The Three Slogans of Liberalism

If George Orwell had reduced The Three Slogans of the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four to three words, he might have chosen Peace, Freedom, and Strength. But the absence of sentiments implied by these concepts would have left readers puzzled and angry. Orwell was too honest for this subterfuge and too clever, as well; hence, he launched his dystopian account with a pair of beguiling contradictions that require explanation, and an adage that applies to every totalitarian system.

Thus, War is Peace means that conflict “eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and…helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.” Orwell explains that continuous war functions like everlasting peace by perpetuating Party dominance forever. Of course, this slogan appeals to party members only. For proles, war remains what it has always been: squalor, misery, death, and destruction.

Freedom is Slavery also sustains domestic political institutions. Party member O’Brien explains this best by reversing the word order to Slavery is Freedom: “Alone — free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.”

The third slogan, Ignorance is Strength, is different in that other modifiers could be appended if one so chose. Orwell uses the word, strength, rendering this adage universally applicable to totalitarian systems, a point understood by the Putin and Mao wannabes among us. Thus, a population of ignoramuses shields totalitarian rulers from challenges to their legitimacy or policies. Their subjects are neither knowledgeable nor smart enough to question them. In fact, the goal of Newspeak is to corrupt the language and make questions impossible, adding security to a system based on citizens who chant slogans and act like sheep.

Which brings us to liberal (or progressive) ideologues, who have conjured an alluring trifecta that has spread to every institution in American society with extraordinary speed and penetration: Diversity, Inclusion, Equity. (For obvious reasons, advocates prefer a different word order). Differences between these words and Orwell’s slogans are important to understand. First, DIE devotees do not possess Orwell’s intellectual honesty, which means that implications of diversity, inclusion, and equity aren’t explored too carefully, if at all. Second, The Three Slogans of the Party are descriptive, not inspirational, in that Orwell’s explanation reveals their true meaning and their functioning in a totalitarian system. For DIE, it’s the other way around; the three words are inspirational but not paradoxical or enticing, luring readers to probe what their users really mean. In fact, Americans under a DIE regime have found this out the hard way.

Certainly, the reverential aura surrounding DIE cannot be doubted. An internet search generates page after page of entries that look like notes scribbled down by attendees at a narcissism convention. An endless procession of sites bursts with sanctimony and self-righteousness, many of which contain motivational quotes for practitioners’ use: “100 Powerful Diversity and Inclusion quotes…”; “66 Diversity Quotes – Inspirational Words of Wisdom”; or just “5 diversity and inclusion quotes…,” if you’re short on time. However, everyone, especially the more religiously inclined, should make time for a “diversity and inclusion daily message.” Prayer rugs not provided.

What do these terms mean? Internet searches often link diversity with inclusion and belonging, sometimes in a cutesy way: “Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance,” states Verna Myers. From this comes belonging and, as devotees insist, results in equity. But it always begins with diversity, which has a mesmerizing effect on DIEhards.

Critics usually point out that DIE enthusiasts embrace diversity but stop short of accepting different viewpoints or white males, especially if they come together in the same package, which James Demore discovered at Google in 2018. But workforce diversity that mirrors American society is virtually impossible, as Heather Mac Donald and Martin Gurri have pointed out. Worse, viewpoint diversity has been vehemently, sometimes violently rejected by diversocrats for the past generation; witness the uproar triggered by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which sent hordes of liberals rushing to fainting couches, and the Biden administration creating a Ministry of Truth to combat a dangerous departure from liberal censorship. Hardly a confirmation of commitment to diversity.

The same is true for diversity’s sister concept, inclusion, which embraces experiences that have multiplied a thousandfold in recent years. Here’s a recent and instructive example: “500 School Districts Publicly Declare Only Woke Teachers Need Apply.” Can the true meaning of inclusion be made clearer?

Which leaves us with equity, perhaps the most slippery term of the three. Briefly defined, equitarians assume that differences in group outcomes in any category whatsoever constitute evidence of injustice, usually racism, and demand correction. As Jordan Peterson reminds us, this egregious assumption ignores actual experiences of ethnic and racial groups throughout history and eliminates two great achievements of Western civilization: equality of opportunity and equality before the law. Further, an equity regime dictates life outcomes of millions of people in thousands of groups, necessitating a bureaucratic police state that would put the Soviet Union to shame. This is the very definition of totalitarianism.

Still, the word itself sounds good, as do diversity and inclusion. A warning message should be attached: don’t append any words after them. But we must if we wish to be honest with ourselves, as Orwell was in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Thus, in the name of full disclosure, we are left with:

None need to worry that these slogans will warm liberal hearts and prompt them to emulate Orwell’s honesty. Americans know from tragic experiences that even minor challenges to the liberal censorship regime trigger ghastly reactions. Still, we must make the attempt.

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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