Orwell Was Right About the State, and That Is No Longer the Whole Problem

For most of the twentieth century, anyone who cared about liberty had one book to point at, and the book was right. Orwell's warning was that the state is the thing to fear: it has the police, the archives, the schools and the broadcasting tower, and if you let it, it will use all four to make you love it. Every argument about surveillance, censorship and emergency powers since 1949 has been conducted in his vocabulary, and mostly on his side.

I want to say something uncomfortable about that inheritance. Orwell described the danger correctly for a world in which only states could do serious harm. That world ended, and the argument did not notice.

What Orwell Got Right

Let me be precise about what survives, because a lot does.

The state does accumulate power in emergencies and does not give it back. The state does lie, and does so more comfortably than any individual, because the blame gets spread across an organisation. The state does prefer a population that is frightened of an outside enemy to one that is looking at its own government. The machinery of surveillance, once built, does get pointed at people it was never meant for. None of this has been refuted; every decade since has supplied new examples.

If you removed every other consideration, the Orwellian position would be the correct one: keep the state weak, keep it watched, and treat every request for more power as a request for more power, whatever it is dressed as.

What Changed

Orwell's world had one class of actor capable of catastrophe. Only a state could field an army, only a state could build a bomb, only a state could run a famine. Individuals and small groups could murder, but they could not threaten a society's survival. So the entire problem of liberty reduced to one relationship: the citizen against the state. Keep the state in check and you had done the work.

That assumption is gone. The engineering that once needed a nation now needs a room. A small group can release a pathogen, poison a water system, take down a power grid, or bring down aircraft, and the trend in every one of those capabilities runs in one direction. The man whose name is in the title of this post demonstrated the point in a way nobody could miss: a few dozen people, no territory, no army, and a day that changed the security posture of every free country on earth.

Once non-state actors can threaten survival, the citizen against the state stops being the only axis. There is now a second: the society against the small group inside it that wants it dead. And the two axes pull in opposite directions, because the tools you need for the second are precisely the tools Orwell told you never to hand the state.

The Balance Was Not Designed for This

Here is the part I think people avoid.

The liberal settlement, the one we are all rightly attached to, was a bargain struck under the old assumption. We accepted a certain amount of crime, fraud and even occasional terrorism as the price of a state that could not read our letters. That was a good bargain when the worst thing the unwatched could do was bounded. A bomb in a market is a tragedy; it is not the end of the polity.

The bargain was never priced against an unbounded downside. Nobody in 1949 asked how much privacy a society should trade to prevent a small group from killing a million people, because no small group could. The question was not answered badly; it was not asked.

So when someone today says that the surveillance state is exactly what Orwell warned about, they are right, and they have also not engaged with the reason it exists. And when someone says that the threat justifies the surveillance, they are pointing at something real, and they are also handing the state precisely the machinery Orwell showed would be abused. Both sides are correct about their own half and silent about the other's.

Why This Cannot Be Solved by Trusting the State More

The tempting resolution is to say that the threat is real, so we must trust the government with the new powers. I do not think that follows, and Orwell is the reason.

The state that asks for the power to watch everyone in order to catch the few is the same organisation that lied about weapons in Iraq, that classified its own mistakes for forty years, and that will use a terrorism database to look up a journalist the moment it is convenient. Its incentives did not change when the threat changed. Giving it the tools without changing what it is only means the tools will be used against the people who were promised protection.

The real problem is that we need capabilities Orwell would have forbidden, held by an institution Orwell correctly distrusted. That is a design problem, not a debate to be won by quoting him.

What a Design Would Have to Do

I do not have the solution, but I can say what shape it must have.

The powers have to exist, because the downside is unbounded and wishing it away is not a policy. But the powers cannot sit inside the ordinary hierarchy of government, because that hierarchy will use them for itself. They have to be held under a structure the public actually controls: rules the public sets and can revise, oversight the public can see, and a decision process that does not run through a minister whose career depends on never being blamed for the next attack.

I have argued elsewhere that representative government cannot bind its own future self. This is one of the places where that failure costs the most. Every administration expands the surveillance powers a little, promises restraint, and hands both the powers and the promise to a successor who inherits only the first.

Orwell's book is still the best description of what happens when that goes wrong. It is just no longer a description of the only way things go wrong. A free society today has two ways to die, and the cure for one is the cause of the other. Pretending we still live in the world with only one is the most comfortable position available, and it is not available any more.