Walter Kirn Revisits Orwell After Fifteen Years
The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
-Andor (Disney+)
I've been writing for most of my life. I've been reading even longer. But longer than that I've been watching and listening and observing. Everything. Everyone. Always. All the time. It's just how I am. It's just what I did when I got here. I started looking around and just never stopped.
Reading, writing, watching, listening, observing — these things have always mattered. For centuries, they were the backbone of how we understood the world and one another. How we made sense of life. How we connected. How we became human.
Collectively, they were a foundation that once felt unshakable. But now it’s shaking. It's shifting and splintering and disintegrating, and quickly. These core human acts are being hollowed out, diminished, displaced, ignored.
We all see it happening. We all talk about it. We all tweet about it. Some joke. Everyone complains. And still — we let it continue.
But why?
Is it too late to fix?
Is it too big to stop?
is it someone else’s job?
Maybe.
But what most people miss is that whether you care or not, whether you fight or look away, the collapse of something this fundamental never comes without costs. Big ones. Ugly ones. Dangerously scary ones. When the roots rot, the fall is only a matter of time. And when that happens, we have no idea what will hit the ground first: the culture, the country, or the human soul.
I’ve tracked this shift in post after post (here, here, here, here, and more here), but the deeper questions remain: Why are we letting this happen? What are we numbing ourselves to? And what have we stopped even trying to see?
What Kirn Saw in Orwell
This week, Tucker Carlson sat down with novelist and critic Walter Kirn for a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from the Luigi Mangione case to the state of American culture. They discussed moral authority, media narratives, upper class entitlement, and whether we're witnessing the extinction of books themselves.
But the most fascinating exchange came at the 1:41:00 mark when Carlson mentioned that Kirn had been rereading George Orwell's 1984 for the first time in fifteen years.
What followed was ten minutes of the most astute cultural commentary I've heard in ages. Kirn's observations about Orwell's masterpiece and its relevance to our current moment were so uncannily prescient, so important, that I knew I had to share them.
His insights cut straight to the heart of what's happening to us now. How we read, how we think, how we see. Or don't see.
What follows is Kirn's commentary on 1984, lightly edited only for length. This is essential reading for anyone trying to understand our current moment, and why it feels so… strange.
Kirn on Rereading Orwell (From Official Transcript)
🎙️ Kirn on Rereading Orwell's After Fifteen Years
Kirn: I picked up the 75th anniversary edition of 1984, approved by the Orwell estate. It's got a little seal on the cover. It's the official edition. This happens to be Orwell month — a celebration of Orwell all across England and the English-speaking world.
There was an introduction that the estate approved for the book, which was one of the most Orwellian things I've ever seen. It was written by a novelist (here Kirn is referring to Dolen Perkins‑Valdez, a Harvard‑trained novelist, known for Take My Hand) who said, "Well, Winston Smith, the hero, is a misogynist." And she literally used the word "problematic." She said that normally she wouldn't read a book with a character like this. But, you know, it's still an important book.
Then she made other criticisms. This is in the prologue. It's the introduction to the book. I noted this on a podcast and said Orwell now has an Orwellian introduction which accuses him of thoughtcrime and warns us that though the book is problematic, we might want to read it anyway. She also notes the lack of racial diversity.
But what was so odd about it was that following the introduction, there's another forward written by Thomas Pynchon who many would argue is our most mysterious and illustrious serious novelist alive. He's written these magisterial books that some believe are almost too complex to understand. He did a forward, but he got second billing. He got bumped out of first place in Introduction World by this ridiculous trigger warning.
Perkins‑Valdez's new introduction is a series of trigger warnings about the book and it's not ironic. Not ironic at all. So terrifyingly earnest that you can't believe it. She criticizes the book for not reflecting her lived experience.
My god, it's a dystopian novel written in 1948 about a future totalitarian state which resembles a combination of Soviet Russia and England, and it doesn't reflect your lived experience?
The only books I want to read are ones that don't reflect my lived experience. I don't read Moby Dick to reflect my lived experience.
Carlson: Your lived experience would consist of your diary.
Kirn: My lived experience is a drag. It's a limitation. I go to books to go to other parts of the world, be in other heads, other times, other parts of history. And that should be a criticism of 1984?
Carlson: It's just the triumph of narcissism. That whole "how is this about me" instinct.
Kirn: Anyway, that was the first alarming thing and I hadn't even gotten to the book yet.
🎙️ On What Orwell Actually Achieved
When I got to the book itself, I have to tell you — "prophetic" isn't the word. Prophetic is overused. It's not that he predicts the society we live in today. He finds the eternal formulas by which power defeats the human mind and the individual. It wasn't that he was just extrapolating about historical trend — he was giving us a worst-case scenario for groupthink over person-think. He was giving us a warning about what happens when we lose our memories.
More than anything else, 1984 is a book about time. About a society which doesn't have access to the past, in which the past is constantly rewritten to celebrate the current leaders. And there's no future because no one can plan a life. No one can even expect that they won't go to jail tomorrow for some tiny crime or offense. People in 1984 are stuck — brutally and tragically — in the present.
