The Goldstein Machine

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell (1949)

When you think of 1984 you probably think of Big Brother.

Depending on how long it has been since someone assigned it to you in high school, Big Brother may be all you remember. But perhaps you remember other features of the story, too. Maybe Newspeak rings a double-plus-ungood bell in your memory as the novel's invented language of efficiency and political control. Perhaps you recall Room 101, a personalized torture chamber in which the state subjects its victims to their darkest, most private fears. Even if you don't remember the role they played in 1984, you probably remember the thousand derivative dystopian stories they spawned. The irony, I think, is that none of these features of Oceania's system of authoritarian control alone is necessary, much less sufficient to explain what it is that makes 1984's imaginary state so powerful and stable. Indeed, there is only one indispensable practice, only one tool upon which Ingsoc's stability depends:

The Two-Minute Hate.

Men can, after all, resist the image of an all-powerful leader like Big Brother. I mean, of course they can - these are some of our best stories! There are real stories, like Spartacus, the Decembrists (St. Petersburg, not Portland), the American Revolution, or the French Revolution. There are also made up stories, where in many cases this human resolve in the face of an all-powerful antagonist is an even greater force! Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Katniss Everdeen, Antigone, Prometheus - they all poke the gods of our world in the eye without a care for what happens to them.

Men can find freedom within the confines of restricted language like Newspeak, too. Shostakovich's great Fifth Symphony ends with a hollow triumph, a plausibly deniable send-up of forced patriotic joy. The Island escaped the heavily censored confines of Apartheid South Africa by means of deep symbolism and simple subterfuge. Bei Dao and the Misty Poets rebelled against the oppression of the Cultural Revolution with both hidden meanings and hidden activities, penning their verses in the secret places of the countryside.

Neither is it certain that men will be cowed by the threats of violence and deep, dark fears of a Room 101 alone. Solzhenitsyn and many others kept forbidden ideas and thoughts alive through Samizdat. Burmese juntas could never fully suppress subversive back-room thangyat performances. Many of Paul's most famous epistles were penned from a prison cell. MLK's too. There is Luther, who could do no other. There is Bruno, who was in less fear upon learning that he would be burned alive than those who pronounced his sentence. And there is Jan Hus, who died singing the words that condemned him.

No, the thing that makes Ingsoc work, the thing that makes any control over what is allowed in any society work, is the transformation of external compliance into internal conviction.

Men cannot be controlled by mere violence, oppression, or tyranny. We must be compelled by our very nature to rush to the defense of those who would control us.

The shrieking image of Emmanuel Goldstein on the screens of every citizen during every Two-Minute Hate was the glue that held together every other tool of oppression. It disarmed their natural opposition to the All-Powerful Man, because sometimes Oceania needs someone who can get things done. It weakened their resolve against threats of fear and violence, because against an opponent like Goldstein how could the government not be ruthless and uncompromising? And with Goldstein's spies seeking to spread his lies to new minds, would it not be wise to enforce language that upheld the values of Ingsoc? There is a reason why the final step on Winston's path is not to submit to Big Brother but to love him.

Hannah Arendt understood this.

Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other. The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt (1951)

Most modern interpretations of Orwell understand it, too. Mostly. That is, they tell us how those who would control us almost always manufacture an external enemy and point us at them like a gun. This is useful enough and true enough. But it isn't complete. I think the magic of the Two-Minute Hate is not simply that we are easily conditioned to huddle together to oppose an external threat. The magic of the Two-Minute Hate is that creates a Perpetual Emotion Machine - a Goldstein Machine, if you will - that is purposefully designed to sustain a permanent enemy.

A Goldstein Machine must be a perfectly plausible threat. It must have some basis in fact or be otherwise believable in a way that human behavior might predict.

A Goldstein Machine must be a perfectly intolerable threat. It must be existential. It cannot be borne. It is a thing which would abuse and destroy us if we do not do the same.

A Goldstein Machine must be a perfectly undefeatable threat. It must be so entrenched and enmeshed with the machinery of culture, government, and society that it can never be fully extricated.

For the last 20 years or so, there have been two tools through which media, government, corporate, and other institutions have sought to control and direct the thinking of American citizens: a Goldstein Machine called Systemic Racism, and a Goldstein Machine called the Deep State.

