The last thing a totalitarian state can take is love — a reread of Orwell’s 1984

Fridman opens with a line from the novel: “There was truth, and there was untruth. And if you clung to the truth, even against the whole world, you were not mad.” *1984*, he says, is one of the most impactful books ever written, and also one of the most misused. It donated Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Doublethink, Newspeak, the Thought Police, and the adjective *Orwellian* — which, “strangely enough,” became a synonym for the very thing Orwell was against.

The novel has been translated into more than 65 languages and has sold over 30 million copies. Authoritarian regimes keep banning it: under Stalin, and as recently as 2022 in Belarus. Fridman is not posing as a scholar. He has reread the book many times, usually letting the thoughts wander, and wanted for once to put the takeaways on paper. The review is for people who have read it and people who have not, spoilers included.

The setting is a superstate called Oceania, fully controlled by the totalitarian party Ingsoc and led by Big Brother — who, Fridman notes, may or may not be a real person. He might only be a symbol. The Party wants only to increase its power. It does that with telescreens, two-way devices for propaganda and mass surveillance; with Newspeak, a language being built by deleting English words that could lead to rebellion; with Doublethink, the demand that you hold contradictory beliefs and accept them as true; and with a constant rewrite of history. The famous formula is, “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.”

Refuse Doublethink and the Thought Police arrest you for thoughtcrime. The slogans are themselves Doublethink: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Four ministries complete the joke. The Ministry of Truth handles propaganda and the rewriting of history. The Ministry of Love handles brainwashing by torture. The Ministry of Plenty handles rationing. The Ministry of Peace maintains a constant state of war. Even the names, Fridman implies, are a first lie: Oceania will not tell you the truth about its own offices.

Society has three layers. The Inner Party is tiny. The Outer Party is a little larger; Winston, the protagonist, lives there. The rest, maybe 80 percent, are the Proles — the working class, from *proletariat*. Later in the review Fridman returns to a line he wrote down: “The masses cannot rebel until they become conscious.” The Proles have the numbers. The whole machine of rewritten history, Doublethink, thoughtcrime, and the Ministry of Love exists to keep them from wanting freedom, and even from knowing they are not free.

Winston works at the Ministry of Truth rewriting old newspapers. Julia is the dark-haired woman he falls in love with; passionate sex is forbidden, and Newspeak’s approved version, “goodsex,” is only the kind that leads to procreation. O’Brien, an Inner Party man, pretends to be in the Brotherhood, then tortures Winston and breaks his mind and heart. Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein, supposed head of that underground, are symbols the reader never meets. They may not exist. In a totalitarian state, Fridman suggests, that uncertainty is a feature.

The first takeaway, especially on later rereads, is that when a totalitarian state has taken most of what makes you human, the last thing that is hardest to take is love — for other people, for life itself. That small flame, Fridman says, is where hope starts. Julia’s note to Winston, reading “I love you,” is the revolutionary act that points to a society beyond the one they inhabit. Winston, by contrast, is almost animalistically obsessed with destroying the state. Love is what lets you believe you can build something better, rather than only wreck what you are in.

Revolutionaries, he warns, should not spend 100 percent of their energy on destruction. Beyond destruction there can be chaos that is worse. The book itself blurs love and lust, and almost claims that sex is the most powerful rebellion left when everything is forbidden. Fridman does not buy the ending of that argument. If sex is your manifestation of rebellion, it does not last. It keeps you focused on tearing down, not on what sits past the horizon when the state falls.

Winston’s lines on the subject still rub him the wrong way. After Julia admits she has slept with many men, Winston says the more men she has had, the more he loves her: he hates purity, hates virtue, wants everyone “corrupt to the bone.” Another passage calls their embrace a battle and the climax a victory, “a blow struck against the Party,” “a political act.” Fridman hears hatred of the state in that fuel, and no longing for a future. The deeply human thing, he keeps repeating, is love as a source of hope and as the catalyst for building after the revolution.

Fridman pauses to define his terms. He uses authoritarian for centralized control of political affairs, and totalitarian for control that goes beyond government into social life, economics, the press, the rules of interaction — Nazi Germany, in his example. *1984*, on that definition, is about totalitarianism. Family love is one of the bonds such a state goes after. It forbids passion with a romantic partner, and it indoctrinates children to turn their parents in for thoughtcrime, real or invented. In a world with no standing idea of truth, accusation is enough; you are guilty by existing.

The Party’s final destination, as O’Brien stages it through torture, is to break mind, heart, and soul until the only love you can feel as pure is love for Big Brother. Fridman compares that to North Korea: leftover feeling may not go to family, lovers, or friends, only to a godlike messianic figure. In Oceania that figure may not even exist. In every such case, he says, the human attached to the symbol is much smaller than the symbol, and that is the only love you are allowed.

Humans, Fridman says, have an almost animal craving to hate the other. In the novel the objects are Goldstein, or the rival superstates Eurasia and Eastasia — which, like Big Brother, may or may not exist. You never know what is true beyond Winston’s local world, and that is the point. Without steady footing you cannot construct a worldview from which to hope. Crowds make the craving worse. The ritual that illustrates it is the Two Minutes Hate.

