In his widely respected dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell describes a totalitarian future state in which language is used to manipulate the populace and to reinforce the authority of the ruling party and its mysterious leader, Big Brother. Orwell emphasized the central role that a new language, Newspeak, played in the promotion and perpetuation of the ruling party and its authoritarian leader through slogans such as “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.” The immediate historical antecedent that inspired Orwell was “arbeit macht frei,” a Nazi phrase that was famously emblazoned on the entrance of Auschwitz and other concentration camps and which means “work sets you free.” He also drew upon his experiences with Comintern, the international socialist group. 

By the late 1940s, when Orwell began writing 1984, he had become thoroughly disillusioned by the utopian dreams of socialism. Having fought and nearly died in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell experienced first-hand the messy hypocrisies of the worldwide socialist movement. Combining that with the revelations of Stalin’s reign of terror and purges in the Soviet Union, Orwell began systematically dissecting the illusory effectiveness of the collectivist approach in his earlier work, Animal Farm. He summarized his disenchantment with the movement by stating, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western countries struggled with the transition to democratic forms of government and the implications that full-fledged enfranchisement had on the politics of a nation. Within a relatively short period of time, public opinion and public perception became the dominant force in the governance of every Western country. This process also unleashed the latent influence of propaganda, not just in authoritarian countries of fascist or communist rule, but also in countries where voting was widely disseminated.

This was an unprecedented conflict that few societies were prepared to confront. Granted, by that point, we had defeated the forces of the medieval thinking in many fields such as science, medicine, and technology, but on the political, social, and cultural battlefields, the war was not yet won. In fact, in many ways, we are still engaged in an ongoing conflict between the medieval and modern mindset.

One of the defining differences between modern thinking and the medieval mindset is that in the modern approach, the search for truth became recognized as a process of discovery, a way of systematically finding out what is factual and what works, as opposed to the medieval mindset, which relies on endlessly recycling the tired, old, failed ideas and “revealed wisdom” of the past. Today, we are still struggling to come to grips with this distinction.

The key to this puzzle lies in the way the human mind works. Unlike our forebears, who struggled with conjecture and thought experiments, we now, due to the progress in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, have the tools to understand this far better than ever before. The bottom line of the last fifty years of discovery in these fields is that we all crave certainty in a highly uncertain world, full of random events and unanticipated consequences. When events seem too random or complex to fully digest or comprehend, we seek simple, narrow, one-dimensional, linear ways to understand them. This sets the stage for the emergence and impact of Propaganda-speak.

Propaganda-speak shares many qualities with its Orwellian predecessor, Newspeak, in that it seeks to break the world down into simple, linear phrases and approaches. This cannot be done by someone looking to solve complex problems in a complex world, because there is a fundamental mismatch between what is required and what is available through that medieval authoritarian approach. Today, both the left and the right in America politics are guilty of replacing the search for truth and systematically determining what works with the warm, self-reinforcing embrace of Propaganda-speak. Both liberals and conservatives seek to reinforce their authoritarian, medieval orthodoxies through adherence to the tired, old, failed ideas of the past.

We see this play out on the grand stage of American politics every day. If you don’t subscribe to the Propaganda-speak of “our side” of the utopian orthodoxy, you will be shunned. If you do not adhere to the mindless repetition of our overly simplified, linear version of Big Brother, then we will send you to the Thought Police for re-indoctrination. The left and right both equally employ these tactics.

Again, this is not a new phenomenon. It has been widely studied by various luminaries from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky to Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind. We all have different ways of looking at the world and different approaches to solving problems. This has been the case since Cain and Abel. These differences are not necessarily a definitive barrier to success until we allow ourselves to suspend the search for truth and systematically determining what works, instead converting those predispositions into dogmas, ideologies, and partisan tribalism. In the medieval mindset, the “other” among our fellow citizens is the enemy; in the modern mindset, the enemy is error.

This stage marks the final surrender of the will to improve and find better ways to do things. In 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is captured and subjected to months of excruciating torture. Finally, confronted with his deepest, darkest fear of being eaten alive by rats, Winston surrenders his last shreds of resistance to Newspeak, Big Brother, and any inkling of independent thought by capitulating to the command to state that two plus two equals five. This represents the absolute victory of ruling party loyalty over facts, truth, evidence, and reality. Unlike poor Winston, we are not being mercilessly tortured; but just as Winston did, given the state of our political process, we are all confronting our two-plus-two-equals-five moment.