Recently, through the influence of my Russian girlfriend, I read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, which was an inspiration to the far better known 1984 by George Orwell.

I used the word “inspiration” rather loosely though, much like you’d say that Pepsi is an inspiration of Coca-Cola. Strictly speaking, it’s true, but the influence is far deeper.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

In a dystopian society run by a monolithic one-party state that controls every aspect of life, there is a man who meets a woman. Through this contact with the woman, the man begins to develop deviant, and even heretical ideas. Eventually, this culminates in full-blown rebellion, at which point the state stamps out the dissidents like it has done a thousand times before. A high ranking official has a philosophical chat with the man and forces him to undergo a procedure that fundamentally breaks him. By the end of the novel, the hero has all but completely lost the spark that made him human. He neither wants nor cares about the woman for whom he had lusted before.

This outline could work for either book quite well, but at its core, the societies portrayed are very different. Orwell’s Oceania is a totalitarian state that rules through fear, famously saying “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”On the other hand, there is Zamayatin’s OneState which rules by making the case that “Reason must prevail” — its populace doesn’t have an external threat but an internal one, they’ve been convinced that their biggest enemy is themselves and their baser instincts will destroy them if they don’t continue to behave in the way prescribed by the state.

I do not know what direction the world is heading in — I leave that sort of prophecy to charlatans like mystics and consultants — but I do believe that it will take one of those two shapes. Whether by fear of an external foe, or by the promise of not being responsible over the consequences of our actions, humans will eventually be tamed. History has all but been a steady march towards total domination.

Sure, perhaps the chains and the cudgels forcing us to do things have become invisible to the naked eye. But tell your debt collectors that you don’t intend to pay and I assure you that they’ll soon materialize before you.

The day that we invented the hand plough to plant crops instead of going out in the wilderness to hunt and forage, is the day that our ancestors traded freedom for security and stability.

“You’re right, spending hours in back-breaking labour is so much better than hunting for 2–3 hours per day”

This wasn’t a comfortable life either, we were subject to the whims of nature and there were periods of famine. If we take the skeletal stature of a man, we can more or less see how well fed they were in a given period. As such, we can make the case that the average person was better fed in the pre-Neolithic revolution than when farming became widespread.

The average male European nowadays is around 177cm-178cm (5’9’’ in freedom units), whilst the average male 16,000 years ago was 179cm (5’10’’), thereafter with the advent of farming, heights plummet drastically over the next few thousand years with the lowest point being in the late Neolithic, from 5000–3000 BCE, with an average of 161cm (5’3’’) for males. Not even Bronze Age kings (in 1450 BCE), the billionaires of the ancient world, were immune to this decline in height and were only 171cm (5’7’’) — a far cry from their hunter-gatherer ancestors. It took well into the modern era, with all the technology and proper nutrition that entails, to eliminate that discrepancy

All this to say that comfort wasn’t part of the social contract until fairly recently.

Evermore, we’re willing to defer more responsibility to people and institutions for security, stability and comfort. What does it really matter that an algorithm picked what show you ought to watch, what person you ought to date, what job may be right for you?

Is this not in its way using the fear of missing out on the“best” (as defined by the computer), and the promise of comfort and stability to control you? It’s a synthesis of both sides of the coin — it doesn’t matter whether it’s head or tails, you’re still ultimately using the coin.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Oceania or OneState ruling you, the end result is still the same. Even the same story can happen in either society. Despite the fact that if the two culture were to ever meet, they’d detest each other.

OneState would view Oceania as too primitive for using man’s base instincts to control them through fear and love, and far too wasteful by having permanent war. Oceania upon looking at OneState would say that it’s far too complacent, everything is so efficiently optimised for the present environment that any slight deviation from its expectations could destroy them. Besides that, people have far too much freedom despite having a structured schedule, who knows what mischief they might be up to if you don’t keep an eye on them?

The underlying philosophical problem is that OneState looks at everything in grand civilisational trends, where statistical predictions are possible because everyone is a number; and hence can be treated like mechanical instruments. Whilst Oceania understands people on the individual level and it knows that deep down they’re neurotic creatures that can be exploited.

Apple famously used the idea of not being a blind consumer to sell blind consumption — heads or tails, they win

Be that as it may, whether we’re cogs in a grand machine or we’re being nudged at the individual level to behave in a way for the benefit of the state, civilisation is here to stay. And I believe we’ll go through cycles of both tyrannies. That is the future — a coin toss hoping it lands on something different than heads or tails — but ultimately being disappointed with the result. History will be a long series of defeats, where either political extreme learns to master their particular brand of tyranny, only to ultimately lose.

If man is devoid of natural obstacles that would curb their ambitions, they will ultimately bring about their doom. In caveman times any idea that was too silly would get destroyed by the stark reality that abject poverty brings with it. But if you add to it godly capabilities, fuelled by technological ingenuity, bad ideas can go a long way before they’re proven wrong by reality.

Hence I believe that this is the civilisational tennis match that is in store. Liberalism will bloom in times of plenty, and social taboos and norms will be bent or broken outright. The grand civilisational machine will keep chugging along. We’ll simply be cogs in the system, doing our part as good consumers. We’ll be atomized and with no recourse to the wider community beyond what interactions are hoisted upon us by the systems. Ever so slowly losing that spark which made us human to begin with.

Under liberalism, we’re numbers on a ledger, we have the illusion of freedom primarily because that freedom averages out in the macro-level — any deviance is averaged out by the overwhelming normalcy. It doesn’t particularly matter what we think, as long as it broadly falls within what is acceptable.

Yet there comes a time where the civilisation machine can’t handle the sheer strain it’s being put under, and it will break. The bounds that tied civilisation together will degenerate enough because of the atomized individuals, to such an extent that society can’t function properly.

Humans are social animals, who yearn for a sense of belonging and purpose. Not one that is hoisted from on high, but one that is provided on a peer to peer basis. For practical purposes we don’t care about the mass of humanity, we care about our social group and people — much like we care about a murder in the street we live in, but we don’t really care about a genocide a world away.

Without purpose or community, the jingoists and populists will rise to attempt to give us one. And they will stoke the flames of arbitrary groups like nationalism, ethnicity, sexuality, or any such random characteristic and will clash against the atomized mass of individuals.

Eventually, one of these more cohesive groups wins and asserts its dominance, and naturally because their main source of cohesion is hate towards the “other” a perpetual war ensues. If they ever were to actually defeat their foe, they’d just raise the standard of what it counts to be “pure”. That’s what sows the seeds of their destruction, they begin alienating the rest of humanity that doesn’t meet their standards.

When there are enough dissidents they rebel and win. Yet because they are not bound by any characteristic beyond hate for those that do have clear standards of membership, they begin valuing the system more than any one group of people. And the cycle repeats itself ad nauseaum.

It’s often said that in their own way, 1984, We and Brave New World (which is even more of a rip-off of both properties) are the future. But people get so caught up in this multiple choice question, where they attempt to pick which one of these is the right one, that they forget that perhaps the correct one is “all of the above”.

History doesn’t have an ultimate destination point, it’s a moving target that shifts moment to moment, depending on what the mass of humanity happens to be thinking and feeling in that particular moment. And I fear that in one form or another, tyranny is here to stay.