Searching for Truth in Dystopia
The lie becomes the truth
“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” These chilling words from George Orwell’s 1984 repeatedly sprung to mind as I was reading The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. Snyder’s book chronicles the rise of authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia. He focuses on Russia’s influence over global politics in general and over America and the European Union in particular. Although the book was published in 2018, prior to Russia’s full-scale war with Ukraine, it holds even more true today.
Snyder goes into detail about the inner workings of Putin’s propaganda machine. Putin uses state-run media outlets, social media, and other tools at his disposal to generate support for his government’s nefarious agenda. Here, the parallels with 1984 are so blatant that they’re practically trite. Putin’s willingness to lie outright, and to repeat those lies ad nauseum until the public has internalized them (i.e., until the lie becomes the truth) paints a dark picture of human nature.
The politics of eternity
Snyder shows how Putin methodically primed Russia for the invasion of Ukraine by promoting a theory called “the politics of eternity.” The theory presents a dystopian worldview in which “one nation is at the centre of a cyclical story of victimhood.” Mother Russia, in this case, is the eternal victim, always under attack by some vague external enemy. But the enemy, like a chameleon, is forever shapeshifting. The specific nature of the enemy doesn’t much matter; it’s a minor detail in an all-encompassing historical narrative. 1984 opens with Oceana at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia. But as the story progresses, suddenly “Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.” What does matter in the politics of eternity is the existence of an ever-present threat looming over the state.
Eternity politics, per Snyder, are rooted in the ideology of the Russian political philosopher Ivan Ilyin. Ilyin, born in Moscow in 1883, was a committed anti-Communist, religious Christian, and proponent of fascism. Ilyin’s thinking inspired Putin and the oligarchs. Putin, having embraced eternity politics, managed to persuade his people that the Decadent West, embodied by the United States and the European Union, is out to destroy Russia and the Russian way of life.
The perils of binary thinking
Putin’s narrative is remarkably simplistic and facile; he portrays Russia as virtuous and the West as sinful. The politics of eternity require a binary understanding of reality, leaving no room for uncertainty.
Snyder’s book illuminated for me the fundamental purpose of truth in an open democratic society (a topic I discuss in a previous post) and the incredible fragility of our concept of reality. In the absence of a trusted source of information, how are we to know what’s real? And how can we see through lies so pervasive that they’re virtually inescapable? As Orwell said, “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.” How can we avoid this outcome?
The benefits of uncertainty
One approach that may seem counterintuitive at first is to embrace ambiguity. Putin’s lies are founded on strict, immovable binaries. He makes sense of the world by dividing it into categories such as Russia vs. the West, Good vs. Evil, and Us vs. Them. But adhering to binaries is problematic as it can hinder our search for the truth.
Truth is inherently nuanced and complicated and is antithetical to the dichotomous thinking that characterizes the politics of eternity. Perhaps, then, to pursue truth in a society that’s been turned on its head is to consider the possibility of multiple truths. Without accepting moral relativism, which has its own set of problems, we can strive to be curious about a wide range of opinions and perspectives. And hopefully, by seeing a situation from many different angles, we can begin to let go of crude binaries and make progress toward a future in which two plus two is four.