[Caveat Lector: Please note this long post deals with subjects like torture, political/artistic suppression and artistic freedom. It also talks about how its not a good thing to be forced into fame or made to represent something that the establishment might need at a particular historical era, however rich and famous it might make an artist.]
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn Was Not a Happy Camper
One of the first thing any Regime, of whatever political stripe, has to do to survive, is control its artists, its writers, and its musicians. Imagine if Donald Trump had a Tolstoy or a Foster Wallace dissecting his evil regime. He would have to lock him up, I guess, like all the rest. I immediately think of another example in another era. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who by being pissed off by his exile from his beloved Russia, proceeded to write the most devastating critique of Stalinism and its offspring, which I have no doubt provided the all important ammunition necessary to finally collapse the iron Curtain. Before the worst nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl came the devastating monumental horrifying three volume Gulag Archipelago, books I still have nightmares about. I recommend anything by Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest of the great. That being the case, his work is challenging. Very.
2. Some Minor Downsides to Enhanced Interrogation
Now, speaking of political executions, killing or exiling your artists, being the example I gave, is the move of a weak and threatened bully, however vast and all powerful the technocratic superstate may be ostensibly. Attempts to re educate the artist through brainwashing and imprisonment simply makes for more copy that other writers may deploy to equally devastating effect. The trope about never pissing off writers is never truer than when you try to suppress writers, the pen being always and forever mightier than the sword, the ICBM or indeed the jackbooted ICE thug. Take the novel 1984. Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, can be seen to represent the fate of so many dissenting artistic intellectuals of that and any other time. Smith’s destruction at the hands of thugs and murderers acting in the name of political orthodoxy is a pale shadow of what countless unknown and unnamed have endured, not to mention those killed outright. In the novel we see a sophistication in the techniques used against Smith, for instance the knowledge of his darkest fears (rats), but in the end in real terms they, the purveyors of the theory and practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, crushed Winston Smith’s soul. The jackboot was deployed on his heart and mind and body. This was what’s best, they thought. Turn him into a pale shadow of his former self. Make him love Big Brother, that ultimate of toxic relationships, so to speak. instead of the scalpel of careful brainwashing, we have the destruction of the self, man turned to ghost. There are countless examples of artists tossed from bridges, taken out to deserts and executed, incarcerated in mental hospitals, robbed, cancelled, driven to suicide, tortured to an inch of their lives. With Winston Smith they killed the man within. In the end of this devastating book Smith was walking around playing chess and doing his job. But he was absent from his own life. Checked out. Again this is satisfying if you are the type that political orthodoxy at any price is the answer to the world’s woes.
3. What Art Does, and Why One Cant Outsmart It
These are extreme examples, yes. They happen, unfortunately, all the time. Problem is, well, its a huge loser move. Why? Hm, torturing and killing the brightest and the best is immensely satisfying if you are that insecure about one miserable writer or musician’s work, despite the fact you are running an empire of many former countries all tied up with the bindings of dictatorship by another name. By the very public shaming and imprisoning and disappearing of the creatives, one gets to show off the paraphernalia of state power. Its also a deeply stupid move, fora number of reasons. First and foremost it is a waste of human potential. Secondly if you are going to go around killing creative and intellectual superstars, well others get the hell out of your country. That causes a big brain drain from the aforementioned empire. Once word gets out, and it does, you will have the equivalent of Einstein and Freud leaving Germany because of the Nazis. Its a loss to society and to the future of your country to lose those types of people, the clever types who are touchy about freedom of thought and expression within limits of course. Next, its also messy. It leaves gore and witnesses statements and traumatized people and it make martyrs of their victims in your country. Then comes the backlash, the outrage. Then the writers will start writing, and the killing/exile/cancelling/torturing of writers gets memorialized by very good living writers who will write their very best novels about what happened, which in the end become instrumental in dismantling the kinds of regimes that do those kinds of things to people. Even the most controlling of surveillance systems, information gathering of the most forensic kind, eventually will be resisted and dismantled. People just cant live like that. No absolutist system, whether technocratic, technology based, or with sheer military might, can survive without a vibrant artistic community. Inevitably they, such aforementioned empires and countries, collapse from within. In order to survive society needs to be allowed evolve. It has its future trapped within the minds and hears of its people. Artists, philosophers, scientists, engineers, and the billions of people who go about their lives, need to express themselves freely without hurting one another. One can offend, challenge, disagree, disturb, shock, change one another’s mind, without hurting. A society does this in three ways (1)work, in other words labour for wages (2) love, in other words a just and caring society; and (3) creativity, in other words the exercise of the mind in exploring possibilities and future ways of being in the world based on a critique of the world as it is.
