Individual Lies
Here’s an essay that I wrote long ago about a subject that, once again, I’ve been chewing on. Unfortunately, these words still feel relevant.
The year is 1941, the essay is England Your England, and the writer is George Orwell.
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.1
Knowing that those words were published in 1941 should dilate your focus at least a bit. There’s a context, a broader atmosphere, which you can almost certainly picture, underneath those sentences; it is a time of seriousness and uniformity and when the expected opinions are the only opinions, rather than a time to ruminate about the kindness of those overhead.
How people remember Orwell has always seemed unfortunate to me. Perhaps the average person knows one or two of his books—typically 1984 and Animal Farm—yet there’s less knowledge of his numerous essays, reporting, criticism, and other novels, and certainly less knowledge of how the life, as revealed in the quote above, redounded into the art. His most read and most celebrated novels might even be described as atypical, and they are, in fact, best understood after a study of his other writing. Regardless of where you start, however, what you uncover is his unmistakable mentality and conviction and experience—his sentences are the consequence of combining a ruthlessness about getting things right and a turbulent, timely life.
And if I were to summarize all of Orwell’s essays, novels, and reviews, if I were to grossly oversimplify a lifetime of work, if I were to unfairly take a deliberative, erudite man and distill him into just a few words, I might write: the small lie matters. This is a disservice to complication and nuance and inadequate for such a remarkable bibliography, but it’s not exactly a bad legacy.
What’s dangerous for the writer, or for anyone who strives to be an individual, are those smallest of lies. A small, expedient solution is always justified in the moment as the necessary shortcut, the needed conclusion, the agreeable fiction; yet all of these lapses will, eventually, inevitably, compound into something much greater. Spend a little time living in the complexity of actual relationships and the real choice becomes not between the lie today and the truth today, but between the truth today and the more painful, too-long delayed, truth tomorrow. Thus the mentality toward language in which everybody recognizes Orwell—a campaign against cliché, slogans, and political expediences, against the massaged sentence, against prevarication, against shortcuts, that’s unwilling to stray into comfort or safety or ease, rather than to write, you might say, the truth.
So there’s no surprise to find this endless, dogged approach toward language when you look beyond his most discussed books. There’s a hatred for the slippery phrase that’s combined with its opposite: a ceaseless search for the precise word. When you glance at the news, when you overhear conversations, when you simply look at the world, can you find anything more discordant to contemporary norms?
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that “the facts” existed and were more or less discoverable.2
Even a cursory glance at history reveals that this is still the more difficult path. The small lie, in politics, for writers, even in conversation, must be acknowledged as more typical—the pacifying, comfortable fiction will always feel better in the moment. If you’re writing history, there’s a story people want; if you’re talking about society, there are norms to uphold; if you’re describing an individual, there’s certainly an acceptable spectrum of words; if you’re told to retract what you wrote, to simply agree is what feels best; if you’re told that the thoughts inside your head are incorrect, it is so much easier to just outsource those thoughts to the mob. Going along with what’s expected, to placate the crowd, is always the easiest choice—however pernicious that choice is after the current day passes.
If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.3
Whenever a writer fights for a small, seemingly inconsequential truth, they appear petty, the point seems needless, argumentative, and most readers won’t appreciate the conflict. It isn’t rarely as easy as two plus two; it is, if you want an example, the truth that nobody you know wants to hear. What opinion, if announced to your closest friends, would make them recoil? All of the usual notions about allies and popular revolutions are simply fantasies—as the more likely result, if we’re actually talking about uncomfortable and unacceptable truths, is ostracization. Orwell angered his opponents, then he angered his friends, until, in the end, only he was left. When you see his books for sale—which you’ll find nearly everywhere in the world—it is 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 nearly all of those problems could have been solved with a slight change to his words—with just the smallest of lies in favor of the expectations of his day.
It is a point worth emphasizing: there’s no handholding, there’s no righteous ending, there’s no satisfying apologies. The young revolutionary imagines that they will confront injustice, turn around, and then discover a tribe, though the truth is that the walk home is, almost certainly, a solitary one. If the walk will be solitary, do you still want to confront injustice? Or is the real goal to find a tribe? What’s necessary to say doesn’t concern what’s already acceptable, it is about what those closest and most dear to you can’t stand to hear.
The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.4
But 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, their closest colleagues, or a slithering mob is irrelevant. After the mob has encircled you isn’t the time to determine personal ethics—because, in those moments, the small, crowd-pleasing lie, will appear righteous. Your true principles 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 probably have those answers before they hear the knocks.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.5
Writers should know to avoid the expedient in prose. Shortcuts never work, and readers always feel the distortions hidden within a sentence. The elision on page one triggers a problem on page two; an imprecise description triggers an incorrect conclusion. And perhaps this sense of how even the smallest of false words redounds into later problems gives writers an advantage: constantly obsessing about words makes you attuned to the dangers of small fictions.
And it is worth remembering that if your plane flies off course by just one degree, you’ll never reach your intended destination—although a destination does surely arrive. The smallest of lies, the slightest change in course, will avoid a dispute right now, yet it ensures a later, greater conflict. The specifics will always be different, but this collision is certain. And once the flames are nearby and the crowd gathers, slobbering, panting, the picture of what you should do will be distorted: what’s expedient will appear thoughtful, what’s foolish will appear smart, what’s cowardly will appear courageous.
England Your England, 1941
In Front of Your Nose, 1946
Why I Write, 1946
As in art, so much more so in life. How many shortcuts do I rue! But perhaps I have learned a few things. Thank you ever so much for this light through the crack in the wall!