For two weeks the United States Government was closed for business. Two weeks of stagnation because one half of the members of one chamber of one section of the United States Government decided it would be a good idea to shut the whole thing down—in order to repeal a law that has made it through the tests of validity outlined in our Constitution. For two weeks Government windows were shuttered, and yet the majority of United States citizens went, and continue to go, about their daily lives as if nothing happened—so great is the level of dysfunction to which we’ve become adjusted. This is the world that exists eighty-one years after the publication of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, one in which Huxley’s world doesn’t seem as new as it once did.
For much of recent history, American politics has been defined by George Orwell’s 1984. For Orwell, the future state is one always at war, a state in which the government spies on its citizens and represses any substantive forms of expression. Rights do not exist and Big Brother is always, always, watching. It’s not hard to see the parallels between this dystopia and the present we live in. America is constantly at war, be it one with boots on the ground (the War in Iraq), wars of words (the Cold War and the “war” with Syria), or wars on philosophical concepts (the wars on terror and poverty). It’s under the pretense of these wars that the United States Government has found the authority to roll back civil liberties and collect vast amounts of formerly private information. The recent Snowden leaks have reminded the American populace of that fact, of what it really means to live in a post 9/11 world where the Patriot Act is law.
Even in light of these government actions, public response has been tepid at best. Within months, the initial anti-NSA fever has died out, and the bills proposed to roll back NSA oversight have been all but forgotten, buried under reports about Miley Cyrus and Meg Ryan. In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, literary critic Neil Postman writes:
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance…feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy… In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
There is a reason why over eighty-five million more people tuned in to the Superbowl this year than the State of the Union Address, and a reason why more people visit Facebook per month than The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post and Fox News websites combined: Americans are overwhelmingly apathetic in the areas that count.
We see this problem manifested in a variety of ways. Take, for instance, the growing rise in partisanship across the nation over the past twenty-five years. More and more people are forming positions based on party platforms and Sunday show talking points, with citizens relying on their “ideological leaders” to form their positions for them.
We see this clearly in a recent Jimmy Kimmel segment about Obamacare. Ignoring how the staff must have edited out those who knew that the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare are the same thing, there is still the problem that there are still voters oblivious of this key fact. In one portion of the Kimmel clip, a pedestrian exclaims:
It’s nice that everyone can afford it, and everyone should be able to afford it. But to force people to pay something and doctors to make something is limiting their ability to do their job, that’s kind of anti-American.
Gibberish? Yes, but it’s taken straight from current conservative talking points. Here is a man who claims to be against the “socialist” institution of Obamacare, but paradoxically agrees that pre-existing conditions shouldn’t bar a person from getting health insurance, that young adults should be able to stay on their parents medical plans until the age of 26, and that companies with over fifty employees should provide health insurance. His relationship with Obamacare is almost disturbingly similar to Taylor Swift’s brand of feminism: Taylor loves the man and hates the patriarchy; this man loves the policy and hates the name.
We live in a country where “spin” matters more than the truth, and where towing the party line is more important than sincerely holding opinions and engaging in substantive debate. This disregard for the truth—this apathy toward interacting with it—drives American politics. It may be easy to argue otherwise: a quick glimpse at our political system suggests that the fever of emotion in our political discourse shows that Americans are the exact opposite of apathetic. I would disagree. Here, political apathy has many faces, and it is as present in the heart of a registered voter as is it in the ranks of “independents.” Within our political framework, apathy isn’t characterized merely by the lack of voting but the insincerity of it, the absence of convictional courage. We see it clearly in the clip above: in our politics voters forgo forming their own opinions in favor of adopting those of their party, opinions that when scrutinized don’t line up with their own personal convictions. Still, people couldn’t be bothered to formulate their own opinions and so they turn to the safety and artifice of their party platform. In short, people care too little to think for themselves and so they let others do it for them.
What locates this situation in the realm of Huxley’s Brave New World and not 1984 is that here people opt not to decide for themselves: we simply choose not to choose. In Orwell’s world, such a circumstance was impossible: the option to decide was never given, and if it were taken there would be consequences. In Huxley’s world, our world, we do to ourselves what Big Brother did to the citizens of Orwell’s: we give up our ability to think for ourselves. Imagine how different Congress would be if House races, made contentions by consistent large-scale voter turn out, were based on substance and action rather than rhetoric and grandstanding. For one thing there would have been no shutdown. Now, if only that were the case.
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