4. Some Casual Notes on the Complete Waste of Time That is Artistic Endeavour
Creating art will not win one friends, or enemies. It will not make one rich, or poor. It will not provide security or insecurity. It in a sense has no purpose except to describe what it means to live in the world of people and machines. Its effects, well, that’s different. The effects of art are world changing, truly seismic. Everyone consumes art, even psychopathic dictators. Hitler, for instance, was a Wagner loving painter, god help us all. The power for change happens when things get written down and depicted in a way not originating in policy and dogma or official versions of the truth. When a writer depicts life, human struggles, pain, society and history and relationships, as well as the deep inequities in any given society, in a way that resonates with skill with a great number of people, then there is a groundswell of a will for change. Art gives one, then many, a voice. To hear your own your own story is a timeless and liberating act, without the interference of church or state or mother. Art is life, as Pablo Neruda would say, and he knew all about exile and struggle. Life and especially ones story belongs to each individual as part of the whole. This is the statement of Art. Instead of a conflict between art and state, there should be a collaboration and alliance between the two. Sometimes this happens. Sadly, I have to say, its a rarity. Mostly the state locks their artists up in an endless cycle of giving and withholding funding depending on who is obeying the status quo ideology.
5. The Problem with Killing/Cancelling your Literary Dissenters in a Democracy
But in so called democracies, you cant imprison and subject a writer/artist to enhanced interrogation. Well, you can, but it will not get you re elected, and that’s super important if you like to be in power. People hate it when you disappear their pet writers. Sometimes it balloons into real moral outrage. Documentaries get made, not to mention news articles, video blogs, viral chain mails etc. You also cant disappear people without a trace. There’s too many cameras (for instance). Bodies turn up, investigators are dogged, unflinching, brave, forensic. Things will get found. Isn’t it interesting, just for instance, they are still talking about Jimmy Hoffa after all this time? Hypothetically you might, under force of some corrupt law, seize all the files and all the images around some rendition of some lesser scrivener, but never them all. Nobody disappears without a trace. Every phone has a camera. as do most doors, laneways, cars, shops, bedrooms, living rooms, doorbells…
6. The Real and The Unreal
So, factoring in that disappearing dissenters is an issue and most writers are smart enough to be careful to avert for themselves, there are a few options available to those who want to curb the writers who live in so called lands of the free. One is of course cancellation. The writer is found to be a pervert, a liar, a fraudster, immoral, untalented, a drunk. The far right might condemn the writer as an irreligious libertine who perverts the mind of the young and the far left might condemn the writer as sexist misogynist disrespecter of minority groups, someone who simply is out of touch with current trends – in other words uncool. This leads writers to be replaced in the top of the pops of ‘gifted geniuses’ who are leading the artistic trends as dictated by those who sign their cheques. Every so often one finds the system replacing their latest prize winner, a dangerous position for any writer to find themselves in, as they are the servant of two masters, the system and their talent. Now I make a distinction here between those who really are awful and immoral and really are sexist and racist and fascist, and those who have for the purposes of politics, find their names ruined. I also have tremendous sympathy for those young writers who are suddenly burdened by being known by too many strangers. Writers are mostly introverts. They avoid spotlights as their work is generally incredibly demanding and requires a lot of down time and privacy.
7. The Beginning
As my spiritual mentor James Joyce would put it, a writer must maintain distance from his subject and his subjects. He or she or they must be standing far back carefully observing the world in which they live, carefully noting, preferentially living simply with their partners and friends and collaborators and agents and publishers and for the sake of their work and the sake of their careers, it might be safer to avoid the crowd. Regimes like the legitimizing influence of cool writers and artists. Avoid.
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