Orwell's mistake

Eva Vazquez

No, we are not living in Orwellian times, although it would reassure us to understand with a single book what happens to the truth.

was always successful

but since a Trump White House spokeswoman called the lies "alternative facts," the novel rose to the best-seller list.

However, Orwell did not anticipate our time. The characteristic of Big Brother in

is that it supplies the entire population with a unique truth, in the form of newspapers, books, songs, posters, parades, banners. Members of the party wear identical blue jumpsuits. Everyone has to stand up when listening to the hymn -

-, even if they are alone. And most importantly,

is created

, which destroys and creates words to limit thought. It is pursued, not because someone can express something other than the official truth, but rather think about it. Orwell fables a unique system of centralized thought. And this is replicated in the entirety of the individual's life, at any time, in all his acts, in an oppressive way.

The opposite is true in our societies, as illustrated by an anecdote once related by Alastair Campbell, a former adviser to Tony Blair. He was giving a talk against Brexit and a woman was rebutting him insistently. He said, "Let me give you a series of facts." To which she replied: "I am not interested in your data, I am interested in my feelings."

Today the truth is private and there are as many as pairs of eyes look at the world. Nothing could be further from the single, controlled and centralized truth of Big Brother. Today you can trust vaccines or not; and it can even be believed that they are control tools of a perverse conspiratorial network, headed by Bill Gates. Climate change can be denied to the point of threatening life on Earth. Each tribe chooses its truths and gurus: the act of knowing has been replaced by that of believing. Information - which opens the door to knowledge - has been replaced by superstition. Each tribe lives in its parallel reality, first brought about by fragmentation; and then exacerbated by polarization.

"Nothing belonged to the individual, except a few cubic centimeters inside his skull," laments Winston, the protagonist of

-. On the contrary, in the attention economy, those cubic centimeters are today our most precious asset, for which everyone struggles on content platforms, social networks, websites ... In Orwell's novel, control is exercised from the power, located outside the individual, inward. Today, on the contrary, each individual willingly gives up their inches of skull by placing their attention where they are trapped, since the design of social networks acts as a great lure. There is nothing more opposed to a single, centralized truth dispenser. By giving our attention, we give up our own thought and will. But everything is sweetly distracting us. In the novel, on the contrary, oppression is present even in people's breathing, when telescreens dictate the daily gymnastics table to individuals.

In reality, the regime described in

has the truth as an existential reference, because it is the starting point of its work of falsification and control. It devotes enormous resources to destroying it, both past and present, and thousands of officials are working to make it, recreate it, and misrepresent it again, as many times as necessary. In

, the truth exists and is fearsome because if it were to be discovered, it would threaten power.

Defending today that the truth exists has become an antique for which there is no evidence.

It weakens because it is indistinguishable from the lie.

It is no longer necessary to turn falsehoods into truths: that opposition is simply irrelevant.

Everything is diluted in the magma of tweets, headlines, images, videos and all kinds of

that make up the news every day, make networks burn or occupy cyberspace.

Yes in

the truth is a body suffocated with a pillow on the bed, in 2021 the truth is one among millions of bodies that dance in a confused way under an incessant noise.

Orwell perfectly described totalitarianism, but he did not anticipate the future when it came to our relationship to the truth.

Or perhaps the mistake is to think that he intended to do so.

Democracy, as a regime of public opinion, is based on the exchange of ideas, but public discussion is drowned out by a noisy charlatanism whose links with reality are increasingly tenuous.

Let's protect the debate, because a society that does not share an elementary consensus on the facts is a broken society.

Irene Lozano

is a writer.

His latest published book is

.

She is also a deputy in the Madrid Assembly.