And the thing that keeps them there, their sole preoccupation, is the violence of society. Violence happens now. It takes you out of the past. It blots out the future. Violence is a deep experience of the present, from which you can't escape.
And in 1984, the reason they have a two-minute hate where society gathers every day to throw oranges and hurl curses at this imaginary enemy, subversive Goldstein… and the reason they have Hate Week in the summer is that fear, anger, and violence are ultimately the weapons of the control class.
Orwell does a very good job of showing how eternal and perpetual war with unseen enemies abroad keeps people in their place — keeps them insecure and anxious. He also shows how constant fear in the domestic realm — "Will I be told on? Will I be turned in?" It all functions the same way.
🎙️ On the Hopelessness of 1984
Pens and paper are pretty much illegal, because they create a record that can't be falsified.
The book is a nightmare. A thorough nightmare which offers no hope at the end. It's not a spoiler to say: the hero, who manages for a short time to think for himself, have a love affair, write a diary — his great crime in the book is starting a diary.
At the end, he's completely crushed. Tortured. Brainwashed. He comes out a thoroughly broken person saying slogans: "I love Big Brother." Without spirit. Without hope. It's a hopeless portrait of what happens when an inner circle of people devoted to power above all take control of the human mind and the individual.
If you want to depress yourself, read 1984. That it resembles in so many ways things that are happening now is uncanny. I guess someone used it as a template.
🎙️ On Reading Orwell Then vs. Now
Our censorship regime, our surveillance regime. In the book, the young are enemies of the old. They spy constantly. Children are the most zealous backers of party orthodoxy — especially young women.
When I read it as a child, the reason they assigned 1984 was to teach us there was this place called the Soviet Union that is much like this. By reading 1984, you could celebrate your freedom to read 1984 which they can't do over there.
You can celebrate the superiority of our culture and our value for the individual and our freedom to think and express ourselves without fear. But when you read 1984 now it's not to feel superior to the old Soviet Union or you know Hitler's Germany, it's to realize: we're there. We're so there that in some ways, Orwell lacked imagination.
He didn't know AI, though. In the world of 1984, novels are written by machines. They just take the elements of novels and like a kaleidoscope they crank a wheel and new combinations come out — you know, which is very much like the AI literature I've been predicting. Prophetic doesn't fully describe it.
Yeah. It's not just passivity that Orwell records. It's the ability of thinking people or allegedly thinking people to pretend that what's happening isn't happening. That what just happened never happened. And to go on mouthing these utopian slogans about a future that no one actually believes will come.
🎙️ On Orwell's Evolution and Modern Parallels
Carlson: I've been an Orwell fan my whole life and what's so interesting is that Orwell was a cheerleader for World War II. A government propagandist. He worked for the BBC. Hate to say it but it's true. He wrote 1984 only three years after the end of the war. And he points out — it's a militarized society. That's the essence of totalitarian control is war.
Kirn: So it seems like a big change. He seems to have changed his view. He participated in what he seemed to believe was a just war and then afterward started to see it as a racket for the control of people. And he also sees terrorism — a form of terrorism — as a control mechanism too.
On an airstrip in Ocean Eye, every once in a while a rocket will just fall and wipe out a crowd and no one knows where it was fired from. They assume they came from the enemy. And one day Winston is with his girlfriend in this little hideout that they have in the middle of the book in their, you know, very short and soon to be curtailed love affair. And she says, "You know, we're shooting those. I know we shoot those rockets." What? He says, "Yeah, we shoot those rockets. It's what we call a false flag nowadays." And Winston says, "I never could have imagined that that was possible. Here he lives in this nightmare society, but he still can't believe that they would shoot rockets at their own people in order to keep them fearful. The woman, however, you know, sees it clearly. She's a little bit more cunning and she has a lower estimation of people. But there's not much in Orwell and in 1984 that doesn't have an equivalent now. There's not much in there that doesn't explain events these days, you know.
As I read it, I saw this morning the riots going on in Los Angeles. Full of hate, full of anger, full of people brandishing bricks, molotov cocktails, and so on. And I thought, does it really matter? What they're supposedly protesting? No, it's the rage that matters. Is the rage really something that threatens America, threatens the state, or are these outbreaks of rage and rioting in service to power because they can keep us distrusting each other? They keep us divided. They keep us rebuilding.
You know, one of Orwell's thesis is that society's gotten so prosperous that you have to have a war just to keep the economy going. You, everybody has everything, so you got to destroy a lot of stuff in order to rebuild it, you know, abroad and at home.
Seen through the lens of 1984, protest doesn't look like it's about anything but riotous protest — keeping the machine going through channeling people's frustration, anger, and anxiety into these orgies that really lead nowhere, but always cause us to need more surveillance, more control, etc.
It gives me a flower of an idea of the supposed idealism behind riotous protest. I see those people as tools. Frankly, I think they are.