Jenni Fagan, Bentham’s panopticon
Friday
Having just reread Eugene Zamiatin’s dystopian novel We (1920) for the first time since encountering it in 1972 in a junior-level utopian literature class, I’m struck by how it captures the cult behavior of Donald Trump fans. The novel even features a protective wall.
Although Zamiatin supported the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, by 1920 he was already seeing worrisome signs of group think. Unable to get his novel published in the Soviet Union, he smuggled it out, after which he too had to leave. Although Zamiatin died unknown in Paris in 1937, We would go on to have a major influence on dystopian literature, especially Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Madeleine L’Engel also draws on it for Wrinkle in Time.
Zamiatin sets We in a future world named “OneState,” which is ruled over by “the Well-Doer.” Everyone wears uniforms and lives in a version of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which is to say, glass apartments where everyone can see everyone else. The society runs according to the ideas of assembly-line inventor Frederick Taylor, and anyone who steps out of line is executed.
The narrator, D-503, is in charge of building “the Integral,” a spaceship that will convey OneState ideology to other worlds. Although initially a good citizen, D-503 falls in love with a rebel (for our purposes, think of her as a Never Trumper) who wants to tear down the “Green Wall” and let the outside world intrude. D-503 prepares to use the Integral in the service of the revolution but is betrayed and, along with most of OneState’s inhabitants, lobotomized. The book ends with him dispassionately witnessing the torture and execution of his rebel love under a giant bell. Part of the wall has also been destroyed, however, letting in the outside green world and putting the future in doubt.
I thought of Trump cultism as I read the novel because of how everyone outsources their thinking to the Well-Doer, automatically adopting his talking points and instructions. No need for anyone to grapple with complexity or nuance. At one point, a state poet explains the logic of the state, sounding very much like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor or philosopher Erich Fromm, who attributed Hitler’s success to a fear of freedom:
You see, it is the ancient legend of paradise. That legend referred to us of today, did it not? Yes. Only think of it, think of it a moment! There were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. No other choice. Tertium non datur. They, fools that they were, chose freedom. Naturally, for centuries afterward they longed for fetters, for the fetters of yore. That was the meaning of their world weariness. Weltschmerz. For centuries! And only we found a way to regain happiness….No, listen, follow me! The ancient god and we, side by side at the same table! Yes, we helped god to defeat the devil definitely and finally. It was he, the devil, who led people to transgression, to taste pernicious freedom—he, the cunning serpent. And we came along, planted a boot on his head, and…squish. Done with him! Paradise again! We returned to the simple-mindedness and innocence of Adam and Eve. No more meddling with good and evil and all that, everything is simple again, heavenly, childishly simple! The Well-Doer, the Machine, the Cube, the giant Gas Bell, the Guardians—all these are good. All this is magnificent, beautiful, noble lofty, crystalline, pure.
Don’t be fooled that Trump’s most devoted followers in the House of Representatives call themselves “the Freedom Caucus.” They might as well say, with Orwell, that “slavery is freedom” given that they want to impose Trumpian orthodoxy on any who seek to stray. Their version of the Gas Bell is primarying candidates. The result is GOP legislators who resemble OneState’s lobotomized subjects:
On the corner, the doors of the auditorium were ajar, and a wide column of about fifty people—the word “people” is not the right one. They were heavy-wheeled automatons seemingly bound in iron and moved by an invisible mechanism. Not people, but a sort of human-like tractor. Over their heads, floating in the air—a white banner with a golden sun embroidered on it and the rays of the sun: “We are the first! We have already been operated upon! Follow us, all of you!”
The wall holds back a messy world that doesn’t conform to the reigning ideology, consisting as it does of both external nature and our own natural selves. Trumpists’ version of the Green World is anything that threatens a white, male-run America. Before he has been awakened, D-503 relies on the wall for his essential identity:
Soon I reached the road running along the Green Wall. From beyond the Wall, from the infinite ocean of green, there arose toward me an immense way of roots, branches, flowers, leaves. It rose higher and higher; it seemed as though it would splash over me and that from a man, from the finest and most precise mechanism which I am, I would be transformed into…But fortunately there was the Green Wall between me and the wild green sea. Oh, how great and divinely limited is the wisdom of walls and bars! This Green Wall is, I think, the greatest invention ever conceived. Man ceased to be a wild animal the day he built the first wall; man ceased to be a wild man only on the day when the Green Wall was completed, when by this wall we isolated our machine-like, perfect world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and beasts….
Here, meanwhile, is D-503 witnessing Well-Doer who, like Trump on his escalator and his helicopters, descends from above:
It was He, descending to us from the sky. He—the new Jehovah—in an aero, He, as wise and as lovingly cruel as the Jehovah of the ancients. Nearer and nearer He came, and higher toward Him were drawn millions of hearts. Already He saw us. And in my mind with Him I looked over everything from the heights: concentric circles of stands marked with dotted blue lines of unifs—like circles of a spiderweb strewn with microscopic suns (the shining badges). And in the center the wise white spider would soon occupy His place—the Well-Doer clad in white, the Well-Doer who wisely tangled our hands and feet in the salutary net of happiness.
At first, the Well-Doer’s reelection goes according to plan as thousands of hands are raised to reelect him. Then, however, events take an unexpected turn:
“Those opposed?”…
This was always the most magnificent moment of our celebration: all would remain sitting motionless, joyfully bowing their heads under the salutary yoke of that Number of Numbers. But now, to my horror again I heard a rustle—light as a sigh, yet it was even more distinct than the brass tube of the Hymn….It took one hundredth of a second only; I saw thousands of hands arise “opposed” and fall back.
Never-Trumpism doesn’t succeed in the book as the rebels are caught, tortured and executed. The conclusion of the novel is suffocating, especially when one realizes that Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mao and Kim Il-Sung will rise to power in the decades following the book’s publication. But because of its bleakness, We serves as a warning, reminding us to keep fighting for our constitutional democracy.
The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been.
Further thought: In his column yesterday, Charles Blow of The New York Times describes Trump cultism as follows:
The rallies are part tent revival, part circus, part call-and-response game show. Like-minded people with look-alike faces populate them. They are orgies of sameness in which crowd dynamics produce and escalate a tornado of affirmation and acceptance until it is perfectly admissible to surrender any remaining morality to the mob.
It is a religious experience of conversion and immersion, a born-again baptism in which people emerge bound to one another and bound to Trump.
Trying to pry them apart from Trump, to make them somehow see the light and turn on him, is a time- and energy-wasting exercise. Trump is wielding a Jim Jones-level of influence and control over these people, and deprogramming the members of his cult would take more effort than most are willing to commit.