The Terrifying Power Of Thought Control: Echoes From 1984 To Today

This passage from 1984 should scare the hell out of you. O'Brien, a ranking member in the government, is electrocuting Winston Smith in order to make him lovingly obey the state, represented as the mysterious character “Big Brother.” During this “political shock therapy”, O’Brien says this to Winston: 

"Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees... There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to... We make the laws of Nature.... Nothing exists except through human consciousness." [emphasis added] 

This should terrify you because, if you are paying attention, you know many of your fellow citizen’s minds are under the near complete domination of the powers that be - various influencers, politicians, celebrities - and you witness daily that they have allowed their conscious experience to be dictated for them. They will believe almost anything they are told.

If they are informed that riots in which the city is burning down are actually peaceful protests, they accept it.

If they are told there is an evil, invisible presence at play in the world, called “white supremacist patriarchy” and that it pervades all of existence from mathematics to traffic patterns to unconscious minds - they gobble it up.

If they are told that “colorblindness” is racism and a key diagnostic of racist “possession”, they nod along.

If they are told people of color cannot be racist - sure enough they parrot that nonsense idea. 

Tell them that discrimination, prejudice, and segregation actually improve society, and they will implement those practices.

Tell them that people of color can only vote in one direction if they want to remain authentically black or Hispanic, and they will robotically submit to this prejudice.

Tell them that rape includes catcalls and that there is a “War on Women” and “rape culture” in America, and they will agree. 

Tell them that to win any argument, they need only bring up anecdotes and their lived experience, and like zombies, they will engage in public discourse with only their feelings as tools. 

Want some new merch while supporting free speech? Check out our store! Wrong Speak Flat Bill Cap

Tell them that “defunding the police” will lead to less crime, and even as crime spikes, they’ll call for fewer cops. 

Tell them men can get pregnant, and they will say, “Of course, they can.” 

Tell them that terrorists are freedom fighters, and they’ll don their flag. 

You can push them even further - tell them to start questioning whether 2 + 2 is 4 (even some mathematicians have done so), and they will be on board. 

That’s especially unnerving, as in 1984, Orwell suggested this simple math equation was fundamental to establish that you have control of your consciousness: “... two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows,” he wrote. Now, it is important to note that most people who believe such pathological nonsense are not “faking it” or participating in it as a “grift” - they are true believers, this is the reality they inhabit, it’s how they were programmed. 

And here’s a few mechanisms by which this grotesque impressionability comes about: 

First, there is a fear of “torture” if one does not agree with the brainwashing. This is the 1984 method - threaten and torment people until they are afraid not to believe in what you are demanding they believe. Looming always is the loss of reputation (e.g. digital Scarlet letters), loss of job, loss of relationships (friendly, familial, and romantic), loss of status in one’s political sphere, and so on for failure to ascribe to the “mandated” ideologies. 

Second, in many souls, especially the affluent living in mostly peaceful societies, there is an internal drive for “political sainthood.” Thus, even without the consequences of “apostasy” from the cause, many seek to have, at the end of life, a political hagiography written about them. Everything they believe is an attempt to achieve the spiritual via political means. 

Third, the obsession with subjective experience has made the populace, at least in the West, ripe to give credence to anything. There have been a variety of forces that have helped the subjective ascend to dominance. For example, New Ageism, meditation, mindfulness, and the influx of "quantum" mechanical ideas such as the observer effect (I’m not joking). While not directly related to the political, have championed "personal experience" and primed people to favor the subjective, no matter how psychotic and rife with unreality, over the objective. 

Fourth, related to the domination of the subjective, is the manic focus on feelings as arbiters of “The Real.” This appears to have begun as an educational psychology endeavor and was later intensified and spread by the likes of the self-help movement, therapy culture, and political correctness theories (e.g. microaggressions, safe spaces, etc.). 

Fifth, there is a vast messaging system reminding the population of the four previous points. Celebrities, politicians, media figures, students, and so forth - all chant the same thing, all the time: “Your lived experience and feelings are paramount, to be someone great you must be a political hero, and if you go against the orders, you will be ruined - by the way, note these past torture victims as warnings.” 

In the end, the ultimate danger of the ability to program the consciousness of the hoi polloi is actually not that they will hallucinate political leaders floating off the floor like soap bubbles; no, it’s that if people can believe such outlandish things, they could potentially be made to hold genuinely hideous beliefs. Such as that the Tutsis are cockroaches, the Chinese are “dead wood”, or that the Jews are viruses. That’s the true risk in the battle for consciousness. 

Thankfully, we are not anywhere near mass slaughter, but over time, if the brainwashing dynamics remain unaltered, it can eventually turn people - even your neighbors and friends, people you think you know - giddily and self-righteously violent, terroristic, and yes, even genocidal. They can come to love Big... Killing. 

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.