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O'Brien's map of the world
Voluntaryist, The, 2nd Quarter 2002 by Sherrer, Hans
Beginning from our earliest living moments, each of us constructs what can be referred to as a mental "map of the world." A map of the world is like a mental road map of how someone views the world. This mental map serves as an interface between what we are exposed to in the physical world, and how we internally evaluate that information. It provides a context and a reference point for understanding that external information. All incoming information is filtered through our mental map and categorized according to our conscious and subconscious ideas about the world and what we consider our place in it to be.
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This mental map is not intrinsically static, but it can be fluid and change shape if someone is exposed to a sufficient influence. Typically, the influence necessary to alter one's mental map is an event of life-- shattering intensity, such as a divorce, the death of a loved one, or imprisonment. However, events of a lesser intensity can distort it.
We respond to perceived information in accordance with the outline of our mental map, and it is precisely an attempt to influence those perceptions and the shape of the map itself, that all advertising of products and ideas is directed. Propaganda, for example, is a form of advertising a political agenda by using the psychological techniques developed to induce consumers to purchase products they otherwise might not want or need to purchase.
There has been an intense struggle for centuries between people whose mental maps are in conflict about the role of self-directed autonomy in the life of an individual. In general terms, one of these sides is comprised of individuals who believe that people should abandon or otherwise not assert their sovereignty and accept subservience to an omnipotent "power over" them, and the other side is made up of people who think they have a right to "rule" themselves (self-rule, as opposed to coercively controlling others) and engage in "free, conscious activity." [1]
Perhaps one of the most vivid portrayals of the inevitable clash between these two radically contrary views`of life was the events that led up to, and that occurred after, the arrest of Winston Smith and his friend, Julia, in George Orwell's 1984. [2]
By day, Winston and Julia were dutiful government employees who appeared to obey the innumerable rules of the authoritarian state they lived in. By night, however, they engaged in an unapproved love relationship in a room they had rented without government approval. Unbeknownst to Winston and Julia, the authorities were monitoring their illicit affair and they were eventually arrested and imprisoned.
Winston's interrogator was an official named O'Brien. As part of his treatment, Winston was asked over a period of time what 2+2 equaled. Every time that Winston responded with the correct answer, 4, his body was shocked with electricity. Likewise, if O'Brien held up four fingers and Winston responded four fingers, Winston was again shocked. The education of Winston had been deficient, because according to the state the correct answer was five. O'Brien's task was to modify Winston's mental map of the world so that he would believe to the core of his soul that 2+2 equaled 5; not 4. Winston's mental state would either be altered to the authorities satisfaction or he would lose his life in the process.
Thinking that what O'Brien wanted was for him to say that 2+2 equaled 5, Winston dutifully began to respond that the answer was 5. The electric shocks, however, continued. O'Brien didn't want Winston to say that 2+2 equaled 5, but to believe it as fervently as he believed when his interrogation began that 2+2 equaled 4. After a period of time Winston was reduced to a wretched physical shell of what he had been when he was first imprisoned.
One of the personal facts the authorities had compiled about Winston was that his worst fear was of rats. O'Brien's final step to put Winston's "mind right" was to take him to the most dreaded room in the building. As a mask with a caged rat was strapped to Winston's face, he mentally snapped and screamed out for O'Brien to torture Julia instead. Julia underwent a similar ordeal involving her worst nightmare that was equally successful at inducing her to betray and abandon her love for Winston. As the book ended, Winston and Julia happened to meet and they were both indifferent to each other. The state was successful on the most fundamental level at altering both Winston's and Julia's personalities-their mental and spiritual maps of the world that had originally drawn them together.
The relevance of Winston's and Julia's fictional ordeal is that at any given time the American government subjects millions of its own citizens to physical, psychological, and financial punishment, for things as inane as the forbidden love that Winston and Julia shared. Some of these people are real criminals, but the large majority are simply people of independent spirit whose mental map of the world will not make them willingly subservient to the government. The mechanism being used for the oppression of mental transgressors in this country is the law enforcement system that has overseen a more than 1000% expansion in the number of people imprisoned since 1973-from less than 200,000 to more than 2 million. There has also been a corresponding percentage increase in people held under the yoke of probation and parole, and those people now number over 4 million at any given time. These dramatic increases have occurred in spite of a relatively small percentage population increase in this country and a significantly lower crime rate today than in 1973.
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