Do you love Big Brother? Ben Shapiro discusses what is arguably the most important dystopian fiction of our century: “1984” by the great George Orwell. - - - Today’s Sponsor:ExpressVPN - Go to https://expressvpn.com/ben and find out how you can get 3 months of ExpressVPN free!
Chapter 1: What is the focus of Ben Shapiro's Book Club?
Hey, hey, and welcome, folks. This is The Ben Shapiro Show. So, we have something behind the paywall over at Daily Wire Plus. It is called Ben Shapiro's Book Club. It's precisely what it sounds like, a book club. Well, one of the books that we analyzed over the course of the last year was George Orwell's 1984. Here's what it sounded like. Hey, everybody, and welcome.
I'm very pumped because this month, we read 1984 by George Orwell. You can see how I keep tabs. Literally, I put tabs in the book. We're gonna go through this book. We're gonna answer some of your questions. First, I'm gonna give sort of a brief intro to the book. I think, honestly, there's no better way to introduce this book
than just to read the first couple of lines, because it just is fantastic. I mean, George Orwell is an extraordinary writer. He writes with actual clarity. One of the things I really appreciate about Orwell is that he's not hiding the ball at all. He's not attempting to be obscure. He's not attempting to play around with language. He's just going to give it to you straight.
It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13. So right away, you know you're in a different world in which everything is going to be changed, the facts are going to be subsumed to something different.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of victory mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. And so you're immediately immersed in Winston Smith's gritty world. This is not going to be a positive future.
This is not going to be a place with gleaming towers and wonderful flying cars or anything. This is going to be a very dark and gritty place. And the first thing that we notice is Big Brother is watching you. This giant poster of Big Brother, who clearly is described in the way that Stalin is described. He's a mustached figure with these piercing eyes, and he's constantly watching.
And this is the constant theme of Big Brother. If you actually look at all of the covers for 1984 over the course of its publication history, nearly all of them look like this one. Nearly all of them have a human eye on them because the basic idea, of course, is that a state that is omnipotent and omnipresent can twist you into something that is not you.
And that is the real danger, a state that is so in control of everything surrounding you that you don't even have the ability to think anymore. You don't have the ability to be anymore. And then, of course, there are the three big slogans that are introduced on page 16 in this particular edition. This, I believe, is the Signet Classics edition.
The three slogans of the party, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. In a moment, I'm going to go through what each of those means. First, I kind of wanted to go through a little bit of the iconography that has been associated with 1984 that's become so much a part of how we think about 1984. Of course, you all remember this commercial, right?
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Chapter 2: Why is 1984 considered an important dystopian novel?
And one of the things he discovered, it's actually a phenomenal book, Homage to Catalonia. And if you've never picked up a copy and you like 1984 and you like Animal Farm, you should really pick up Homage to Catalonia because it's pretty spectacular. He has another book called Road to Wigan Pier, which is about poverty in Britain, also spectacular. Orwell's a terrific, terrific writer.
Homage to Catalonia is really not about socialism versus fascism, per se. It is much more about the fact that Stalinism had crept into the communist ranks to the point where it was almost difficult to tell the difference between the side that you were fighting for and the side that you were fighting against. There's a very famous portion of Homage to Catalonia where, and this happened, where Orwell
started being targeted by the Stalinists inside the communist movement in Spain. He actually went to a hotel to meet his wife in Barcelona and he spotted her across the room and she came up to him and she hugged him and then she told him to run because the Stalinists were going to liquidate him. And so a lot of what Orwell is writing about is the Stalin regime.
And while he sort of lumps all totalitarianism together, right, he says it doesn't matter whether we're talking about Oceania or East Asia or Eurasia, none of that really matters. What he means by that is that once you have a totalitarian regime, whether it considers itself Nazi or whether it considers itself communist, You're now in the same boat.
Now, there are some fundamental distinctions between these ideologies that I think that Orwell elides, but his ability to critique totalitarianism is unparalleled, which is why 1984 stands the test of time. And there's no question, by the way, that many of the incidents in 1984 are attempts to draw from real life.
So, for example, there's this character of Parsons, right, who is this sort of fat, bloated idiot who lives in in Winston's apartment building. And he's very excited that his kids are informing on all the neighbors. They're constantly informing on all the neighbors. Well, this was a thing in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
There's a very, very famous situation where a kid named Pavel Marazov was a 13-year-old boy And Pavel Marazov supposedly informed on his own father to the GPU, which was the predecessor to the KGB. And his father received a 10-year prison sentence. And then supposedly Marazov's family beat him to death. And so he actually became a Soviet hero. There were songs written about him.
There were statues built to this 13-year-old kid who informed on his own father. That obviously is paralleled in 1984. In Oceania, your mind is not your own. You have these massive surveillance state apparatuses that have been built. That, again, is paralleled by what the Soviet Union did.
And the goal of the surveillance in the Soviet Union was not just to keep track of people because they didn't actually have the ability to process all the material they were taking in. The idea was that everybody knew that they were being watched at all times. That inherently changes everybody's behavior.
