The Unholy Trinity of 1984 – part 3

1984: When Power Becomes God

Orwell’s Party is an extreme case. It tortures deliberately, lies knowingly, and seeks power as an end in itself. Most real institutions are not Oceania, and calling every disliked rule “Orwellian” empties the novel of meaning. The Party is useful because it exposes a mechanism in pure form: epistemic closure, a condition in which a system controls the standards by which the system may be judged.

This epistemic closure can be easily observed in this representative diagram.

Near the end of the novel, Winston has been broken deeply enough that he begins to reproduce the Party inside himself. He reasons that the collective mind must be right and asks, “By what external standard could you check its judgements?” Then he writes: “GOD IS POWER.” The sequence appears in Part Three of the novel.

“God is Power” means that ultimate reality is identified with supremacy: whatever can command, defeat, punish, and define is what deserves worship. But the sentence works in reverse. Power is God means that whatever successfully occupies the highest place begins to function as truth, goodness, and necessity. The past must have always led here because here is what won. The ruler must possess wisdom because the ruler possesses authority. God must favour the victorious because victory is treated as God’s visible signature.

This reversal is not a demonstration that domination really is divine. It is a diagnosis of idolatry: human power takes the place of an external standard and then calls its own reflection God.

Its religious loop can become perfectly circular. Authority exists, therefore God must have granted or permitted it. God is good, therefore an order preserved under God cannot be fundamentally false. The history delivered by that order must therefore be the history God allowed to survive, and that history confirms the order’s legitimacy. Power becomes evidence of divine favour, then divine favour becomes evidence that power’s account is true. The distinction that breaks the loop is simple but severe: divine permission is not divine endorsement. Christianity itself dramatizes the distinction when Rome is permitted to prevail over Jesus.

The Party understands that control of thought does not begin by ordering a person to reach a conclusion. It begins by controlling the premises from which conclusions can be reached. Newspeak reduces the words available for disagreement. Doublethink allows mutually incompatible claims to be sincerely held whenever the institution needs both. Propaganda does not have to insert a detailed command into every believer’s head. If authority can determine what counts as danger, innocence, loyalty, heresy, man, woman, citizen, terrorist, science, or God’s will, the believer may complete the reasoning alone. A scriptural command to obey, protect, punish, or remain pure can do the rest.

Orwell imagines the endpoint at which one institution has abolished every rival community through which a person might test its account. Real societies are more porous. People belong to overlapping groups, leave one for another, and sometimes form their own. That movement prevents collective memory from belonging completely to one authority, but it can also divide society among incompatible versions of the past.

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This is Part 3 of 13 in a long-form essay totaling 12,623 words. If this held your attention, return tomorrow for Part 4 and follow the remaining ten parts over the next ten days. If you arrived here late, begin with Part 1 and read forward through whatever has already been posted. Each part develops an idea of its own, but the larger argument builds across the entire series.

The worldview behind this essay is something I have sensed intuitively, observed, questioned, and slowly learned to articulate over decades. I am here now, expressing it as clearly as I can with the tools available to me, for whatever impact one man can still make on an underused platform.

I would genuinely appreciate a like, comment, or share. But I’m not your boss, and you have free will, so use it however you like. Subscribe or don’t. Support me through Ko-fi or don’t. I would rather your engagement be freely given than morally extracted. Consider this merely a reminder that we all play a role in building a better world, and that includes you.

After performing a quick analysis of 50-150WPM reading speed, which resulted in a 1.3 to 4 hour total read time, so I decided to turn this into a 13 part series:

1. How Difference Became Hierarchy, How Hierarchy Became Holy, and Why the World Is Still on Fire
2. The Ladder, the Sheath, and the Loop
3. 1984: When Power Becomes God
4. How Groups Inherit—and Remake—the Past
5. Before Christianity, There Was Empire
6. Three Religions in One Difficult Family
7. Other Empires, Other Metaphysics
8. How Difference Becomes Permission
   1. Race: Ancestry Turned into Destiny
   2. Misogyny: Hierarchy Disguised as Love
   3. Transphobia: Panic at a Moving Boundary
   4. Xenophobia: A Visible Enemy for an Invisible System
   5. Misandry: When Resistance Inherits the Old Machine
9. Empire After the Flag
10. Sin, Yu Yevon, and the Revolution That Returns
11. Scripture, Contradiction, and Human Inspiration
12. God Above, God Within
13. The Final Refusal