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Pyotor’s group acts as a microcosm of Solzhenitsyn’s observation of society today because in both contexts, terror replaces ideology and becomes the true organizing principle. In Demons, ideology seems to infiltrate every conversation yet it remains actionless. Pyotr is arguably the most devoted to the “cause,” giving him a heightened sense of authority. However, this authority is contingent on the fear he generates in the people around him. Although Pyotr is faced with skepticism about his envisioned political system, members of the group are inevitably unable to resist. “That pyotr stapnovich was playing with them like pawns they likewise believed…they all knew that they would still come in complement to the spot the next day… They felt they had suddenly been caught like flies in the web of a huge spider; they were angry but quacking with fear”(551). This submission stems from the instinctive obedience that emerges when individuals realize that resistance carries immediate personal danger. When awareness is no longer strong enough to keep individuals from compliance, ideology becomes irrelevant. The fear of punishment and guilt glues the group together. In the last moments of the Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn scales Pyotr’s totalitarian behaviors to reflect the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago wasn’t just a prison but a political tool. The fear the archipelago commanded by simply existing, was enough to control an entire society into submission. For those not imprisoned, it still influenced almost every little behavior in accordance with Soviet Union laws. Solzhenitsyn reveals this mechanism of fear by stating: “for half a century and more the enormous state has towered over us, girded with hoops of steel. The hoops are still there, there is no law”(468). This imagery evokes the tangible methods of control that still exist and control society today. The law that Solzhenitsyn deems non-existent highlights how the “law” has simply masked the concept of fear. Legality does not exist to benefit citizens and bring justice to society but instead to automate and strengthen the power of the regime. In both texts, fear substitutes ideology. The threat of being culpable is enough to coordinate the actions of Pyotr’s “followers.” Similarly, Solzhenitsyn highlights that the Soviet Union does not need consistent laws or clear political principles. Once people internalize the expectation of arbitrary punishment, the system can operate indefinitely and automatically. Furthermore, as fear erodes trust and community, individuals become isolated despite being surrounded by others. As ideology fades, fear is what compensates. Pyotr’s revolutionary group as a microcosm of Solzhenitsyn’s archipelago mirrors the structure of obedience that is identical whether it governs five people or five million.

Verkhovensky’s conceptualized society of universal spying in Demons foreshadows the Gulag system in which people uphold the regime because their participation in informing traps them in obedience.

During a conversation with Nikolay Stavrogin, Pyotr Verkhovensky expresses his ideal political vision almost as if in a state of delirium. “He’s got spying. He’s got each member of society watching the others and obliged to inform. Each belongs to all, and all to each. They’re all slaves and equal in their slavery. Slander and murder in extreme cases, but above all–equality”(417). Verkhovensky’s words highlight how he is actually not devoted to socialist ideologies or helping people find freedom. Instead, he exploits revolutionary rhetoric as a mask for personal power.  His dream is absolute control where everyone is constantly under mutual surveillance. Furthermore, the threat of informing erodes all shared bonds and any solidarity where equality is redefined as shared enslavement. Pyotr critically recognizes that a society where citizens are weaponized as informants to the regime is much easier to dominate than one controlled by an external force. If everyone is obliged to inform then everyone is vulnerable to some automatized power ultimately strengthening the power of the regime. 

Pyotr’s logic foreshadows the system described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. “Beyond the purpose of weakening ties between people, there was another purpose as well. Any person who had let himself be recruited would, out of fear of public exposure, be very much interested in the continuing stability of the regime” (p. 323). Solzhenitsyn articulates how the incentivization to protect oneself ultimately strengthens the regime to protect themselves. Once someone informed even once, the fear of being uncovered garnered absolute compliance, and they were suddenly tied to the system. Thus, informing not only became a mechanism of surveillance but of psychological domination. 

Both texts highlight how totalitarian control is contingent on incriminating individuals in the systems they fear. The power of informing extends beyond just gathering information. It also erodes relationships. As surveillance dismantles trust among individuals, they become more isolated and ultimately more dependent on a regime that seeks to oppress them. Eventually, the state no longer needs to exert visible force as control operates from within. Dostoevsky, writing decades before the rise of Soviet totalitarianism, anticipates the psychology of repression that Solzhenitsyn later chronicles from lived experience. Pyotr’s imagined future of a society in which  “slaves equal in their slavery”(417) finds its grim fulfillment in the world Solzhenitsyn describes, in which informers help sustain the system not out of conviction but because complicity makes rebellion impossible.