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Chapter 3: What are the key themes introduced in 1984?
But the idea, of course, is the perpetual war allows you to push all of the ire of your population abroad and go after all those other people. Now, here's where you get into... Orwell's failure to understand actually socialism and communism because he actually didn't understand socialism and communism on an economic level. There's a huge portion of the book.
It's actually the dullest portion of the book where he gets a hold of Goldstein's pamphlet and he reads the pamphlet. And the pamphlet is just straight Trotsky. It's pretty much an open paraphrase of the revolution betrayed by Trotsky.
and and that the revolution betrayed basically says communism is good stalin is bad and you hear the same thing here right the idea in in the goldstein pamphlet is that the reason that the state has to constantly go to war is because if it were not for the state going to war they couldn't get rid of all of their excess wealth and getting rid of the excess wealth sinking it to the bottom of the sea as orwell puts it keeps the people in misery and keeping the people in misery is the goal because if they're in misery then it prevents them from being able to rise up now that's not
true. OK, communism keeps people in misery because it inherently destroys all the wealth. Soviet Union did not need to go to war with surrounding countries in order to destroy its surplus wealth. It had no surplus wealth. It was an impoverished country masquerading as a first world nation. And then you get to the second slogan. Freedom is slavery.
So, again, the idea here is that to be free is to actually be a slave. To be fully free means that you are a slave to your own impulses, and only when you are liberated from individualism and you are subsumed under the rubric of the state can you experience true freedom. Now, in order to do that, you have to give up your own mind.
And this brings us to ignorance is strength, which is the third slogan and the most important slogan of the state. Ignorance is strength. And when you give up your own mind to the state, then you find strength because now you are united with everybody else. You've been merged into the great collective. And the key to this, and this is, I think, Orwell's best point in the whole book.
I think his best point is this. The key to this is the pushing of subjectivism, the pushing of the idea that you can create reality within your own mind. And this is what is constantly being pushed by O'Brien. O'Brien, of course, is the emissary of the state who is trying to brainwash Winston. And Smith talks about this, right?
He says, what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise than that two plus two equals four, but that they might be right. For after all, how do we know that two plus two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable, what then?
So the idea is that you destroy all objective truth. And once you've destroyed all objective truth, all that is left is the subjective. And then when you apply pressure to the subjective mind, what you do is you destroy freedom. Because again, you can think yourself into anything is the premise here. Now, there is an external world, right? There are facts, there are realities out there.
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Chapter 4: How does George Orwell's background influence his writing?
Chapter 5: What does Big Brother symbolize in 1984?
Jesus says, why do you think that even though there are so many parallels between what's in the book and what we're seeing in the society now, people are still in denial about how we're falling for the same traps as the book because nobody wants to believe that they're falling for a trap. There's a great Twilight Zone episode. I forget the name of it.
In which there is a, it's called the Howling Man. That's the name of the episode. Great episode if you can find it. And that episode is, the basic premise is a man walks into an old monastery And he stumbles across a jail cell in the monastery. And inside the jail cell is a man who's howling. Hence the name of the episode, The Howling Man. And he goes and he talks to this guy.
Everybody's telling him, don't talk to him. Don't talk to him. He goes and he talks to the guy. And the guy behind bars tells them, these are all delusional priests. And these delusional priests keep saying that I'm the devil. They keep saying that I'm Satan. And they kept me here for years. And then the priests tell him he is the devil, right? We've kept it after World War I.
We captured the devil. We put him here. It ended all war and we're keeping him here. And the devil convinces this guy, of course, to let him out. He lets him out. World War II begins. Okay. And the basic lesson is, as the devil says, the greatest, essentially the same thing they use in the usual suspects. It's a ripoff.
They say that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is telling you that he doesn't exist. The same thing is true of totalitarians. The same thing is true of utopians. The greatest trick they ever pull is telling you they are not totalitarian utopians. Don't believe them. Brittany says, hey, I'm a 40 year old mom of four living in Sacramento.
This is the first time I read 1984, although I've heard a lot about it. Now I recognize many of the quotes I've heard people use over the years, especially the last couple of years as originating from this book. How old were you when you first read the book? How did it impact you at the time? So I was probably 13 when I first read this book. I was a big reader very, very early.
And I remember just being shook by it. I remember, more than anything else, the feel of oppressiveness in the book is what struck me. And that's sort of how you remember books, is sort of how you felt while you were reading it, less than what's actually in the book. And what you feel when you read this book is just the walls closing in. And that is constantly... pushed, right? There's no air.
There's no ability to breathe. And that's what Orwell does so beautifully is he really captures that feeling of you have nowhere to turn. You are surrounded on all sides. You cannot escape this. Stephanie says, I read that conservatives often misuse the term Orwellian because Orwell was a democratic socialist.
In 1984, the fictional book written by Goldstein precisely points out why socialism would fail and why a hierarchy of power will always prevail over equity. How could Orwell be so insightful regarding the threat of tyranny, yet so naive as to believe in any form of socialism? So you have to understand that Orwell's early career was spent covering abject poverty in Britain.
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