I guess I never really understood why Nineteen Eighty-Four was a stable equilibrium, if the world it described was at all true, because the fundamental thing is the game, either within states or between them, because there’d always be actors of greater or lesser talents, because there’d always be shocks to technology or inputs, so that there’d be no equilibrium
it’s good and fun to imagine this sort of terror, but I always found it hard to imagine it as a permanent state, because it seemed so fragile, so dependent on the virtues of the leadership and the competitive equilibrium between states – and I know the predictable answer is that the airbase is a little North Korea, but, with the caveat that I haven’t read the book in years, that never seemed like a strong or plausible reading of the text to me
like, Orwell was great at Stalinist terror, but even Stalin emerged through intra-party competition, and even Stalin was threatened by inter-state competition – as Adolf Hitler was done in by it – so it’s just hard to imagine that equipoise surviving anywhere for long, much less one that survives everywhere
the thing I’ve always feared is collapse, the collapse of complex societies, because collapse is the terrible thing we see again and again, and the thing you can’t insulate yourself against
if 1984 ended in collapse, with the factories torn up, the money turned to rubbish, with Smith on the dole and working on the black market, drinking himself to death, and all the little old tea-drinking pensioners wishing they hadn’t done away with Big Brother, and maybe it hadn’t been so bad being Airstrip One, and maybe we’d all have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those awful Continentals – but even that wouldn’t have been all that bad
the thing that really chills me is the Dark Ages
like, you read these books and you realize, like, hey, they don’t have pottery anymore, they barely trade, they’re barely literate, and they just fall into darkness for centuries, where even their names are forgotten
like, that’s the dystopia, to me