Photo Credits: Reuters, AFP

What does it mean to say that Systemic Racism or The Deep State is a Goldstein Machine? It means, very simply, that each is a constructed threat built on a plausible basis that is presented as simultaneously too dangerous to be permitted to exist and as too entrenched to ever fully root out.

Now, if the word plausible gives you heartburn, relax. You can think the stories we tell and the energy we invest in these threats are as preposterous as you'd like, but that doesn't change that there are kernels of truth in the ideas underlying both systemic racism and a deep state. We are a generation removed from wholesale racial segregation of major public services. Discriminatory laws created massive de facto gaps in access to varieties of public and private resources. It would be naive to imagine that many of these gaps would not be effectively systemic, or at least much stickier than most of us care to admit. Likewise, the civil service is famous for delaying, subtly interfering with, adopting strict interpretations of, and otherwise exerting their will concerning budgets and policies across administrations in ways that operate well outside of the will of voters. Regulatory capture, intelligence department compartmentalization, departmental budgetary discretion, and administrative law judges all contribute to a thread of constant state power that exists, if not wholly independent of legislative and executive oversight, pretty damn near.

Systemic Racism and The Deep State are not made up things. And even if you think that they are, the effects they attempt to explain are plain enough that it should be easy to see why large portions of the population find them perfectly plausible - even if you or I think that they are wrong.

The deeply symbolic form with which we are presented Systemic Racism and The Deep State is also designed to designate them as perfectly intolerable. These are not mere bad things to oppose; they are evil social forces which good men must have the internal conviction to resist. "White Silence = Violence" does not leave room for passivity. Neither do doctrines like Ibram Kendi's anti-racism, the contention that anything short of a full commitment to dismantling systems infected with historic discrimination or whiteness is itself an act of racism and oppression. Likewise, when Donald Trump calls the complicit media the enemy of the people, how does one stand on the sidelines in good conscience? When the Deep State is equated with a theorized underground child abuse ring, what good man would stand idly by? In their purest, most memetic form, to those who have invested their identity in compatible ideas, these perfectly intolerable Goldstein Machines transform external compliance into internal conviction.

But the thing that truly makes these threats Goldstein Machines is that they are fundamentally built on a foundation of entanglement with our political and social systems. Indeed, the contention that they are hopelessly embedded in ways we cannot imagine is the most common argument about the threat they represent! The very nature of Systemic Racism is that it is so embedded that nothing short of a full dismantling of society can extricate it. Before it became an epithet through misuse and overuse, to be woke simply meant that you were awake to the subtleties of a thing that had woven itself into the very fabric of our culture. The very nature of The Deep State is that it is so embedded that nothing short of a full dismantling of society can extricate it. They are perfectly undefeatable by design.

A Goldstein Machine is a threat which simultaneously MUST be destroyed and CANNOT be destroyed.

Beyond internal conviction and compliance, there is one more thing which always emerges in the shadow of common knowledge of a thing which MUST be but CANNOT be destroyed:

Grift.

It makes sense, of course. The nature of a permanent threat cannot help but to create an equal and opposite permanent cottage industry of grievance for those who would lead the charge against that threat. They are the first to see its use as a cudgel, as a get out of jail free card, as a one-size-fits-all excuse and explanation for everything in the world. And why not? The threat is critically important, people believe in it without much urging, and you can milk it as long as you'd like. The Goldstein Grift is the inevitable afterbirth of every Goldstein Machine.

In 1984, as in many such dystopias, the Goldstein Grift was to become a party apparatchik. O'Brien fits here along with the rest of the Inner Party, but many more sit at that unknowable, unpredictable periphery between Inner and Outer, where the aspirant must be ever ready to prove his conviction and make his play for power. Conviction alone is not enough - even Parsons was purged.

For the better part of two decades, one Goldstein Grift in our world took the form of administrative bloat within universities, secondary education institutions, Fortune 500 human resources departments, and departments of state, local, and federal government whose occupants were motivated by the desire to dismantle Systemic Racism. Intersectional theory allowed this bloat to metastasize into DEI Inc., which now sought to dismantle hidden, persistent structural biases in cultural institutions which might disadvantage those in infinite demographic dimensions perceived as being marginalized by those institutions. There were and are countless good people among the people who joined this mission, and certainly a list of useful achievements. Remember, there is more than a kernel of truth within the claims of deeply embedded biases in our culture and some of our institutions. But at the scale the movement reached at its zenith, it is hard to conclude anything but that DEI Inc. had become a glorified jobs program - a Goldstein Grift built on a perfectly plausible, perfectly intolerable, perfectly undefeatable threat.

