by Jenny Klejeski
In the 8th grade literature class that I teach, we are reading Animal Farm by George Orwell. If you’re not familiar with it, Animal Farm is a satirical allegory for the Russian Revolution, criticizing socialism and warning of the corrupting influence of power. Before reading Animal Farm, we read a memoir of a girl living in China during the communist cultural revolution of the 1960s called Red Scarf Girl. Before that, we read The Giver, a dystopian novel about a seemingly perfect community with some dark secrets.
Sensing a theme?1
In our introduction to Animal Farm, we watched this video on what the term “Orwellian” means. The video features one of the slogans from the totalitarian regime in Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”In our discussion of this maxim, my class talked about how it has shown to be true in the books we’ve read so far. Through censorship and revisionist history, those who are presently in power have the ability to control what people know of the past, which in turn affects the future.
It’s fairly easy for my students to recognize and understand this rather sinister idea within the context of totalitarian governments. They can see how freedom is threatened by propaganda, book burning, brainwashing, and other types of systematized coercion.
One thing that I want my students to understand in our study of these books is that this control is not limited to political dictatorships. In our American arrogance, I think we have a tendency to believe we’re immune to such control. We believe that with our freedom of speech, our ability to search the internet to find anything, our say in who our leaders are, our lack of censorship, our political diversity, that we are in total control of our present.2 But really, how in control are we?
I’m not talking here about crazy conspiracy theories or #fakenews or other paranoia-inducing ideas. I simply mean that we are fed half-truths about the world at every turn. There are people and institutions and conventions that control the present. Celebrities, political platforms, news outlets, social media all tell us a very particular narrative about what it means to be human, what we need to be happy, successful, and loved. We are told who the “other” is and how they are worthy or unworthy of our attention.
By being created in God’s image and likeness, God gave us the greatest possible gift: the ability to love, made possible only through free will.3 To love is to freely give over, through an act of will, that which is at the heart of who we are as humans: our freedom. Freedom finds its fulfillment in self-gift; it’s a response to the truth of another. It is only in freedom that we can truly love and it is only in truth that we can be really free.
What happens, then, when we accept anything less than the truth? We inhibit our own ability to love.
While we pity the victims of brainwashing, surveillance, censorship, and totalitarianism because we see how their freedom is limited, we ourselves fail to recognize how we have prostituted our own freedom to love in truth. How tragic it is to think of how cheaply we give our freedom to the highest bidder—how we limit our ability to love through the lies that we take in about ourselves, about others, about the world.
Modern people are not unhappy because they want too much. On the contrary, it’s that they’ve settled for far less than what they are created for.4 And this settling is not merely a passive acceptance of lies, but actually contributes to the creation of further deception.5
In David Foster Wallace’s speech “This Is Water,”6 he asserts that everybody worships something. Our freedom lies in choosing what it is that we worship and he states that the argument for worshipping some sort of spiritual being outside of oneself is that anything else will “eat you alive.”
He states: “If you worship money and things, [...] then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. [...] Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”
While Wallace isn’t coming from a strictly Christian point of view, his words still hold true. When we give over our freedom to anything less than the truth, we become slaves to the lie.
Christ said, “you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” In the encyclical Redemptor Hominis, Pope St. John Paul II states that these words of Christ contain both a requirement and a warning. The requirement is to accept truth as the condition for authentic freedom. The warning is “to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world.”
Before we pat ourselves on the back for being enlightened (be it regarding politics, religion, worldview, what have you), we ought to ask ourselves if that which we accept is true in relation to the fullness of truth revealed in Christ or if we are swallowing half-truths. Are we embracing the beautiful complexity of life or flattening the mystery? Let us seek to go about the world as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves.
1 My goal is for all my students to be wearing tin foil hats by the end of trimester... (kidding, of course)↩
2 Insight from Dan: In addition, the ability to create and craft an image via social media -- we can skew photos of ourselves and craft text to create and sustain the image we desire.↩
4 Rob, our resident C.S. Lewis expert, points us to this quotation: “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”↩
5 “Oh, what a tangled web we weave….”↩
6 Yes, this is at least the third time this speech has been referenced on this blog. Do yourself a favor and listen to the whole thing if you haven’t yet.↩
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