In forcing membership from individuals through collective guilt, Dostoevsky reveals the psychological mechanism Arendt later identifies because when loyalty rests on fear and complicity rather than principles, it becomes the pure, thoughtless obedience that totalitarian power requires.

In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt posited that “total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content from which changes of mind might naturally arise”(424). For example, In Stalin’s USSR, one’s status as an “enemy” was arbitrary – loyalty could change overnight. Yesterday’s comrade could be today’s traitor yet those faithful were expected to remain loyal to the regime, regardless of what it demanded. Arendt highlighted that totalitarian regimes strip loyalty of any specific meaning leaving no real cause or principle left to be loyal to. When loyalty is no longer attached to anything tangible, it becomes pure, abstract obedience – essentially, loyalty for loyalty’s sake. Furthermore without concrete content, one loses the ability to question as there’s simply nothing left to question. Totalitarian regimes destroy the emotional content that gives people the ability to reason, judge, or change their opinions and instead drives pure, blind, thoughtless submission to the regime itself. Thus, loyalty becomes a tool of domination when detached from judgment and conscience. 

In conversation with Nikolai Stavrogin, Pyotr explains how socialism has spread in Russia first by establishing elaborate hierarchies, which attract people’s attention, and second through sentimentality. However, Stavrogin responds stating “there’s one thing better still: get four members of a circle to bump off a fifth on the pretense of his being an informer, and with this shed blood you’ll immediately tie them together in a single knot. They’ll become your slaves, they won’t dare rebel or call you to accounts.”(386). Stavrogin is describing a lethal tactic for creating absolute loyalty. Claiming that someone is an informant makes betrayal seem imminent. Thus, individuals are pushed to commit a violent act together creating an environment of shared culpability in which each person is morally and legally compromised. This mutual secret becomes “the knot that ties them together,” as the fear of exposure prevents dissent, produces submission, and makes them “slaves” to whoever controls the secret. 

Just as Arendt described, this loyalty is rooted in fear and complicity rather than ideology. Stavrogin’s morally destructive tactic causes members to stop asking whether “the cause,” if one can even call it that, is right because survival depends on silence. This is an incredibly effective way to create a devoted following as their self interest in protecting themselves strengthens the power of whoever’s in charge.  

Dostoevsky thus dramatizes the manufacture of the very kind of empty, fearful loyalty Hannah Arendt later names as the foundation of totalitarian obedience.

In Demons, Dostoevsky’s early descriptions of the society convey eerie parallels to totalitarian regimes therefore anticipating Hannah Arendt’s later ideas about the necessity of total domination in every aspect of one’s life. 

During a late night meeting, Nikolai warns Shatov of the “possibility that [he] will be killed”(241). In warning Shatov, Nikolai reveals that he is also somewhat associated with “the society.” Already, the threat of violence and subsequent fear hints to totalitarian behaviors. It is revealed that upon returning from America Shatov wanted to renounce his membership. The society’s response to Shatov’s desire of abandonment was ignored. Instead, Shatov was given a task that he undertook in the hopes that fulfilling their last demand would free him. In recalling this knowledge for Shatov, Nikolai states “But what you don’t seem to know yet is these gentlemen have no intentions of parting with you”(242). Thus, it is not in the hands of Shatov to determine his own fate but rather the society which has now implemented control over Shatov’s autonomy in choice. 

As Hannah Arendt states, “It is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to demand unlimited power. Such power can only be secured if literally all men, without single exception are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life”(598). In Shatov’s outraged exclamation, “It’s my right of conscience and thought”(242), corroborates Arendt’s ideas that “every aspect of one’s life” must be dominated. This, naturally, includes conscience and rights. 

