Orwell as Psychologist: On the limits of mind control
Is "brainwashing" possible? In describing 1984's dystopia from a female perspective, Sandra Newman reexamines the psychology of Orwell's classic novel.
As a teenager, the ending of George Orwell’s 1984 chilled me to the bone. Despite this — or, because of this — it quickly became my favorite novel.
That an ostensibly political novel should be my favorite might seem ironic, given that I’m not extremely political — especially not in today’s hyperpolitical climate. But for me, 1984 was never really a political novel. In fact, it is a book that warns against the hyperpoliticization of every aspect of our lives, against a world in which political propaganda replaces art, science, sex, and friendship.
But on a deeper level still, it is a book about psychology. My first introduction to concepts such as linguistic relativity and solipsism came from Orwell. Arguably, these are deeper concepts than the psychological themes of propaganda and brainwashing which 1984 is best known for.
I first collided with these ideas when I read 1984 at age 14. Back then, fiction (as opposed to science) was really the only way for me to explore complex psychological concepts. At the time, I accepted Orwell’s conclusions about the mind at face value. Over two decades later, with the benefit of both life experience and scientific education, I see things slightly differently. While most of Orwell’s deeper ideas about language and cognitive dissonance still hold up to my more mature assessments, it’s the more basic character developments that sometimes seem lacking.
Sandra Newman’s recent novel Julia (published in October 2023) — a retelling1 of Orwell’s story from a female point of view — addresses Orwell’s character development in at least two important aspects.
The first of these deals with how Julia Worthing, the love interest of the original novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is portrayed. Most reviews and media coverage of the new novel have already focused on this point.
The second aspect, where this post might spark some original discussion, deals with the limits of mind control and belief change.
From this point forward, I’ll assume you’ve already read the classic novel by Orwell, but I’ll give warnings before any spoilers for the new novel by Newman.
Getting into character: Julia Worthing
Julia tells the story of 1984 from the viewpoint of the eponymous character, Julia Worthing, whom we already know from her affair with Winston in 1984. The original novel was never a typical love story, but there were aspects of Winston’s relationship with Julia in 1984 that many readers find wanting. On my first reading of 1984 as an eighth grader, I didn’t think much of Julia’s decision to hand an “I love you” note to a character she basically doesn’t even know.2 As an adult rereading the same story, this feels cringey and unwarranted.
Indeed, there’s little disagreement that Winston’s relationship with Julia is the weakest aspect of the original novel. Besides feminists, even conservative thinkers like C. S. Lewis3 found it lacking. Though these reasons were mostly divergent (Lewis didn’t like the “bad smell” in erotic passages), both lobes of the Venn diagram nearly converge in Lewis’s quip: “There is too much in it of the author’s own psychology: too much indulgence of what he feels as a man, not pruned or mastered by he intends to make as an artist.” In Newman’s words, Julia’s character was “a projection of a male fantasy”.
Newman makes brilliant sense of Orwell’s weaker dialogue and character developments, not by rewriting them, but by giving them new context. And rather than suppressing the story’s sexual elements, there is still plenty of sex — far more than in the original novel, much to the late C. S. Lewis’s would-be chagrin (sorry Victorians).
Getting out of character: belief change
But Julia’s character isn’t the only element of the original novel that I now find implausible. 1984’s dark ending, in which Winston is reeducated and finds love for Oceania’s Stalinesque dictator, Big Brother, no longer matches well with contemporary accounts of human psychology.
Here, some historical context is useful. Orwell wrote the original novel from 1947 to 1948, during the early years of the Cold War (a term Orwell himself is credited for popularizing). During this period of ideological tension, fears over communist indoctrination stirred. Though Orwell didn’t live to see it, having died in January 1950, the ‘50s soon erupted with an all out obsession over “brainwashing” after some American POWs became communist sympathizers during captivity in the Korean War. Partly catalyzed by this red scare, the CIA launched project MKUltra to test and develop new brainwashing tactics, which focused heavily on the psychedelic drug LSD. Subjects for MKUltra were not volunteers, but, rather, unconsenting victims. After many grossly unethical experiments, the CIA eventually concluded that LSD’s effects, while powerful, were too unpredictable to be useful for mind control.4
In short, brainwashing is largely pseudoscience. The concept is no longer taken seriously by most psychologists, and it’s no longer generally admissible as a defense in US criminal courts5. That’s not to say that subtler forms of psychological manipulation are impossible, or even that one cannot be stripped of one’s identity through trauma. But the stories of ideological defection in Korean War POWs don’t require much in the way of new psychological theories or techniques. In the end, any ideological belief change that occurred in POW camps is likely explainable in terms of survival mechanisms activated during extreme stress and isolation.