He reads the passage at length. The horror is not that you must act a part, but that joining in is impossible to avoid. Within thirty seconds pretense is unnecessary. A “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness,” a desire to kill and to smash faces with a sledgehammer, flows through the group like current and turns you, even against your will, into a screaming lunatic. The rage is abstract and undirected. It can be switched from one object to another “like the flame of a blowlamp.”

Because the Party controls history, it can retarget that flame day by day. As long as hate is catalyzed through ritual, it can overpower the quieter feeling of love people have for one another. Fridman would rather read the book as satire — a caricature of mass hate, even if the last third is torture with little humor — because satire shows elements already in human nature. He sees a faint version on social media, then immediately reins himself in. Comparing ordinary online outrage to Hitler or to *1984* is, “in most cases,” a reach. Cry wolf too often and you lose the language for lesser-of-two-evils choices. The duty is to resist cruelty at the individual level, and to build technology that does not reward it.

Ingsoc wants only power, means and end together. Fridman quotes O’Brien in the torture rooms: the real power is not over things but over men; power is inflicting pain and humiliation, tearing minds to pieces and putting them together in shapes of your choosing. “Power is not a means, it is an end.” One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution to establish the dictatorship. “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

O’Brien also analogizes the cell to the organism: the weariness of the cell is the vigor of the whole. A Reddit user, BraveSky6764, connected that image to Fridman’s conversation with biologist Michael Levin. Great purges become the cutting of a fingernail. If society is an organism — the way a totalitarian state sees it — then murder, torture, and genocide can be justified so long as the organism flourishes. That is Stalin’s omelet: it is acceptable to break a few eggs. The metaphor is ghastly because it is also how we treat the cells in our own bodies, dying by the billion without a thought.

Put yourself in the Inner Party’s head, Fridman says, and most of them, perhaps all, believe they are doing good. They do not grant the sacrificed the same value as themselves. Against that drug sits a founding American sentence, however flawed in practice: that all men are created equal. It is a non-trivial idea, and it resists the will to power. The book’s other warning is about utopia. Totalitarianism arrives when you chase perfection. There is no perfect society. The optimal state, for a person and for a country, is constant turnover — of leaders, of ideas — messy, chaotic, and, over the long arc, capable of progress. Perfection exists only in an oppressive state, after you have cut away the unruly parts of being human.

Fridman thinks *1984* has been misused by ideologues. Conservatives in the United States, he says, call left-wing policies Orwellian. That is an overstatement dressed as drama. Orwell was a democratic socialist; the novel is a criticism of totalitarianism, not of socialism. Every political ideology can succumb to power. People on the American left and the American right can both be corrupted. One-way use of the word is a convenient shorthand. All politicians are capable of building an Orwellian world.

The sharper cut falls on Winston. When O’Brien asks what he is willing to do for the Brotherhood, Winston admits he is willing to commit atrocities — evil unto children, murder, anything. The totalitarian and the blind, immoral resistance to it can both be evil. That is why Fridman keeps returning to love: without it, the Orwellian state and the fight against that state can both destroy basic rights. Orwell himself, as Fridman reads him, was not preaching the opposite of totalitarianism as pure individualism. Democratic socialism, for Orwell, meant that people have to lean on each other, that society is a cohesive collective as well as a set of sovereign individuals. He was torn. You fight a centralized state by defending individual freedoms; a working society then needs those freedoms to become collaboration. The book’s target remains control of speech, thought, press, and truth.

Do we live in 1984 today? Fridman dislikes the question as a political slogan. If everything is 1984 and everyone is Hitler, there is no way to talk about the lesser of two evils, which is what democracy actually is: a pile of options that all kind of suck, from which you pick the one that sucks least. We do not live in that state. We should still watch for its tools — mass surveillance, Doublethink, control of language, a constant war that disciplines the population and the flow of resources. The moment those elements appear, resistance is the job. Vigilance, not the cry of wolf, is the point.

Critics of technology often treat *1984* as proof that tech is how totalitarian states win, telescreens as exhibit A. Fridman grants a kernel of truth and rejects the whole. On balance, technology is also a tool for freedom. The internet, in a platonic sense of interconnectivity, gives resistance unprecedented reach. It supplies instruments of oppression and instruments of the fight. As long as the will to fight arises in the human heart, he thinks technology helps humanity win. The novel shows the horrible end state of total control over speech, thought, and feeling; real debates about free speech are more nuanced than that endpoint.

To keep from slipping into that dystopia, he says, you have to value critical and independent thought, and thought comes before speech. Learn to think from first principles, independent of tribe, government, the people around you, even the people you love and who love you — at least sometimes. Then he puts a collar on the advice with Nietzsche: if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you. Think too independently and it can break your mind. We are social creatures. We need the connection.

