Individual Lies

Here are the convenient, pacifying, comfortable fictions.

Looking down an interior staircase in Milan, Italy in black and white.

Milan 2019

An old book caught my attention this morning. There wasn’t any purpose or justification as to why I grabbed it from the shelf, beyond this being the political season, and the author being a useful beacon for all seasons.

Journalists, as we can see by their election forecasts, never know what the public is thinking. Revolutionary propaganda is incredibly ineffective. Churches are empty all over the country. The whole idea of trying to find out what the average man thinks, instead of assuming that he thinks what he ought to think, is novel and unwelcome.

The year is the more turbulent one of 1944, the essay is Propaganda and Demotic Speech, and the writer is George Orwell.

How people remember Orwell has always seemed unfortunate to me. Most people know one or perhaps two of his books—typically 1984 and Animal Farm—yet they know little of his numerous essays, reporting, criticism, or other novels. His most celebrated novels are his most atypical, and those novels are also best understood only after a study of his essays and life.

That particular quote has never struck me on previous readings, though I found myself pausing before it this morning, and that’s perhaps a response to my sense of the current times. In the first sentence, Orwell references a collective public, the amalgamation of all into a single group; his last sentence, however, references the ‘average man’, a stand-in for the solitary individual, the particular person within the larger group. There’s even a slight hint that Orwell’s individual in this excerpt might think in a manner that’s unexpected for the larger group. On this cold and blustery and most political of mornings, I couldn’t help but notice how distant that statement appears when read today.

Before I slipped into a lament about contemporary politics, however, I reminded myself of one of the best Orwell openings—and there are dozens of great choices. This comes from his essay England Your England, published in 1941.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

If I were to summarize all of his essays and novels, to grossly oversimplify a lifetime of work, I might write: the small lie matters. In some ways that’s a disservice to a complicated, nuanced, and quite remarkable bibliography, but it’s also not a bad legacy.

What’s dangerous for the writer are those smallest of lies. A small expedient solution is always justified as simply a shortcut, it’s the lazy conclusion, an agreeable fiction. Yet all of these lapses will inevitably, in every society, compound into something much greater.

In his novels and reporting you observe this endless, dogged approach toward language. There’s a hatred for the slippery phrase combined with its opposite: a ceaseless search for the precise word.

Even a cursory glance at history reveals that this is the more difficult path. And the small lie when it comes to politics must be acknowledged as the more typical path—the convenient, pacifying, comfortable fiction will always feel better in the moment. Whenever a writer fights for a small, seemingly inconsequential truth, they can appear petty, the point seems needless, argumentative, and most readers won’t appreciate the conflict. Orwell angered his opponents, then he angered his supposed allies, until, in the end, only he was left. When you see an Orwell book on the shelf—which you’ll find nearly everywhere in the world—it’s easy to forget that he died broke, with few allies, unable to publish much of his work, amid attacks from political groups across the entire spectrum. And almost all of those problems could have been solved with a slight change to his voice—a small lie.

For the writer who struggles against even the smallest of lies, perhaps there’s no more important question: will they be subservient to the group’s demands? Whether that group is a few neighbors or nearly all colleagues or an entire slithering mob is inconsequential. The question must be considered beforehand. After the mob has encircled isn’t the time to determine personal ethics. Those standards are best contemplated alone and long before they’re needed. What do I know? What’s true? What’s false? What don’t I know? Writers should have answers well ahead of hearing the knocks.

Who is coming? Whose fist will rap the door? Although the specifics will always be different, the arrival is certain. And once the flames are nearby and the crowd pants, the picture will be distorted: what’s cowardly will appear courageous, what’s expedient will appear smart, what’s prostrate will feel upright.

Writers know to avoid the expedient in prose. Shortcuts never work, and readers can always feel the distortions hidden within a sentence. I believe this sense of how even the smallest of false words redounds gives writers an advantage: constantly obsessing over words makes you attuned to the dangers of the smallest of fictions.

What’s expedient on page one merely takes the narrative on a false path, resulting in an even greater deceit on page five. If your plane is flying by one degree off course, you’ll never even see your intended destination—though a destination will surely come.

The smallest of lies avoids a dispute, yet it ensures a later, greater conflict: it gives voice to the crowd’s lie rather than the writer’s truth.