Shatov’s acknowledgment that in response to his arguments of denouncement, “[Verkhovensky] claims that it’s possible and that he has the right” is followed by an accusation of deceit from Nikolai. Nikolai points out that there is no possible way this could be true as even members who are barely associated with the group are constantly keeping tabs. Furthermore, some don’t even know they are serving society by doing this. Essentially, this act of surveillance reveals the automatized control that totalitarian regimes implement. Using people as devices of surveillance, a method that ultimately strengthens the regime is inherently totalitarian. For individuals who overtly reject the ideologies, like Shatov, remain caught in the arbitrary nature of constant scrutiny. Annihilation as a solution for the fact that Shatov “knows too much and may inform,” reveals how Shatov’s promised emancipation instead strengthens the society’s grasp on him by creating an environment of perpetual fear. Thus, the inherently totalitarian characteristics of the society reveal that it is a microcosm for totalitarian regimes.

Shatov’s passionate monologue highlights Dostoevsky’s central warning. Separating intellectual elites from the moral and spiritual aspects of life leads people to spiritual decay and therefore, farther away from enlightenment. In the context of the loosely organized revolutionary movement in which nihilism was loosely identified with, Sergey Nechayev preached spirituality. Shatov’s despair that those “who have no people, have no God” reflects Dostoevsky’s belief that alienation from community and tradition creates a moral vacuum easily filled by ideology (38). 

Historically, this “loss of faith” paralleled the rise of Nechayev’s ruthless revolutionary ideals, which encouraged the infiltration of all institutions to provoke chaos. As the historical background information notes, Sergey Nechayev harnessed this disorientation, preaching a creed of destruction and manipulation as the path to renewal. Dostoevsky recognized that such radicalism thrived not merely on political frustration, but on the loneliness of people who had lost any sense of belonging or higher purpose. This is the same logic of totalitarian movements later analyzed by Hannah Arendt.

Dostoevsky highlights a psychological truth: when a society forgets its shared moral language, individuals become spiritually unmoored and desperate for meaning. That hunger makes them susceptible to “demons”—whether in the form of political extremism, nihilism, or blind devotion to an idea. In this way, Dostoevsky anticipates later thinkers like Arendt and Solzhenitsyn, who likewise saw totalitarianism as the consequence of mass isolation. The novel’s early warning is clear: without community, faith, and shared values, human freedom decays into emptines which in turn, invites tyranny.

The Great Battle of Oneself

As two gin scented tears trickled down the sides of Winston’s face, he had finally won. No longer stricken with agony and strife, he was ok. He loved Big Brother. Orwell portrays how totalitarian regimes rewire the perception of individuals to become instruments of their own oppression, thereby paralleling Arendt’s concern with the manipulation of isolated individuals living under a manufactured reality. The party’s manipulation of truth erodes the line between objective and subjective, replacing reality with fabrication. As Arendt warns, such manipulation is fortified by the isolation that inhibits relationships, ultimately weakening one’s ability to confirm reality through shared experience. Today, through social media algorithms and online echo chambers, people experience a similar manipulation of truth, gradually internalizing distorted perceptions that make them complicit in their own control.

The Party’s control of truth converts citizens into collaborators in their own mental subjugation. When the Party defines truth itself, individuals must constantly rewrite their own thoughts to match its version of reality, turning obedience into an act of self-surveillance rather than external coercion. While sitting at his desk one day, Winston stumbles across a forgotten half-page fragment torn out of the Times. The paper included a date 10 years prior and a photograph depicting the delegates Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford in New York. While the photo depicted the delegates in New York, they themselves had confessed to engaging in illegal activities on Eurasian soil on that very same date. Baffled, Winston concludes “the confessions were lies”(78). It is in this very moment that Winston has found evidence of history that has since been altered. More importantly, the evidence is tangible and doesn’t merely rely on Winston’s senses and memories. Thus, it would technically be much harder to refute the existence of something physical. However, this is far from the case. As Stéphane Courtois states, “it was not always easy to learn the facts or to discover the truth…regimes had mastered the art of censorship”(11). The Black Book’s “art of censorship” parallels the Party’s system of falsified records and confessions. As Winston uncovers the truth behind this censorship, his awareness is simply not strong enough to survive in a world where proof is systematically destroyed. Any and all true historical accounts had been rewritten so many times that this photograph no longer held any significance. This historical truth is essentially fictionalized, and any means to verify it have been erased. Thus, totalitarian regimes convert censorship into a self-sustaining environment of truth.