The image he wants is Tom Waits: “I like my town with a little drop of poison.” Deeply independent thought is that drop. Most of the time you assume the world around you is true, which is efficient; we stand on the shoulders of giants. On a regular occasion you question assumptions, biases, and the things you have taken for granted — but not too much. The act of rebellion against the slippery slope is that thought. Speech is only its outward form. Avoid echo chambers in both.

The last third of the novel is torture. Room 101 holds whatever you fear most; for Winston, rats. Fridman wants to read more psychology and neuroscience on whether torture can actually change perception. He floated the question to Andrew Huberman, who pointed him to papers on incentives and disincentives shifting the mental state of people and animals. The book’s emblem is O’Brien holding up four fingers and forcing Winston to see five — not as blur or delusion, but as a change in how the visual cortex processes the scene. Literature apparently supports that this is possible, which Fridman finds terrifying. He does not believe it can be long-lasting if it does not kill you.

Torture for intelligence, he notes, is a poor way to get accurate information; people will say anything to make it stop. *1984* is about using pain to break the ability to think and to perceive. O’Brien’s line, “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself,” describes a plausible mechanism: facecrime means your expression betrays you, so the body learns not to think the thought. Temporary extinction of rebellious thinking, Fridman can imagine. Permanent, irrecoverable extinction of the capacity to love — the book’s claim — he does not accept. Winston cannot walk back “torture her, not me,” and that is the novel’s tragedy. It is one character in one story. Plenty of people, he thinks, cannot be broken that way. Viktor Frankl’s *Man’s Search for Meaning* is the counter-text: in the worst conditions, a flame still persists.

From the Party’s side the method is clear. Destroy Winston’s knowledge of what is and is not true — Goldstein’s book, Julia, everything — so he has no emotional or intellectual ground. Hope needs a sense of where you are and where things could go. Then force him to betray his deepest feeling, and you have a hypocrite, then an apathetic nihilist. A hardworking nihilist is the citizen the Party wants, because that person will not rebel. Against that, Fridman cites a long-running reading of the appendix. The essay on Newspeak is written in the past tense, in ordinary English. That implies the Party, Newspeak, and the world of the story are already over. Even a perfectly executed totalitarian state falls. For him, the way out is still love.

Among stray notes he kept a line from Julia: “If you keep the small rules, you can break the big ones.” In the book she is, from the Party’s point of view, a model citizen — every committee meeting, every regulation. That camouflage is what lets her break the large rules: passionate sex, love, the forbidden things. Fridman thinks it is also a decent way to live. The local world and the larger one are full of irritations. If you spend yourself on small battles, you will not win the one or two that actually make a better life. Stay with a hard problem against impossible odds and against criticism. That, he says, is how big problems get solved.

Julia is not giving productivity advice. In her world the totalitarian state *is* the problem, and her rebellion is to plant a seed in each person she sleeps with: we are human, we lust, we can love. He also does not dodge a darker reading. Winston may have been played from the start — Julia arranged, the little cove for the diary arranged, the dream of the Brotherhood arranged. Why would an oppressive state walk someone through a whole journey of wanting freedom? Maybe because, as O’Brien says, the purpose of torture is torture. Absolute power may require a willingness and a mechanism to produce absolute suffering, and hope given then crushed is a way to maximize it. The takeaway he still wants, even from that reading, is love.

The last stretch of the video turns personal. Before a New Year’s party in 2023, Fridman posted a list of books he hoped to read that year — many of them old friends he had already read many times, Camus and Dostoevsky among them. Prominent people he respects mocked the list as school basics, and mocked the idea of finishing *The Brothers Karamazov* in a week. He describes the feeling honestly: a joyful kid sharing books he loves, then hours and days of sting. He suspects a cohort that waits for him to fail, hunting evidence that he is a bad person. His replies: most people did not actually read those books in school, they are not “basic,” and he got almost nothing from assigned reading. The books paid off when he returned to them by choice, as a teenager, in his twenties, in his thirties.

The one-book-a-week goal was aspirational and badly explained. *The Little Prince* takes an hour or two, which can be given to Karamazov; he had already read that novel in English and in Russian, and was preparing to interview its well-known translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. After the pile-on he hesitated even to make this *1984* video, and he may keep the hobby of reading more private. Mockery, he says, will not touch the serious work of the podcast; a vulnerable side interest is another matter. His actual habit is about an hour a day on a Kindle and roughly two hours of audiobooks during chores and long slow runs of ten to fifteen miles. Rereading, especially, lets a year hold a lot of books.

He closes by circling the original misuse. We are not living in 1984. Treating every disliked policy as Oceania, or every opponent as Hitler, burns the language you need when a real lesser-of-two-evils choice arrives. Watch for the tools — surveillance, Doublethink, language control, perpetual war — and resist them when they surface. Do not spend the adjective on your out-group. And do not forget Winston’s own appetite for atrocity. Without love underneath, both the Party and its enemies can grind rights to nothing. The modest daily practice he recommends is that drop of poison: first-principles thought, independent of tribe, used sparingly, because the abyss looks back.