For the first time during Trump's first presidency and with greater fervor now, a Goldstein Grift built to dismantle a massive unelected bureaucracy in the US government responsible for Everything Bad metastasized into MAGA Inc. It framed ordinary evils like forever wars, corruption, waste, and self-dealing - plus extraordinary evils like underground trafficking rings and demon worship - as the direct result of this intractable, all-powerful Deep State. There were and are countless good people among the people who joined this mission, and a list of worthwhile achievements that continues to grow. Remember, there is more than a kernel of truth within the claims of deeply embedded unelected institutions choosing political priorities and spending taxpayer money with little oversight or accountability. But at the scale the movement has reached, evidence is beginning to mount that the anti-Deep State campaign is also becoming a glorified jobs program. Only in this case, instead of supporting an ecosystem of academics, administrators, cancellation artists, and professional wokescolds, it's an army of podcasters, media personalities, preachers, minor officials and politicians willing to trade a bit of integrity for a seat at the table. It, too, is a Goldstein Grift built on a perfectly plausible, perfectly intolerable, perfectly undefeatable threat.

And its particular flavor of the Two-Minute Hate is playing out for us in real-time and in plain sight.

Why did it take so long for Bondi to release Volume 1 of the Epstein Files? Deep State.

Why did the long-awaited release of the Epstein Files deliver a more heavily redacted version of already released files? Deep State.

What will the story be no matter what happens from here? If the whole effort fails and no useful information is ever released? If information is finally released but it's not as powerful as expected? If future editions still have redactions? If it finally comes out and it's everything everyone expected but doesn't lead to the political downfall of all the right people?

There is no outcome to the Epstein Files that cannot and will not be made into fuel for the Goldstein Machine.

And Inner Party and the Outer Party aspirants in the thick of the Goldstein Grift don't care. They don't need to care. They got what they came for. And just like the people who wanted black communities to have better and more equal access to banking and credit got three-hour annual corporate implicit bias trainings instead, the true Outer Party members who just want the government to be accountable and transparent will continue to be fed a healthy diet of influencer access brags.

Meanwhile, we will be discouraged from considering that maybe just maybe a bunch of rich and powerful people from the deep Inner Party of both MAGA Inc. and DEI Inc. are in on the game enough to protect both each other and the grifts that keep on giving. It almost seems like it's just one big joke that the rest of us aren't in on.

If you would forgive the double reference to Hannah Arendt - and you really should - there is an element of the banality of evil to all of this. After all, nobody's being thrown in torture chambers to face their most personal fears. As much as President Trump sure does seem to want to test whether Congress has any jealousy over its authority to pass budgets and laws, and as much as big media might have shoved Biden is Healthy as an Ox narratives down our throats for a year, let's be honest. There's no Big Brother in our world. No, the worst we can say is that we're being force-fed deeply manipulative symbolic expressions of a thing we already care about that transform everything into being about that thing, that make us rage at its influence over everything in our world, desperate to destroy it, filled with the kind of fury that can only come when we realize that the symbol of a perfectly undefeatable enemy can never be destroyed.

That's the seduction of the Two-Minute Hate. It starts to feel like justice. It starts to feel empowering.

The tragedy of the Two-Minute Hate is that it slowly turns those of us who actually care about the share of power wielded by unelected career administrators and persistent social inequities into mere expressions of the symbol shrieking on our screen. It's what makes us stop working toward addressing the actual thing we care about and start working toward serving the symbolic thing that is necessary to prop up somebody else's grift. Because there is not one but two parties at play in our version of the story, our Goldstein Machines will rise and fall within the public consciousness. They may even be absorbed into newer, more effective forms. But they and the grifts that surround them will persist.

So what is a citizen to do? Same thing we always do.

Clear Eyes - We see when a thing we believe is used as a symbol and abused for a grift. We reject that we have to prove our belief in it to anyone else. We reject that we have to participate in the Two-Minute Hate any time someone conjures it to channel our rage.

Full Hearts - We don't let our skepticism turn into cynicism. If we care deeply about a thing - whether it is systemic inequities or entrenched unelected power - we continue to care deeply about that thing. We show that care by resisting those who would twist our belief into a symbol they can use to control us or others.