develop and make operational technologies for disrupting and then reprogramming individual habitual patterns of perception, thought, and action.
And indeed, this CIA program employed a host of psychologists, psychiatrists, hypnotists, chemists, biologists, physicians, nurses and other professionals in mental hospitals and universities. They tested LSD and other psychoactive drugs to knowing and naive subjects, explored new forms of electro-shock treatment, hypnosis, cognitive reprogramming, and sensory deprivation. Finally, I would like to highlight briefly parallels between the mind control tactics and strategies employed by Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones, and those found throughout In an earlier analysis, I argued that there were curious similarities between the procedures that Jones put into effect to dominate his followers both in San Francisco and in the jungle compound in Guyana see Zimbardo, He tested the operational utility of these imaginative, fictional techniques with him as Party Head and his System in control of the minds and lives of more than a thousand real people, U.
My personal connections with Peoples Temple run wide and deep. I arranged for Jeanne Mills, an early defector, speak to my class about her personal experiences and had long conversations with her before she was murdered in her home. I also organized a Peoples Temple cult night program at Stanford University with cult experts, former members, and relatives of deceased members. I was an expert witness in the defense of Larry Layton, charged with conspiracy to murder Congressman Ryan on the jungle airstrip as he was leading a party of 20 defectors, relatives, and media to safety , and in that capacity was privy to much information and tape recordings by and about Jones and of PT.
I also engaged in a number of long interviews with Layton both in jail and my home. I will not dwell on assumptions that Jones acted in collusion with the CIA from the time he visited Cuba in photographed with Fidel Castro , Brazil in , Haiti, and other Latin American countries, studying voodoo and torture training of the military police.
One source Meiers, , p. Upon returning to Indiana, he was ordained as a minister in the well-established Church of Disciples of Christ, and soon after had access to large amounts of money, enough to move his church to Ukiah, California the next year. In addition, his ability to illegally transport an enormous amount of weapons, along with Social Security, welfare and aid to dependent children funds from the U.
That intervention continued in Guyana when the American Embassy there refused to act on behalf of the Concerned Relatives and Congressman Ryan for many days, instead notifying Jones of their demands prior to allowing them access to Jonestown. He was filmed by the NBC camera crew walking with Ryan on the airstrip, but moving away just before the gunfire erupted. Still more curiously, if there was no CIA connection, Dwyer and several members of the Embassy in Guyana later got medals and promotions for their ambiguous role in the saga of Jones and Peoples Temple.
The affirmative answer is revealed in this excerpt from an electronic message sent to me by Stephan Jones reproduced with his permission, 10 March I think he may have even attached some kind of prophetic significance to the date — nuclear holocaust or fascist takeover or something.
They are coming to get us. Jones went further than distort the reality of the past, he was able to distort reality as it existed in perceptions of the present. People held captive in this jungle concentration camp policed by armed guards, gave thanks to Dad for their freedom and liberty. In addition, members told themselves and wrote in their letters a series of big lies, such as: the food was good and abundant, when it was horrible and scarce; the weather was lovely, when it was brutally hot; there were no insects, when mosquitoes attacked ferociously; they were happy, when many were depressed and frightened.
He went a bit too far by asserting that in Jonestown there was no sickness, no illness, and no death. Not even he could control those forces, and had to deal with that discontinuity when members of his flock got ill and died.
Jones even played Nazi horror films, such as Night and Fog , to remind his followers that their condition could get worse if they did not obey him. While the Ministry of Truth rewrote history in , Jones was able to get his god-fearing, religious followers to tear up and discard their beloved Bibles after he exposed the lies and errors he claimed to have found in the Bible.
Jones created a Department of Diversion, headed by Terri Buford, whose purpose was to carry out sensitive work in the government involving gathering data on selected politicians that could be used to persuade them to cooperate with the goals and needs of PT. Big Brother is watching you: Big Daddy is infiltrating your every thought.
In place of the telescreen surveillance in , Jones reached into the minds of his followers by blasting them with these endless messages that blared from loudspeakers in the central pavilion and could be heard for great distances, sometimes live, sometimes taped, but always his presence filled the airways and thus the mind ways while members worked, ate, and slept.
Jones rewarded those who informed on other members who complained about the hard work, awful rations, and enforced separation of spouses, and he severely punished the dissidents publicly. He even announced that he would send around comrades who would pretend to be dissenters to lure others into agreeing to complain or, worse, to defect, and then mete out the punishment due to these traitors.
His spy system was started much earlier in the United States by having members of his security force find out as much as possible about various members by breaking into their homes, checking their garbage, tapping their phones, or having family members inform on each other. Both the Party and Jones enforced food deprivation.
This tactic was a means to weaken the strength to resist or rebel. Meaningless victories can be claimed by the Party from time to time in order to stir up patriotism and encourage citizens that their hard lives are having a positive effect on the war effort.
The photograph is important because it represents tangible evidence that the Party intentionally lies to the people. In , Winston is fixated on a scrap of paper from a ten-year-old news article that shows a photo of executed Party leaders Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at an event in New York. All three men testified to being in Eurasia committing treason at the time the photograph was taken.
Readers have several reasons for suspecting that Julia is a spy. The first interaction she ever has with him is to tell him that she loves him. Also, Winston is considerably older than her and not very attractive, so both Winston and the reader may wonder why Julia has any interest in Winston to begin with. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them. One reading of this statement is as a coded admission that she works with the Thought Police. Charrington, who are revealed to be spies, Julia is never identified as working with the Thought Police, so it seems unlikely that her character is supposed to be read as a super-secret agent.
As a result, even though Winston more strongly believes in the need to destroy the Party, Julia actually does more day-to-day to break the rules.
Julia has lots of contact with other people who do not obey the rules of the Party. Julia has had many secret lovers, and presumably some of these people supply her with contraband.
Julia specifically mentions waiters and servants who work for the Inner Party and have access to contraband not usually available to the Outer Party. By having a relationship that is not condoned by the Party with someone else who despises the Party, Julia is breaking the rules imposed by Oceania, which gives her more pleasure than anything else. The diary is the first thing that Winston purchases from Mr.
He writes in the diary to get his thoughts out in the only way he can without immediately being caught by the Thought Police although they do eventually find it.
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