As Winston gazes at the picture of Big Brother, it’s as if an immense force is penetrating his skull, almost signaling him to reject the evidence of his senses. Winston’s inability to resist the mental invasion reflects Arendt’s warnings of totalitarian power transforming lies into unquestioned beliefs. This forces individuals to internalize falsehoods until they become indistinguishable from their own thoughts. The party’s absurd declaration “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five”(80), captures not only falsehood, but a collapse of reason. It denies the existence of an independent and external world. As Winston stated, “you would have to believe it”(80). This wasn’t just a declaration; it was orthodoxy. As coercion turns inward, belief is forced on a psychological level in which citizens must discipline their own thoughts to survive. In a parallel manner, Arendt observes that “gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts”(437). Both illustrate a system in which lies are woven into the fabric of reality through repetition and power. The “demoralizing fascination” Arendt attributes to this idea mirrors Winston’s sense of helplessness. People begin to accept falsehood not necessarily because they are convinced but because of the meaningless, exhausting, and simply impossible nature of resistance. As truth is replaced with consistency and repetition, it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to distinguish between belief and obedience. For totalitarian regimes, truth is merely an extension of power, cleverness and as Arendt describes “infinite repetition”(437). The party’s real power comes not from violence but the ability to make individuals accept fallacy as reality turning perception itself into a mechanism of control. 

Alone with his thoughts, Winston not only questions the party, but his own mind and sanity. Terrifyingly, the simplest logic that “two plus two makes four” might itself be madness – After all, there was no way to validate. As Winston begins to doubt his own reasoning, Orwell illustrates Arendt’s insight that totalitarianism corrupts the very faculty of thought, turning rationality into a tool for accepting falsehood. As Winston’s logic turns against itself, the fear of being wrong obscures his will to be right, highlighting how Winston actively sustains his own indoctrination. The oxymoron “heresy of heresies” transforms common sense into a political crime, exposing how the Party simultaneously inhibits thought and disobedience. Arendt’s “lying world of consistency” corroborates the totalitarian impulse to implement a comforting illusion of stability in which people no longer feel the raw human emotions of confusion or pain when confronted with uncomfortable truths because, as Arendt stated, everything is perfectly consistent. Winston’s hesitant syntax and spiraling clauses, “they might be right…what then?”(80), parallels Arendt’s idea that people in totalitarian regimes prefer the comfort of coherent lies to the uncertainty of truth. Orwell’s tense but subdued tone reflects the exhaustion that comes with trying to protect against self-deception. What begins as constant rationalization evolves into psychological adaptation. Eventually, it becomes easier just to pretend one understands the seemingly absurd. Both Arendt and Orwell display that the desire for internal peace trumps that of external reality, leading to self enforced delusion. This causes a mental collapse in which individuals no longer need to be forced to lie because they find safety within the lie itself.

When intimate bonds are hollowed of affection and weaponized for surveillance, individuals lose the emotional independence needed to resist collective domination. Thus, the Party dismantles human connection by turning love, family, and desire into extensions of political loyalty, leaving citizens isolated and controllable. 

There were no people, nor were there secret microphones. They were completely alone. After losing their way on a community hike, Winston revels in this rare moment of independence and discovery, desperately trying to take advantage of this freedom to connect and share his joy with Julia, who feels rather uneasy and guilty. The Party’s control over marriage drains affection, transforming marriage into a political act of loyalty to the Party rather than an act of love between individuals. It is through the unorthodoxy of Winston’s opinions that we are able to detect the illusory nature  of marriages under Party control. Winston was well aware that “Katharine would have unquestionably denounced him to the thought police”(133). Their loyalty lay in betrayal, and their love was subordinated to ideology. This is paralleled by the function of real totalitarian regimes recorded in the Black Book of Communism, which describes an order stating, “Wherever arms are found, execute immediately the eldest son in the family”(16). Under this pretense, fear permeates families as love is distorted into a liability. The innate reaction to protect members of one’s family is what turns individuals into enforcers of their own oppression. Winston recalls his marriage with precision and numbness, not love, revealing how emotional connection has been replaced by political devotion, even if inadvertently. By erasing love’s spontaneity and replacing it with mechanical duty, the Party ensures that individuals learn to suppress affection instinctively, transforming the heart itself into an instrument of oppression.

