【Australia】

Well,Australia that didn't take long.

When we started the Dystopia Project two weeks ago, with the aim of writing a story on every dystopian novel that might apply to the Trump presidency, we figured it would be a while before we had reason to cover the heavyweight champ of the genre: Nineteen Eighty-Four.

George Orwell's 1949 classic is about a state that is totalitarian in the extreme. Trump, we thought, would at least start out appearingto be more like a regular president than a Big Brother type. This week the plan was to explore how he resembles a smooth-talking manipulator in Isaac Asimov's Foundationtrilogy.

SEE ALSO: Introducing the Dystopia Project: Tales to help you through the Dark Times

But that was before Trump and his team spent their first weekend in power insisting that, when it came to crowd size, two plus two equals five. (Or rather, 250,000 inauguration attendees equals somewhere north of a million.) Orwell's Ministry of Truth, which dealt in creating constant tiny retroactive lies, couldn't have put it better.

Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway's use of the phrase "alternative facts" is a perfect example of doublethink. She and millions of Trump supporters evidently have the ability "to forget whatever it was necessary to forget," as Orwell wrote, to "consciously induce unconsciousness."

As you may remember, the book predicts three global superstates: Oceania (basically the west), Eurasia (basically Russia) and Eastasia (basically China). Oceania frequently changed which one it was at war with, then denied the change. In our completely different world, Trump loudly proclaims friendship with Russia while one of his cabinet picks says Russia is guilty of war crimes.

And let's not even get started on Trump's proclamation declaring a National Day of Patriotic Devotion. The monolithic Party that governs Oceania would be hella proud of that one.

The Orwellian echoes are apparently traveling far and wide: Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Fourhave skyrocketed. At time of writing, it is in pole position on the Amazon bestseller list.

SEE ALSO: 'Alternative facts' push '1984' to Amazon bestseller list

Here's the thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four: we've spent decades obfuscating its meaning.

As a society, we reduced it to a book about a surveillance state. We remember the telescreens, the hidden mics. We see the slogan Big Brother is Watching You and think of the NSA.

But that largely misses Orwell's point.

Sure, his protagonist Winston Smith worries about whether he is being observed at any given moment. But he spends far more time worried about the fact that truth is whatever the Party says it is: they have seized control of history, of science, of anything that resembles objective reality.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book about gaslighting a nation

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears," Winston thinks. "It was their final, most essential command."

The book's third act, its darkest and most compelling section, rams this idea home. It is here, in the bowels of the Ministry of Love, that Inner Party ideologue O'Brien convinces Winston that reality is whatever O'Brien says it is.

Like Trump, he pushes hard on a ridiculously inconsequential matter: how many fingers he's holding up. Is it four or five?

Yes, O'Brien uses torture to get his point across -- Trump has said, incidentally, that he would like to reinstate the practice in military interrogations. But Orwell is more interested in O'Brien's terrifyingly watertight argument about how power and hate trumps truth and reason.

Basically, Nineteen Eighty-Fouris a book about a government that is gaslighting a nation, and a nation that shrugs when confronted with gaslighting. We appear to be living that reality right now.

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Orwell spent most of his career fascinated by the use of language in politics above all else. He understood more than any other writer the power of narrative and the narrative of power.

In 1943, a year before he started to tentatively put Nineteen Eighty-Fourtogether under its working title "The Last Man in Europe," Orwell wrote an essay looking back on his decades-long experience with fascists and Nazis in Spain and Germany. What he wrote should chill us to the bone:

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’ ... 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 this from a man who was living in London during the worst of the Blitz.

SEE ALSO: Orwell estate's legal threat over '1984' T-shirt is most Orwellian thing ever

Orwell went on to chide liberals and pacifists for assuming that everything would turn out alright in the end, that evil would somehow destroy itself. With Nineteen Eighty-Four, he provided the opposite: a world in which evil not only triumphs, but finds a way to sustain itself permanently -- to annihilate all hope of progress.

As O'Brien famously puts it: The boot on the human face, forever.

How do we fight back? Nineteen Eighty-Fouris that rare dystopian book in which the resistance -- in this case, "The Brotherhood" -- doesn't even begin to achieve any kind of success. In fact, The Brotherhood may not even exist. (Winston's world is so full of artful deceptions, he's not even sure if the year actually is 1984.)

O'Brien pretends to be part of The Brotherhood, in the first half of the book, partly in order to ask Winston if he would "throw sulphuric acid in the face of a child" if it were necessary to defeat the Party. Yes, Winston says, unreservedly. A tape of this conversation is later played back to him, and it's part of what breaks his spirit. The Party can remember facts when it wants to.

So the hidden lesson of the book is that morality matters. You have to be better than the dystopian power, even when you think the telescreen is turned off. Love matters: Winston and his paramour Julia annihilate their souls when they are forced under ultimate torture to betray each other.

But above all, truth matters, even tiny truths. Records matter. Keeping a diary matters. History matters. Science matters. Keeping objective facts straight in your head, when the world and your Facebook feed is screaming the opposite, is a vital act of rebellion.

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four," Winston writes in his diary. "If that is granted, all else follows."

Or to put it in the context of our times: Freedom is the freedom to say that 250,000 is 250,000, without fear of being shouted down by "alternative facts."

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