Call this brainwashing if you like. But, it’s not the sort of brainwashing that Big Brother could use with total efficacy. If the purpose of Oceania’s Ministry of Love is to reeducate doomed prisoners so they cannot remain defiant — even privately — to the day of their executions, then I predict such a project would very often fail. This skepticism was largely shared by Aldous Huxley, author of the other great dystopian novel Brave New World. Huxley wrote to Orwell: “Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power […]”. On the other hand, contrary to the later conclusion of MKUltra, Huxley did believe that mind control was achievable using hypnosis and drugs.6
Of course, most of Oceania’s other horrors are fully realizable. And even a mere attempt toward the sort of reeducation that the Ministry of Love aspires to would be one of humanity’s most despicable projects ever, on par with Nazi concentration camps and Soviet Gulags. And yet, if total indoctrination were possible, then it is surprising that 20th Century totalitarianism in Germany and Russia didn’t already accomplish it.7
Major spoilers below
In Newman’s retelling of 1984, torture doesn’t quite serve its intended purpose. Though Julia’s captors in the Ministry of Love give her truth drugs reminiscent of MKUltra and subject her to nearly the same torment as Winston8, she emerges from the Ministry of Truth hardened against Big Brother, rather than softened to him. Her epiphany at the close of Chapter 21 is an inversion of Winston’s epiphany from 1984: “She had won the victory over herself at last. She hated Big Brother.”
Of course, I can’t be sure that Newman had the same motivations for this inversion as I would. Perhaps she simply felt that a feminist retelling of 1984 should depict Julia as a strong female character, rather than one who succumbs to mind control. Or perhaps Newman wanted to subvert expectations with a different ending than the original novel. But regardless, I find Newman’s psychological intuitions to be stronger, in many ways, than Orwell’s.
End of major spoilers
Closing thoughts
Reading Orwell’s 1984 as a young teenager catalyzed a loss of innocence. At an impressionable age, the novel’s ending suggested to me that love and hate can be flipped with sufficient force.
This isn’t entirely wrong: thoughts are feelings are indeed fleeting. The self, as we commonly understand it, is not a solid or immutable core. MKUltra was on to something with LSD, as powerful psychedelics really can weaken or temporarily dissolve the ego. But Orwell’s terrifying hypothesis, that sincere love for a dictator can be aroused by a combination of torture and gaslighting, doesn’t necessarily follow from this.
Some readers will run Orwell’s thought experiment with different results. This is, naturally, a shortcoming of thought experiments. They are not real experiments. But the Ministry of Love is obviously not an ethical experiment to run in real life (and neither was MKUltra, for that matter). Hence, the value of both formal thought experiments (in academic philosophy) and informal thought experiments (in fiction).
Just as researchers attempt to replicate each other’s findings in science, literary authors may attempt to replicate each other’s findings in fiction. In this light, Newman’s novel is a valuable follow up experiment that questions some of Orwell’s findings.
I’m incredibly grateful to speculative fiction novels like 1984 for shaping my interest in the human mind at a young age. And while I still consider 1984 to be a brilliant dystopian novel and cautionary tale — more relevant today than ever — I’m now old enough to see that Orwell’s account of human psychology isn’t perfect. Fiction is fiction and not reality.
If you enjoyed the photography in this post, click below to see more from my photoshoot with Elena Schüler 👇
In my view, Newman’s novel is not some historical revisionism within the 1984 universe. That would, of course, be Orwellian in the most ironic possible way. Newman addressed this in a Washington Post interview: “What Orwell was objecting to was the erasure of history — not that somebody else comes and interprets history differently and is also speaking …” In my view Newman’s new work rebukes totalitarianism just as completely as the original novel and is fully aligned with all of the major political themes of 1984: surveillance, cult of personality, censorship, etc.
According to the interview referenced above, Newman also first read the novel at approximately the same young age with approximately the same non-reaction.
Lewis, C. S. (1966). "George Orwell". On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature. Harcourt.
Anthony, D., & Robbins, T. (1992). Law, social science and the “brainwashing” exception to the First Amendment. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 10(1), 5-29.
For example, the writing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived an eight-year sentence to the Gulag as a Soviet dissident in Stalinist Russia, demonstrate the resilience of personal individual identity even under the harshest totalitarian oppression.
Granted, this isn’t a perfectly controlled thought experiment: Julia somewhat mitigates her torture using an insider’s tip and isn’t given the same metaphysical lecture by O’Brien as Winston received. But the conclusion still seems to be that torture can backfire.