When Life Imitates Fiction

By Peter Pavarini

As a fiction writer, I’ve found that most of my creative ideas spring from personal experience or by studying the lives of others – both past and present. Despite what many people think, most writers don’t need to “make things up” if they are good observers of human nature.

A Year Unlike Any Other.  As I write this, we are in the final two weeks of the most contentious presidential campaign – certainly in my lifetime. The year 2020 would have been extraordinary even without a national election of such consequence. In a matter of months, Americans have been subjected to the impeachment of a president, a pandemic of historic proportions, an economic shutdown and rapid recovery in most states, and a pivotal vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court about to be filled by a jurist whose judicial philosophy is diametrically opposed to her predecessor’s. If all of this hadn’t actually happened, one could reasonably assume I just outlined the plot of a cheesy, political mini-series, or perhaps a thousand-page work of pulp fiction I hope to write someday.

As much as I’d love to share my thoughts about everything that has happened this year, I’m dedicating this blog to the demise of one cultural norm I believe will change the course of human history.

Bringing Fiction to Life.  The phrase “life imitates art” is attributed to Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde who challenged the classical notion that art is mostly an imitation of life. Although I have never been a big fan of Mr. Wilde’s writings, I’m beginning to understand what he was getting at in his 1889 essay “The Decay of Lying”. Apart from obvious examples like copycat criminals who re-enact fictitious crimes[i], the literary work which approximates the world we’ve been living in this year is George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

According to the New York Times, the term “Orwellian” is the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a modern writer.[ii] The Grey Lady should know. America’s “paper of record” has for years been the arbiter of what news is fit to print and must be accepted as fact by the masses.

Any high schooler who has had the privilege of reading Orwell’s classic would be familiar with Oceania – the fictional nation in which the story is set, Winston Smith – the lowly bureaucrat in that country’s Ministry of Truth, and the hellish society controlled by the Thought Police and Big Brother. Sadly, most of today’s youth probably missed that educational opportunity because they were studying more progressive curricula like the “1619 Project”.

For the younger generation, Nineteen Eighty-Four is not fiction, but reality. Ubiquitous video surveillance is no longer the imaginary technology it was when the novel was written in 1949. Television screens are indeed always on, and the videos created by mobile phones, drones, body cams and concealed security cameras routinely record everything we do or say. No one who grew up in the age of reality TV should be surprised that the star of “The Apprentice” is now the president of the United States, nor that the moguls of the Orwellian media/entertainment/Big Tech complex are so intent on removing him from office.[iii]

The Media’s New Mission.  The media’s mission is no longer to be curious about things like a candidate’s financial entanglements with foreign governments of China, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. There’s nothing to see or report about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop if what we might find is contrary to what Big Brother wants you to know before November 3^rd. The media must assume that the public is too stupid to understand how the financial dealings of the Biden Family are different – or perhaps the same as those of the Trump Family.  Claiming the need to protect us from hackers and other “distractions”, the media insist that their Twenty-First Century mission is to keep the citizenry in the dark about such things.

As pundits like to say, all presidential elections are about the “soul of America”. Regardless of party, every candidate in modern history has claimed to be morally superior than his or her opponent. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows that’s exactly the kind of “doublespeak” Orwell featured in his novel. Any candidate who expects to be elected must tell the electorate not what they need to hear, but what they want to hear.[iv]

Why Truth is the New Hate Speech.  There was a time when most Americans reasonably assumed that a person in any position of authority had a legal if not moral duty to tell the truth. No longer. An alarming number of our fellow citizens act as though they would rather be lied to than confronted with evidence of corruption that has permeated our political establishment for decades. Neither of the two major political parties is exempt. That’s why the Orwellian censorship of the Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook[v] and Google, corporate America’s embrace of cancel culture, and the mind-numbing brainwashing of our nation’s students is playing out exactly as Winston Smith experienced in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc[vi] since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.”[vii]

Alternative Realities.  In the 1999 film “The Matrix,” the main character Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill by the rebel leader Morpheus. The red pill represents an uncertain future, but it would free Neo from the enslavement of the machine-generated dream world he lives in and allow him to escape to the real world. Even though the “truth of reality” would be harsher than the simulated reality of the Matrix, it represents freedom. As Morpheus says, if you take the blue pill, your story ends. You wake up in bed and believe whatever you wish to believe.

America in 2020 exists in the simulated dream world of the Matrix. American voters have a choice of pills. In a matter of days (possibly weeks), we will know the future they have selected.

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[i] There are many, but the case that comes to mind is that of Josh Cooke, who shot his parents wearing a trench coat similar to the one worn by Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix”. At his murder trial, Cooke used the movie as a defense for his behavior.

I  Nunberg, Geoffrey, “Simpler Terms: If It’s Orwellian, It’s Probably Not”, New York Times (June 22, 2003).

[iii] Italian author Umberto Eco said this: “at least three-quarters of what Orwell narrates is not negative utopia, but history.” Eco, Umberto, “Apocalypse Postponed” (1994).

[iv] See my previous blog, “Tell It Like It Is” https://alessandrocamp.com/2020/08/22/tell-it-like-it-is

[v] Even Leftwing outlets like Mother Jones acknowledge this censorship, although they believe it has benefitted Republicans more than Democrats: “To be perfectly clear: Facebook used its monopolistic power to boost and suppress specific publishers’ content—the essence of every Big Brother fear about the platforms, and something Facebook and other companies have been strenuously denying for years.” Bauerlein, M. & Jeffrey, C. “Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say” (October 21, 2020).

[vi] “Ingsoc”(short for English Socialism) is the political ideology of the Party’s totalitarian government in Orwell’s “1984”.

[vii] From Chapter 1 (Ignorance Is Strength) of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” in George Orwell’s “1984”.