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There is so much in Orwell’s 1984 - wild flights of imagination, or exaggerations and heightening of daily experience, that pinpoint and shed new light on something that is all around us, and that we might not quite see, or see clearly enough, without Orwell’s help.
Listen to Orwell, please:
Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. . . . He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.
Let’s focus, right now, on the Goldstein Effect — that is, the identification of some kind of threat, demon, or enemy, followed by an effort to make that person the face of something horrible, dangerous, and pervasive.
(I will say more about Orwell’s Goldstein in due course; bear with me for a bit, might you?)
The left certainly has its own Goldsteins. The right is really good, these days, at producing Goldsteins. Some individual politicians, in North America and Europe, are terrific at exploiting the Goldstein Effect.
Here are some targets of the Goldstein Effect: Earl Warren, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Fauci, Zohran Mamdani.
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Some people on radio and television, and on social media or podcasts, are masters at Goldsteining. They might be geniuses at it, in a way.
Here’s what they do. They take a person who has done something bad, or said something bad, or is said to have done something bad or said something bad. They display that person’s face, voice, or words.
It’s easy to hate the relevant Goldstein. It might be hard not to hate the relevant Goldstein. This is so even if everything said about Goldstein is a lie, or an exaggeration, or an act of extreme unfairness. (Jon Stewart is extremely talented, and he’s good at Goldsteining. Sean Hannity is also good at it.)
Typically, and importantly, the Goldstein Effect is designed to direct rage or contempt not just at Goldstein, but at Goldsteinism, which is larger than that single person. The relevant Goldstein stands for something, or stands in for something.
It might be the corruption of the Supreme Court; the evils and left-wingedness and cluelessness of academia; the horribleness of “millionaires and billionaires”; the derangement of people who care about animal welfare; the indifference of neoliberals; or the determination of the Democratic Party to open the borders and let noncitizens vote.
Why does the Goldstein Effect work? Why does it work on people who know that people are engineering it?
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As Orwell describes it, the Two Minutes Hate begins with a flash of a face on a large screen. It is Emmanuel Goldstein. He is “the Enemy of the People.”
His is “a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable,” and also unmistakably foreign. In part because of its foreignness, it produces fear and disgust.
Goldstein defines disloyalty to the nation and (what is the same thing) the regime: “He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity.” Goldstein is responsible for heresies and treacheries of all kinds.
In the first 30 seconds of the Hate, Goldstein’s voice is heard as he denounces the party and calls for freedom of multiple kinds. “He was abusing Big Brother,” and “he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought.”
The result is to produce rage and fear in the audience,. Goldstein is a threat. Wherever he is, he commands a kind of shadow army, a network of conspirators.
In the second minute of the Hate, people become frenzied. They leap and shout, trying to drown out Goldstein’s maddening voice. Children join in the shouting.
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Orwell’s hero, Winston, finds himself unable to resist. He, too, begins to shout, and also to kick violently. On his part, this was no mere show. “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part,” Orwell writes, “but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.”
No pretense was necessary: “A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smart faces with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.”
Despite loathing Big Brother, Winston felt his feelings “changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock” against threats.
As his hatred mounts, it turns sexual. Winston fantasizes about raping and murdering the girl behind him.
At that point, the Hate rises to its climax. Goldstein’s voice becomes that of an actual bleating sheep, and for a moment, his face is transformed into that of a sheep. Big Brother’s face then fills the screen, powerful, comforting, and mysteriously calm. He is the contrast to Goldstein: the medicine that cures the disease.
Whoa.
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American politics is full of manufactured Goldsteins. But why does the Goldstein Effect work?
One reason is the sheer power of salience. It’s pretty noisy out there, and it can be hard to know what to think. If someone identifies a Goldstein, it organizes things. The part stands in for the whole. Goldsteining can be comforting, even. It can even be thrilling. Orwell certainly captures that.
If you identify a Goldstein, or if someone does that for you, you know what to think. There is a connection here with the “illusory truth effect,” which means that if a statement is repeated, people tend to think that it is true, even if, in real time, they are told that it is false. The illusory truth effect works in part because people find it easier to process statements that they have heard repeatedly.
When the Goldstein Effect is at work, it is really, really easy to process the statement (“Goldstein Is the Enemy of the People”) - and it is hard not to think that in some sense, the statement is true.
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Of course some people really are villains. Some people really are enemies of the people.
Orwell picked his own: Big Brother, the Goldsteiner-in-Chief.