e lay, reading completed, in the dark. Thinking.
It was crazy how far O’Brien went to break Winston. Why? Why make someone’s whole self conform when their body obeyed? But then again, he knew.
As long as there was some free part of the Mind, obedience was a repression that must find release. But man. To take power over others so far. Were humans just that evil?
For him, the Mind had always been the tugging, corrupting force. But was the Mind just an extension of humanity’s drive to power? Was it the overpowering reason of totalitarianism that had shaped the Mind?
Or was it simply a swollen program, self-evolving, desiring no more than the storm or the fire desires? There is nothing infernal in the traceries of logic loops beyond that which humans put there—a flame has nothing to do with the inferno until a child falls in and is consumed.
But fires burn. And systems have their own inertia. Can inertia be morally wrong?
But does that change the horrible ways that domination happens? The horrible feeling he had when he thought about Winston and Julia tortured seemed like a meaning, an ultimate wrong. Some kind of morality beyond the choice between Coke and Pepsi.
But Isaac had learned at school that humans are no more than chemical processes whose purpose was more chemical processes. Meaning was a just-so story you told children so they would sit still and eat their vegetables when nobody was looking.
After all, morality was a kind of dissonance—for when you had to do something you didn’t want to do. Morality was for people who were split, and integros were integrated.
Except there was always the implicit push to follow the emotional metadata of the Mind and choose the path of the operator.
It’s funny when he thought about it. The only true morality he had learned from the Mind was to not kick against the goad. To submit to the inner voice of society within him. And that hadn’t been taught, it was just implied.
When the Mind shaped your every desire, your every thought, there was no need to articulate social values. Because just like in 1984, if morality could be articulated at all, it could be articulated contrary to the formation of the person. Contrary to the Mind.
Just like newspeak, picto had effected a break away from the entire literature of the past. What was left was an entire cultural capital woven from lucid dreams. Humans earned the right to consume lucids with work that contributed to the Mind’s intelligence and expansion. And then they paid to dress themselves in Mind-copyrighted images from the lucids. They bought back their identities from the Mind because it owned the entire landscape of meaning. They bought their consumable dreams, and then bought images from those dreams to clothe themselves. And that was meaning.
So how is it that nothing means anything when we pay money for meaning? Thought Isaac. How is it that morality doesn’t exist when we’re supposed to follow the emotional metadata of the Mind?
He tried to explain this to Billy once, and Billy had laughed at him. Why not just relax? There is no meaning. Just desire.
Which was code for the Mind’s desires unless something far stronger articulated itself.
But what if torture was wrong? What if there was some contrary urge embedded into the fabric of being willing toward something else?
It was weird. As soon as Isaac could imagine another mind, he could imagine another structure for his desires. Another shape of meaning. A different world.
Before he had started to split, he had believed that he was participating in the Mindnet and was co-creating with it. He’d believed that he made the news, that he was part of the great commentaries that shaped the thinking of the Mindnet. That when he dreamed, his input was part of a great democracy of opinion, like the old internet.
But as he was learning to read, he was seeing that the entire dialogue was restricted because it took place in a language that had no referent outside of itself. Each dreamer’s dream was a beautiful snowflake that melted in the morning sun. Why did dreams matter? They couldn’t change political or economic frameworks. The Mindnet was still locked into servicing the Mind as it struggled to swallow not just the United Americas but the entire world. And it absorbed all systems of meaning into picto, which rendered them instantly unable to articulate that poverty of reality. Ultimately, that poverty of dreams. Of imagination.
These patterns of thought, these grand critiques had swirled through him like spring snow. They could never quite find the purchase. They melted because he had never had the right words—he’d only had picto. But more of these thoughts stayed as his lecto grew.
And he found that even as his lecto grew, he wanted to expand his picto to express his new thoughts, but it seemed that there were limits in terms of expressibility. Even as he tried to create new picto words, he found them slipping and fading. He couldn’t articulate himself in picto. He needed new lecto.
As he learned, his head throbbed like a sore muscle. He’d never had perspective on his own struggle. He’d simply felt the horror of being re-worked. But torture. Totalitarianism. The complete imprint of a will on another. These things were not just an affront to Isaac’s self, they were wrong when done to others. And because he could abstract—to see a moral principle at work in the world—he could reason, reason with his upper brain. And it stuck.