If you revise history enough to serve your purposes, and shout at them in classrooms and from loudspeakers, sealing the one-sided social contract with violence against the independent, humans will fall into line, Orwell said, like so many sheep. People will believe whatever they are told, and are no better than automatons. Reading 1984 can make you feel depressed and suicidal, as if there is no hope for the race and we may as well end it now. A story worthy of Orwell is the one which describes the Nixon administration effort to find a rationale for the bloody U.S.-supported coup in Chile. One adviser suggested the strategic geographical importance of Chile.
Chile is a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.
The schools I attended made a show of democracy and of justice without any substance. We held student elections, but the opinions the candidates were allowed to utter came from a cookie cutter, as we discovered in 1968 when a candidate campaigning against the Vietnam war was removed from the ballot. Smiling, urbane Dean Wolf would call you into his office and make you understand that you were a piece of shit, beyond redemption. President Nixon, nervous and shaky, would appear on television to describe acts of murderous madness in a vocabulary so technically and morally indirect and obtuse that it was hard not to draw the parallel to the official explanations of the endless strategic repositionings of the great powers in 1984 . The difference, as I came to understand, between 1984 and reality was not the behavior of leadership, which easily slides into lies, torture and empty words, but the nature of human beings, who cannot easily be led or changed.