Programming Patriotism

George Orwell refines the machine

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

-Jeff Hammerbacher, Founder, Cloudera

The most common criticism of the tech economy is that we got the incentives all wrong. We captured culture’s geniuses and transformed spirit to pixels. We teach our best thinkers languages no one else understands and sanctify their mission as enlightenment by cryptograph, a renaissance where art is paint by numbers and algorithms become values.

This begs another question: what did engineers do when there was no screen to sit behind and no virtual reality to control?

Enter George Orwell. Last week, we discussed his snobby ideology. This week, let’s dive into a lighter topic: patriotism. It’s a different kind of math, but politics and belief, still, are paint by numbers. At least if the propaganda for patriotism is strong enough.

This is no longer the case.

Source: Vox

In advanced democracies, infinite transparency, a vapid public service, and a self-serving gerontocracy has made trying to believe in anything like trying to swim in air. Our borders are our beliefs and our patriotism is personal.

The Belief Buffet

“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1869)

Living through both World Wars and the Blitz of London in 1941, George Orwell saw patriotism as survival. Writing in England, Your England (1941), he reflected on the experience of the Blitz and why England had to unite:

[H]ighly civilised human beings are flying overhead… trying to kill me….

There is no question about the inequality of wealth in England….But at the same time the vast majority of the people feel themselves to be a single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism.

He explains with the rigor of a Brexit advocate what really divides the culture: the global elite.

[T]he English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought….It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.

In times of desperation and under fire from an indiscriminate enemy, Orwell believes that England had to stay together despite all differences or it would become a non-country. Patriotism created purpose. In 1754, Benjamin Franklin published the first political cartoon to appear in the colonies during the French and Indian War to express the same sentiment: Join, or Die.

Orwell, a committed socialist and lifelong opponent of centralization and totalitarianism, displays here a decidedly unromantic rationalism. An engineer first and writer second, Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Flowers (2021), offers the portrait of a man who, in another era, would found an AI startup or paint Warhammer figurines with the same obsessive sense of justice and rage he applied to sub-optimal ideologies.

In all his essays and all his novels, from Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), Orwell shows a relentless need to optimize humanity by optimizing patriotism. In Orwell’s Flowers, there is proof that Orwell’s work persisted because he looked at patriotism as the programming language for a functional society.

The Herd Elect

[Orwell] drew his intellectual strength from the specific and tangible and from firsthand experience. It sets him at an odds with an era in which ideologies led many astray, not least as doctrines defending authority and delegitimizing dissent and independence.

-Orwell’s Flowers

In Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), it is the pigs that declare that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

As one summary puts it:

The pigs, particularly Napoleon, are considered bad leaders because they manipulate the animals through false propaganda, and threaten them with violence. They view the other animals with contempt and restrict them from having the same privileges they enjoy.

The pigs exclusively educate pigs. They use their earnings from the other animals to get drunk. They lie and change the rules to what works best for them. In their supposed defense of democracy, they become the oppressors. If there was a stock market or a mask mandate on the farm, one might imagine they would trade their holdings well before any new regulations were made public to the rest of the animals or be spotted maskless in a restaurant closed to the public.

Before Animal Farm, Orwell, a cop for five years in his twenties, was literally a pig.

In 1922, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. By 1924, at the age of twenty-one, he was in command of security for some 200,000 people. This is not the career path of an absent-minded artist, but of an efficiency-minded engineer. Serving the imperial cause as a police officer, Orwell couldn’t help but hate both the programming of the empire and the subjects that were the outputs, writing:

I was stuck between my hatred of the Empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts that tried to make my job impossible.

The beasts in question, of course, were his fellow humans. This cold perspective from a young Orwell reflects what must have made the race and class-based cruelty of British imperialism so effective and efficient: Utilitarianism cared nothing for the individual if they interfered with the algorithm of the empire. As his father before him served the government to facilitate the opium trade, George Orwell could only see society at a macro level. This ideology is virtue without malice or mercy but efficiency and inefficiency, in Orwell’s mind, was the ultimate evil. Inefficiency began with information by ideology, rather than objectivity.

As Orwell explained in 1944:

The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well the future.

Or as Rage Against the Machine would summarize in 2000’s “Testify” in a music video with clips of elected officials proselytizing the virtues of free trade:

Who controls the past now controls the future
Who controls the present now controls the past
Who controls the past now controls the future
Who controls the present now?

This verse, making use of Orwell, follows a verse about wars for oil:

Mass graves for the pump and the price is set
And the price is set
Mass graves for the pump and the price is set
And the price is set
Mass graves for the pump and the price is set
And the price is set
Mass graves for the pump and the price is set
And the price is set

What is an objective truth?

A luminary in one punk music verse, Orwell is the operator in the second.

Orwell may have had one in mind, but Orwell’s Flowers reminds us, there isn’t one, as Orwell’s life of dual values. By the end of the 1924, he led security operations in Syria for the Burmah Oil Company, which aimed to extract resources from colonies and eventually vanished into BP in 2000.

In a rant that could easily have been a podcast, Orwell even challenged Gandhi’s legacy on behalf of the imperial codebase. Reflecting in a 1949 essay, two years after Gandhi’s assassination, he shows a positively Sith-like anger that an empire’s subjects should disrespect the gift of tolerant imperialism:

At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in  ‘arousing the world’, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment?

One feels of him that there was much he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking. I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure.

The passage sparkles with Orwell’s infamous other side, that of the aristocrat’s sociopathy more generously known as nobless oblige. Orwell made his life’s work about correcting humanity not because he loved freedom or even his fellow humans, but because he hated waste. When describing a hanging he witnessed in Burma in 1931’s A Hanging, he gets emotional not about the man, but the sacrifice of output:

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short, when it is in full tide.

Leftwing? Rightwing? Conservative? Socialist? George Orwell detested centralized systems that dehumanized and devalued the beauty of the human spirit because it created glitches in our greatness. Explaining what would become his common summary of 1984 in front of unions and journalists, he wrote:

Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible Fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark.

In an Orwellian world, truth is cold, because truth is code. Liberty is a model we are all programming, all at once. Whether for better or worse, we may never know: it’s in the calculation we find conviction.

Where did Orwell find his human side? Check your inbox for the final Orwellian Litverse next week, Orwell Loses a War.