Winston could have tolerated his lifeless marriage if not for the dreadful act of having to endure the “frigid little ceremony, ”or sex (132). What Winston abhorred most about this was how one of his and Katharine’s most intimate moments was simply reduced to “[their] duty to the party”(132). The party’s denunciation of sexual relationships shows how desire is reduced to political orthodoxy. Julia explains, “afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything… all this marching up and down and cheering… is simply sex gone sour” (133). Her observation exposes the fundamental concept of redirecting sexual privation into “war fever and leader worship,” distorting private pleasure into Party fanaticism. Orwell blends both Cynicism and Irony in Julia’s matter-of-fact, blunt, phrasing which contrasts the cold logic of a system that transforms instinct into compliance. Arendt echoes this dynamic by warning, “total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content”(424). For the party, the sex impulse was one of the most dangerous aspects of this “concrete content.” However, like marriage, the party had turned it to account by hollowing out genuine emotion until loyalty itself becomes the only acceptable form of love. Both Orwell and Arendt reveal that destroying sensual and emotional life is crucial in sustaining total domination. By severing the link between feeling and freedom, the Party ensures that even the most innate impulses like love, pleasure, and desire become instruments of power. 

Winston is well aware that the feelings of warmth and love he once felt from his mother and sister are now obsolete. By turning children into informants and breeding mistrust within the home, the Party ensures that surveillance replaces intimacy, fulfilling Arendt’s warning that totalitarian domination depends on isolating individuals until even private relationships become extensions of state control. Winston observes that “the children…were systematically turned against their parents,” transforming love into suspicion and the home into an extension of the Thought Police (133). Whereas in their control of intimacy, the party destroys love from within, trust is destroyed without the party at all, simply through the weaponization of children as informants. The Party’s manipulation of the parent-child relationship invades intimacy with fear. Parents live under the constant threat of betrayal from those they are supposed to love and protect. Orwell’s chillingly blunt tone reflects how normalized this destruction of trust has become. Arendt’s claim that “totalitarian movements depended less on the structurelessness of a mass society than on the specific conditions of an atomized and individualized mass,” highlights intense isolation. When families become groups of isolated individuals rather than connected communities, they are much easier to dominate. Arendt’s “atomized mass” becomes concrete in Orwell’s families, who no longer protect one another but perform surveillance for the state. In manipulating familial love, trust erodes so completely that they are conditioned to anticipate punishment before it comes.

The Party completes its cycle of total domination not by killing its enemies but by converting their minds and souls, proving that totalitarian power depends on the destruction of human dignity and individuality. By redefining truth and forcing people to internalize the Party’s ideologies, the regime turns human nature itself into a political instrument to be filled with its agenda. 

With one hand on the dial, a stern and frustrated O’Brien loomed over Winston. He began his lecture, or rather brainwashing, marking the start of Winston’s deafening transformation. Totalitarian regimes annihilate human dignity by demanding self-destruction for the sake of ideological uniformity. Arendt argues that “for the sake of complete consistency that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity”(601). For Arendt, dignity is contingent on the capacity for independent moral judgment, an ability that Totalitarian regimes find intolerable. O’Brien corroborates Arendt’s idea of Annihilation by telling Winston, “It needs an act of self-destruction… you must humble yourself before you can become sane”(249). Sanity, a mark of  reason, is now redefined as surrender. The Party turns the destruction of self into a moral duty. Individual worth, once derived from moral integrity, is now replaced by conformity and obedience. By forcing individuals to internalize this logic, the destruction of dignity does not require external forces. Instead, individuals humble themselves willingly, aligning obedience to sanity and moral worth. In doing so, individuals lose their capacity for inner resistance, strengthening Party control.

As if Winston uttered the thought allowed, O’Brien repeated his thought, drawing his face uncomfortably near. It is unacceptable to die resisting party ideology. One must first, out of free will, ideologically align themselves as not so much to be destroyed, but rather converted. In transforming human nature itself, it becomes human nature to be an active instrument in one’s own oppression. The Party doesn’t simply want to reform society but “transform human nature itself” (601). This transformation replaces the capacity for independent thought with instinctive loyalty, ensuring that domination no longer requires visible or external pressure. It isn’t enough to simply coerce Winston into agreement. Instead, the Party must “bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul”(255). O’Brien’s chilling declaration reveals how repression no longer relies on terror alone. In this stage, conviction replaces force. Their changed human nature implies that the Party’s logic now defines their emotional and moral reality. Thus, citizens now monitor themselves, making individuals complicit in their own subjugation and, furthermore, feeling secure in the very system that seeks to oppress them. What remains of human nature after this transformation is simply a hollow shell infused with party ideology.

