Before George Orwell became “Orwellian”, he was a small, sickly, eight-year-old boarder called Eric Arthur Blair. The self-described “goldfish” was sent to swim among the “pike” at St Cyprian’s school, a rural establishment in the UK countryside, to prepare him to sit for a full scholarship at Eton College, a leading English boys’ boarding school with a tradition of excellence.
I somehow imagine that growing up in a family steeped in the arcane inner workings of the day-to-day administration of the British Empire set the tone. His father was a mid-level bureaucrat turning the levers as the subdeputy opium agent in the opium department of the Indian Civil Service. Yes, you read that correctly! I imagine it as a state-sanctioned cartel to sell the “good sh*t” to the Chinese. His own service stint as a colonial policeman in Burma (now Myanmar) must have supplied plenty of material too, but I’m certain that the seeds of his world-building dystopian fantasies were, most definitely, planted at school.
In as much as “recollections may vary”, more so the ones laid down in childhood, Orwell described this early schooling episode in the grimly, ironically titled essay, Such, such were the joys. It was published posthumously to avoid charges of libel. Orwell already thought of childhood as the peculiar state where you “live for years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings”. I’m uncertain as to whether any of us outgrow those.
Why would anyone want to curb the influence of the ‘prolefee’ and ‘doublespeak’ on and into the next generation?
St Cyprian’s was, for him, its own special category of juvenile psychic despair. It was a place that embodied the “continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people — in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.”
This “beastly” formative experience must have forged a rudimentary world view that produced the neologisms now so familiar to all of us (even those who’ve never read a word of Animal Farm or 1984). Orwell birthed Big Brother, thought police, vaporised newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime, face crime, unperson, memory holes and any number of similar freakishly accurate terms that seem to both channel and forecast the inherent nature of the present moment.
Do I place too much emphasis on early experience for the creative output of later days? Perhaps, but please bear with me. I’ll try not to indulge in this kind of thing too much, but I couldn’t help thinking about Elon Musk.
He’s been inserting himself into stuff again — fighting for his Grok AI’s pornification of innocent women and children that have flooded X. And now, weighing in with invective against the legal bid to ban social media for children under 16 in Spain as they follow the Australian lead. Obviously Musk is calling the Spanish prime minister all sorts of names, including “a tyrant” — I mean, why would a country want to protect its kids from a bunch of rampant capitalists whose only interest in said children is their unwavering attention — for the big bucks? The Spanish and the Australians are obviously fascists hellbent on preventing children’s God-given freedoms to exist as little receptive jugs into which every twisted billionaire gets to feed anything they please. Why would anyone want to curb the influence of the “prolefeed” and “doublespeak” on and into the next generation?
Musk, in full playground bully mode, is what counts as public discourse these days. Then I remembered Musk’s own “beastly” school life — thrown down stairs and beaten into hospitalisation in the piranha-infested waters of Bryanston High. The public schools of South Africa bore the particular imprint of the colonial office. They were nothing if not designed to perpetuate this kind of thing, imported wholesale from Great Britain. Plus, we had our own special nationalist jam spread on thick at veldskool indoctrination camps where Musk was bullied even more.
I read everything that Musk tweets (X-es?) and realised that he also had early influences on his current creative output. He’s also imagining a dystopian future of his own making. In this place, we’re all happy little X minions in submissive service to his technocracy. What happens when we resist and step out of line? Will his AI robot enforcers show us who’s boss and exile us to Mars? It’s a fantasy worthy of the most bullied little rich boy in the universe.
Orwell left the colonial police service and joined the fight against the real Spanish fascists. He aligned himself with freedom, the poor and the downtrodden after his early brush with the imperial system. His real and imagined worlds were pretty hopeless and bleak — world wars will have that effect. But so are Musk’s visions. Perhaps a memory hole would be preferable.
