chad gable having his entire cheeks and hole out 30 minutes into raw was so startling and sobering
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i was having a breakdown over this class a few hours ago but i do really enjoy linguistics. i think once i actually get past the learning curve that is memorising the fundamentals, i’ll be fine. it’s just NOT the best time to have unmedicated adhd and memory issues TT
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There’s Always a Bigger Fish
Note on the text: I used Clarence Brown’s translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We as published in 1993 by Penguin Books
Our gods are here below, with us, in the Bureau, in the shop, in the toilet. The gods have become like us-ergo, we’ve become like gods. And we are heading to you, my unknown planetary reader, we’re coming to you to make your life divinely rational and precise like ours” (68).
It is for you to place the beneficial yolk of reason around the necks of the unknown beings who inhabit other planets- still living, it may be in the primitive state known as freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically infallible happiness, we shall soon be obliged to force them to be happy (3).
Many people consider We to be the originator, the very cornerstone, of dystopian fiction. Orwell himself said that reading We was what inspired him to write his magnus opus, the ultimate piece of dystopian fiction 1984. The problem at the center of We’s universe is pride. Although it initially sets itself up as a parable of the fight between freedom and happiness it ends up being an eloquent attack on the arrogance of the human race. The truth is that humans don’t know themselves as well as they think they do. That for everytime we think we have figured it out, that we now know how to build the perfect society, history teaches us time and time again that we don’t.
Freedom and criminality are just as indissolubly linked as […] well the movement of aero and its velocity. When the velocity of an aero is reduced to zero, it is not in motion; when a man’s freedom is reduced to zero, he commits no crimes. It’s clear that the only means to rid man of crime is to rid him of freedom (36).
This book is set in the 26th century under a totalitarian regime, called the OneState, where any sort of individuality has been stomped out. Nobody even has a name. At most they have an identifying number, like our protagonist D-503. Every part of life has rigorously routinized. People can have sex for example but only on certain days, at certain times, and with people who have authorized to have sex with them. All emotions, and most forms of choice have been eradicated with the idea that with choice comes pain an suffering. That most people, given the option, will choose wrong and that therefore they must be forced to make the right choice which will result in their happiness as individuals and as a collective.
And yet, despite their best efforts, a form of “primitive” man still even within the seemingly perfect citizens of this seemingly perfect state. There are two places in novel where the imperfect and perfect parts of human nature clash so beautifully. The first of which comes when D-503 describes his hands as “long shaggy paws. I don’t like them. They’re a holdover from the savage era” (23). The second comes when he finds out that I-330, a woman who he has been sleeping with, intends to sleep with someone else:
there were two me’s. One me was the old one, D-503, number D-503 and the other […] the other used to just stick his hairy paws out of his shell but now all of him came out, the shell burst open and the pieces were about to fly in all directions… . ‘I won’t stand for it! I don’t want anyone but me to […] I’ll kill anyone who […] Because I lo[…] I […] (56-57).
So it’s obvious that even in this highly regimented, highly “evolved” society that something of primal man still exists.
The problem is that every generation seems to think that they are at the absolute top of the food chain. That they have the ability to make society better than it has ever been and that no one will be able to make improvements on them. The problem is that that’s not true. That nature is constantly evolving, building on itself. That our knowledge of the world and ourselves is constantly growing, and with that growth our old ways of thinking are constantly dying and being replaced by newer ways of thinking. That the “number of revolutions is infinite” (167). That there is, on this planet at least, to achieve a level of perfection that is stable enough for us to last for all eternity. There will always be something that we didn’t know, some new knowledge of ourselves or the world that we acquire which will supplant the old. Even Galileo for as smart as he was didn’t know what he didn’t know, and would astounded at how far our knowledge of the universe has grown since his time. And that, in essence, is the problem with all totalitarian like regimes, whether they’re states or churches or families. They all act like they’re the ones who finally cracked the code on human behavior, on how to live a perfect life, and that’s why they crumble so relatively quickly. They’re too strict to allow for the kind of growth and evolution that life requires.
This book is really clever in the way that it resolves everything. Because even at the end when the OneState succeeds, it still fails. The state builds a machine, called the INTEGRAL, which surgically removes the part of the brain where imagination comes from and forces everyone to undergo the operation. Because if no one can imagine a better future, they’re more liable to accept their present circumstances, which would indeed make this “the final revolution”.
Yet at the very end of the book D-503 meets a mathematician who claims to have solved the problem of infinity and that if he can just “calculate the numerical coefficient. You see everything is simple. Everything in calculable” (219). You can see in that moment that despite the OneState’s best intentions, the spirit of revolution lives on.
The State further loses on its original promise: the promise of happiness and peace. They were told that by being forced to “live the right way” they would all be happy. Instead they seem further away from happiness at the end of the book than they did at the beginning. At the beginning at least there were aspects of his life tha D-503 legitimately enjoyed whether they were hobbies that he enjoyed doing or people he enjoyed being with. But the end, when he has been robbed of his ability to imagine a better future for himself, what he’s left with isn’t contentment and a peaceful state of mind, but rather a really cold neutrality. He no longer cares about what happens to him or anyone else. Which in some sense is the opposite of happiness. So even when the OneState wins, it doesn’t. What a sly and ingenious ending.
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espero no ser solo un mutual para uds. sino también un canal de agitación proletaria
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