What oppressed Winston the most was how conscious he was of his own intellectual inferiority. The final stage of totalitarian control exposes the creation of hollow, self-enforcing subjects who no longer possess the capacity for dignity, moral conscience, or independent thought. O’Brien’s frightening promise: “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves”(256) outlines the pinnacle of physiological domination. The imagery of being “squeezed empty” represents the erasure of his inner self, most importantly, his capacity for resistance. Winston is reduced to merely a vessel of ideology rather than a true individual. “Filling” Winston with itself allows the ideology to be enforced from within. Courtois’ observation of “a profoundly amoral doctrine that seeks to stamp out every last trace of civic-mindedness in men’s souls, and damn the consequences?”(11) echoes the Party’s hollowing. Both portray a system that destroys conscience itself, leaving people so metaphysically vacant that they enforce oppression from within. Totalitarian seeks not just obedience but moral extinction. The cycle of annihilating dignity and transforming human nature completes itself through the complete obliteration of moral selfhood. Totalitarian power is victorious not by force alone but by surrendering the human soul. 

George Orwell reveals that the strength of totalitarian regimes lies not only in force but in the deepest transformation of human nature. The Party’s concept of manipulated truth compels individuals to rewrite their own perception so that submission feels like sanity. The Party distorts every facet of life from truth, love, and even independent thought, dismantling the line between true and fictitious reality. These conditions require Citizens to discipline their own minds, without external coercion. In doing so, individuals strengthen party control while they themselves become their own oppressors. This presents a parallel to Arent’s warnings of isolated individuals living in a manufactured reality in which the destruction of shared truth renders resistance impossible. All three authors agree that totalitarianism’s greatest danger lies in its ability to invade inner life, turning human consciousness into its strongest and most loyal weapon. In exposing this psychological terror, Orwell and Arendt remind us that freedom begins in perception itself. Even when truth becomes a liability, it is imperative that we remain human and keep with us the courage to see reality even when obscured. Especially now, in the presence of digital echo chambers, political polarization, and curated realities, truth and the human mind’s ability to think freely, judge clearly, and remain independent is constantly at risk. In fighting for truth, we are fighting for the integrity of our own minds.   

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Classics, 2017.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. Penguin Classics, 2021. 

Courtois, Stéphane, et al. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Edited by Mark Kramer, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, Harvard University Press, 1999.

Winston’s capitulation attempts in 1984 corroborate Arendt’s claims that totalitarian regimes themselves rely not on propaganda but indoctrination, because both Orwell and Arendt show that absolutism depends on erasing the capacity for independent thought rather than merely manipulating opinion.

In Part Three of 1984, Winston’s imprisonment in the Ministry of Love exposes a new layer of the Party’s strategies for control. Earlier in the novel, the regime uses methods of propaganda such as telescreens, announcements, victories, hate week, rewritten histories and more, to influence the masses. But O’Brien’s work on Winston is not merely persuasion but transformation. Towards the end of the Chapter, Winston finally reasons “If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens”(278). This reflects Winston’s attempts to abandon all rational thought for the purposes of indoctrination. It’s not enough for the Party to want Winston to believe its lies but rather the Party has made him incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood entirely.

Hannah Arendt explains this idea in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She states: “The essential point is that the necessities for propaganda are always dictated by the outside world and that the movements themselves do not actually propagate but indoctrinate”(468). Arendt is making the important distinction that propaganda serves to promote a specific ideology, specifically those outside the regime. In totalitarian movements, it’s not simply enough to just promote the idea, it becomes important for the citizens of the regime to accept the beliefs that propaganda promotes uncritically. Inside totalitarianism, truth becomes irrelevant because the mind itself has been captured.

This idea is mirrored in what O’Brien achieves with Winston. By the time Winston develops a love for Big Brother, he is no longer the Winston he once was with opinions, doubts, or judgments. He has been remodeled into a perfectly conditioned member of the party.  The telescreens, posters, and other forms of propaganda that attempted to spread a certain ideology now merely sustain the illusion of normality. The successful domination of the party had occurred in Winston’s mind. He himself had become mechanized to carry out the party’s ideologies. 

