Today, a masked ICE agent shot in the head multiple tomes a woman in Minneapolis. She was a legal observer. In a social media post, the Democrats responded with a rather tired quote from Orwell: “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
As spine-chilling as this incident may be, and as much as it is important to read Orwell, I think Aldous Huxley described the American condition much better:
In Brave New World, Lenina shrinks from the “rushing emptiness” of the sea, demanding the radio to drown out profound feelings, showing her propensity to avoid her own humanity.
It is not that the Party is pushing an official version of reality down people’s throats. It is more about a distracted and uninterested society that could not care less about reality. Most of us are choosing to turn the blind eye on the atrocities of our times, drowning our own humanity in a sea of banal entertainment. The threat seems not to be a tyrannical oppressor but rather our the passivity of our own selves: a generalized apathy towards our own neighbors and an obsession with ourselves. It is in this atomization of society where power can do whatever they want. We are amusing ourselves to death.