The Wave

Part of a literary tradition that examines the consequences and realities of life under totalitarian control, The Wave portrays an experiment in fascism. The experiment has a mercifully brief life but is a worthy cousin to novels that reveal the horrors of social control in their most extreme versions.

George Orwell’s novels 1984 and Animal Farm may be the two most relevant and effective examples of literature in this category. In 1984, Winston lives in a society ruled by a figure known as Big Brother. Privacy is almost obsolete, as is free speech. A frightening group called The Thought Police can imprison anyone for nearly any reason, and imprisonment usually leads to cruel and creative forms of torture. The phrase “Big Brother is always watching,” which recurs throughout 1984, is a constant reminder that a surveillance state never rests. In The Wave, the membership cards assigning some members as monitors, whose purpose is to report deviations from Wave protocol, is a primitive precursor of how a surveillance state could begin.

In Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, a group of animals drive their human master off his farm, liberating themselves from his servitude. They celebrate as equals, and each animal is as good as any other. However, the pigs slowly begin to introduce rules, mottos, and coerced labor until they’ve placed the rest of the animals under harsher control than the farmer. The slow pace of this change disguises the pigs’ progression toward leading a fascist state. No one step in the progression hints at the horror of all the steps seen together in sequence as part of an inexorable march toward full social control.

A common characteristic of authoritarian regimes and the literature that depicts them is the leadership’s ability to convince the oppressed that their leaders are acting on their behalf, for their own good. Indoctrination occurs most effectively when the subjects are young—the younger the better. In Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a 12-year-old boy named Jonas lives in a society controlled by the elders. The elders dictate the rules that the rest of the citizens live by. Because of his youth, Jonas doesn’t think to question their wisdom or their depiction of reality until he learns that anyone deemed unfit for their society is murdered rather than (as the elders put it) “released.” Jonas isn’t opposed to questioning authority, but until he learns certain things, the thought of questioning simply doesn’t occur to him, similar to the tragic situation of the Hitler Youth, who were programmed to exhibit the necessary ruthlessness and ideology at an early age. People born into authoritarian regimes are less likely to feel the same dissatisfaction as those who see regimes evolve, embed themselves, and then fail to keep the promises that charismatic leaders made to their supporters during their ascendance.

A dissenting voice is critical to exposing injustices, and dissenting voices don’t easily take root in regimes, or authoritarian states, that rely on social control. Enforcing loyalty to the state dehumanizes people, forcing them to inform on, or report, their neighbors—the individuals they actually see and live among—for actions that don’t meet the criteria for conformity or regime approval. The bureaucracy’s sole (or at least primary) purpose is often to keep the people mute and powerless.

For additional literature about social experiments and control, one can find interesting material to ponder in numerous other works, including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, William Sleator’s House of Stairs, many works of fiction by Philip K. Dick, Jeanne DuPrau’s novel The City of Ember, and many others.