Week 6:

The Origins of Totalitarianism

“…the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition”(437). 

1984

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed– if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”(34-35).

Both Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” and George Orwell’s “1984” reveal the feeble nature of truth in totalitarian regimes. Something inherently objective, like truth, is distorted into a product of subjective manipulation. Those in power control the objectivity of truth, which entirely contradicts its fundamentally truthful nature. In both fiction and theory, the objective past is distorted into a politically manufactured one. Both Orwell and Arendt reveal the weaponization of history itself, because when lies are perpetuated and facts are rewritten, truth ceases to be an objective reality and becomes only what power declares it to be.

Hannah Arendt argues that totalitarian systems, specifically their use of repetition and collective enforcement, erode the distinction between truth and falsehood, easily transforming lies into unquestioned facts. If this is the case, then it becomes a matter of who, and not what. More specifically, a matter of “power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition”(437). Essentially, to methodically tell the truth is a form of manipulating the objectivity of that truth. In totalitarian regimes, Arendt remarks that this deceit doesn’t just occur on an individual level but rather on the level of systemic institutions that work to give falsehoods the appearance of truth. The efforts of totalitarian systems ensure that every member of society believes a certain lie to be true so that it can gain the status of a historical, unquestionable fact, regardless of contrary evidence. This systemic manipulation illustrates how, amidst the violence and oppression, lies the equally grave danger of dismantling one’s reality, where accurate perception and freedom are at risk. 

Orwell parallels Arendt’s idea of the collapse of truth through Winston’s realization of the party’s ability to rewrite the past and enforce “doublethink,” forcing individuals to accept lies as reality. “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed– if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink”(34-35). The Party’s manipulation of historical records reveals the ways in which power drives the erasure of objectivity, replacing it with a calculated, invented reality. Winston himself has a multitude of firsthand experiences with the distortion of truth. Winston comes to the stark realization that his own firm understanding of a certain fact isn’t enough to deem it true if he’s the only person who remembers it. For example, what he realizes he knows about Oceania’s shifting alliances is subject to obliteration if it continues to be distorted. The idea of “doublethink” encapsulates the detrimental effects of this process. As members of society are being fed what to believe, they are subject to contradicting fallacies that surrender not only all forms of truth but also their capacity for independent judgment. Thus, Winston’s experience in a system where lies are imposed and expected to be internalized as absolute truths embodies the dangers Arendt describes.  

Both texts reveal one of the darkest dangers of totalitarianism: the destruction of truth itself. When history is constantly rewritten on a foundation of lies, individuals lose their sense of objective reality. When this is lost, any form of resistance is dismantled. Furthermore, as totalitarianism deepens, the separation between truth and the individual, power over true reality against the party’s reality, becomes all the more arbitrary.