Orwell and Arendt both argue that totalitarian regimes shift from manipulating ideologies to destruction of the self. Winston’s final sense of peace is not really peace at all but rather a lost sense of submission and apathy. His mind is silent as all past efforts to resist have been annihilated. When one’s individual thoughts are destroyed, domination becomes irrefutable and propaganda is no longer required as a method of control. 

Midsemester Essay:

Chapters:

1984:

1. “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).
2. “They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified – when that happened, the claim of the party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist and never again could exist any standard against which it could be tested”(93).
3. In the end the party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they would make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy”(80).  

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). 

Thesis:

Totalitarian regimes use manipulation of truth to strengthen their regime because controlling people’s beliefs is more powerful and oppressing than controlling what they do.

Abstract: 

When the line between objectivity and subjectivity is blurred, who knows what’s right? As those in control of manipulating the truth continue to exercise their power in that way, those unaware become more oppressed and less aware of accurate reality. Thus, when lies are perpetuated and facts are rewritten, truth ceases to be an objective reality and becomes only what power declares it to be.

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.

Black Book of Communism:

“One must not only destroy the active forces of the enemy, but also demonstrate that anyone who raises a hand in protest against class war will die by the sword. These are the laws that the bourgeoisie itself drew up in the civil wars to oppress the proletariat … In a civil war, there should be no courts for the enemy. It is a fight to the death. If you don’t kill, you will die. So kill, if you don’t want to be killed!” (p. 74).

Brave New World:

“We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future…”he was going to say “future world controllers,” but correcting himself, said “future Directors of Hatcheries,” instead”(13).

The fundamental nature of totalitarianism suppresses autonomy. This can be executed through a myriad of methods, such as fear, physiological manipulation, propaganda, and more. Comparing Martin Latsis’ explanation of the Red Terror in The Black Book of Communism with the Director’s description of predestination and conditioning in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World highlights how, while the methods of control differ: one utilizing fear and death, and the other predestination, both function using the same logic of totalitarian control because they inhibit any human autonomy.  

In Izvestiya on August 23, 1918, Latsis writes, “One must not only destroy the active forces of the enemy, but also demonstrate that anyone who raises a hand in protest against class war will die by the sword… In a civil war, there should be no courts for the enemy. It is a fight to the death. If you don’t kill, you will die. So kill, if you don’t want to be killed!” (p. 74). Here Latsis presents a chilling ultimatum, “kill or be killed.” Terror isn’t just used as a threat but as a permanent rule intended not only to eliminate enemies but also to intimidate any voice of dissent. In almost encouraging the act of killing and violence, any and all legal process, moralities, and human conscience is eroded. Framing this violence as a necessity essentially distorts murder into law. Latsis’ words highlight how totalitarian regimes justify extreme violence and fear as a form of weapon against the enemy, further emphasizing how the survival of the regime is dependent on such violence. 

In Brave New World, the Director of Hatcheries explains, “We also predestinate and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future…”he was going to say “future world controllers,” but correcting himself, said “future Directors of Hatcheries,” instead (13). This system, while more subversive, is arguably equally dehumanizing. Here, the regime does not hesitate to mark opposition. Rather, it ensures from the very start of life that individuality is nonexistent. Through the state-imposed methods of conditioning, humans are molded into their predetermined positions without question. The director’s casual fix from “future world controllers” to “future directors of Hatcheries” highlights the efficiency of the system. The ability to aspire beyond one’s place in society is not an option; thus, everyone remains appropriately in their place. Here, freedom is not eliminated by violence or any other method, because it never existed in the first place. It was taken by manipulative, psychological, and engineering strategies to ensure that the individual is subordinated entirely to the needs of the state. 

In comparison, these two passages reveal how, despite the differing methods, the same result of control is achieved. The Red Terror, utilizing pure fear and violence, ensures absolute compliance from individuals because any other behavior would incur death. Alternatively, Brave New World is rooted in predestination and conditions in which individuals comply because they are conditioned to do so and don’t fundamentally understand or know disobedience. Both situations show absolute control over human autonomy, either by taking it away or stopping it before it ever even develops. Both systems instrumentalize human life, inhibiting individuality or autonomy.