A Fate Worse than Nineteen Eighty-Four?

The ultimate aim of the Trump-Musk Broligarchy isn't 1984's Oceania - it far closer resembles the fictional past created by IngSoc to make totalitarian hardship preferable by comparison.

“The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death.”

Mrs Parson’s Children’s History TextBook - Part 1, Chapter 7, 1984

I was re-reading 1984 this week ahead of visting ‘The Winston Smith Library of Victory and Truth.’ when something struck me. Our modern mass surveillance capitalism is compared to Orwell’s dystopia so aptly and so often - including by myself - that it’s in danger of becoming cliché. There are parallels between the Party’s totalitarian insertion into every aspect of citizens’ lives and the omnipresent panopticon reach of our social-media Broligarchy …but what if we’ve been looking at the wrong aspect of the book?

The endgame of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg et al. doesn’t resemble Totalitarian Oceania—it looks far more like the fake history written by the Party within the book to justify the world they have built.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

IngSoc Party Slogan

This mutability of the past, of which - with doublethink - Winston is part creator, torments him and is the seed of his downfall.

In Part 1, Chapter Seven, Winston considers a children’s history textbook. (Bold added for emphasis.)

“The thing you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had really been like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children's history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary:

“In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water.

But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'. The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and –”

But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe. There was also something called the jus primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.”

This, Winston senses, is a distorted, exaggerated version of history used to justify current living conditions. He knows history is fabricated - it’s an open-party slogan. It’s his job. But he also knows it’s possible it was true.

When Orwell was writing this, he imagined a future hyperbole of the capitalism he knew - Looking back to the excesses of the turn of the century robber barons: such as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Carnegie. But some say, if anything, it’s unfair to the robber barons to compare the broligarchy to them - at least the Gilded Age robber barons considered that with great wealth comes great responsibility to the public good. Even if they didn’t live up to it, they recognised the concept. That no longer holds.

Capitalist Caricatures Come to Life

The worst excesses of IngSoc’s caricatured capitalists just fit so well with what we know of the characters of Trump, Musk et al.

Here’s Musk on Tesla’s Child Labour Problem -

“I heard a question raised about cobalt mining and you know what? We will do a third-party audit,” the world’s wealthiest person told a raucous, adoring crowd of shareholders at Tesla’s annual meeting in May 2023. “In fact, we’ll put a webcam on the mine. If anybody sees any children, please let us know,” he said, giggling.

But Forbes has learned that a year later, Musk’s promised webcam hasn’t materialised as expected. Rather than a live camera feed, the Kamoto Copper Co. that’s Tesla’s main cobalt source instead posts a single photo of the sprawling mine complex in southern Congo every month, taken by an Airbus satellite orbiting far above the Earth. There are no children to be seen, but that’s because the resolution isn’t nearly sufficient to reveal anything smaller than processing facilities and the scarred landscape of a highly industrialized open-pit mine.

Forbes Magazine -Elon Musk’s laughable solution to Tesla’s child labor worries

“extremely long hours, unsafe working conditions, harassment, scandals, fines, lawsuits, and above all else, a fear that one false slip will lead to termination.”

The Verge - Tesla’s ‘ultra hardcore’ work culture — as told by its employees

“Mr Trump allegedly rated female Apprentice contestants by their breast size and spoke about who he would like to sleep with.” - Sky News

“Well, I'll tell you the funniest is that before a show, I'll go backstage and everyone's getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant and therefore I'm inspecting it. You know, I'm inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good. [...] You know, the dresses. 'Is everyone okay?' You know, they're standing there with no clothes. 'Is everybody okay?' And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”

Snopes - Donald Trump to Howard Stern, talking about his beauty shows

Don’t let 1984’s History Become 2024’s Future

“An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead”.

Joe Biden’s Farewell Speech

It’s sobering to consider that the future Trump and Musk envision doesn’t resemble Orwell’s 1984 directly but is closer to the IngSoc Party’s fabricated history of the pre-revolution—an uber-dystopian capitalist past designed to make Orwell’s dystopian totalitarian present appear preferable.

We can’t let them control the present, or our future will be 1984’s dystopian past.