He [Winston Smith] wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun … He might be ALONE in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong. – George Orwell, 1984 (Part 1, ch. 7)
She had been fortysomething, tall and fit and straight, her bottle-auburn hair in a bob, her face set in its customary open, forthright gaze. She had come to the scientist’s department, as had so many others, because she asked questions – and, in the production units, questions were not welcome. Obedience was. Cheerful, efficient, uncritical obedience. Whether or not the obedience yielded the results that the company needed to survive. And, like the others, she had worn out her welcome in production.
The scientist shook his head at the memory. “Welcome to Research”, he had told her when she onboarded, as he had told the others. “By definition, we don’t know what we’re doing. Questions R Us, because that’s the only way we’re going to figure out what we’re doing. You get to ask all the questions you want. And then you get to try to answer them, on time and under budget.” At first, this was to her liking, and she had prospered, but she soon had come to understand, up close and personal, the saying “be careful what you ask for, you might get it”.
“Aren’t we ever done?”, she had complained, after yet another set of experiments had underperformed. “No”, the scientist stated flatly. She squirmed a bit.
“If what we’re trying to do were easy”, the scientist continued, “everybody’d be doing it already and there’d be no place for us. You might be the only person on the planet who has had the idea you’re testing, and most of the time, that idea is going to be wrong. Only if you fail to prove that your idea is wrong do you have a chance of having found a way to deliver the productivity increases we need to survive as a business. This ain’t ‘accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative’. And it’s a hard and lonely place to hang out. But it’s how, and why, science works … and why your boss ain’t exactly the life of the party around here.” She had grinned sheepishly at that.
And then her face dissolved into the darkness as the scientist returned to the present, sitting at his laboratory bench with his hands over his eyes, blotting out the computer screen that had the latest National Science Foundation funding status report – the disastrous NSF funding status report – on it.
Lippy the Lyin’ and Hardy Har Harvard
“Yeah”, he muttered. “Every scientist that’s ever been, who wasn’t a faker, has had a unique idea. Has been a minority of one. A lunatic, Mr. Orwell. One who has had to face the horror of being wrong. Repeatedly. Not to mention the pressure and the poverty, even if an idea proves to be correct enough to do work every once in a while. Never mind making some mogul any money. And for what?” He barely managed to avoid shouting that aloud to the laboratory building. He reluctantly opened his eyes, re-read the devastating report about the halving of public monies for science – which, he knew from his own experience as an NSF program officer, were woefully inadequate to fund the lunatics who were not obviously wrong before the cuts, and the even more devastating report about the gutting of the review process.
“There’s total confusion,” said one employee who has worked at the N.S.F. for more than a decade and is involved in determining which grants are recommended for funding. The employee, who did not want to be named out of fear of retaliation for speaking to the news media, said that the N.S.F.’s rigorous review process had been disassembled, and that political mandates had taken precedence over scientific merits when assessing grant proposals.” – Bhatia A. et al., New York Times, 22 May 2025 [Emphasis added.]
A tear formed in the corner of the scientist’s eye. The NSF review process was ridiculously slow and trussed up to suffocation in governmental red tape. He knew only too well, he was guilty, he was no less an enabler than German bureaucrats during the Nazi era. But at least the process had been fair, or at least as fair as one that had $1 on offer for every $20 requested (in the good years) could have been. “This”, his soul moaned with increasing intensity, “is worse than the destruction of science. This is the denial of science in the name of power. This is 2 + 2 = 5!”
[Winston had written that] Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How [Winston responded] can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder.
“You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. You must humble yourself before you can become sane. It is not easy to become sane.” – 1984, Pt. 1, ch. 7; Pt. 3, ch. 2.
“‘Facts are elite, facts are fungible, facts are false. And when nothing is true, anything can be true.’ And here we are.” The tear fell to the desk; the scientist had felt it coming and moved his laptop out of the way just in time. “Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, Ray Bradbury, they all saw this coming. And they lived and wrote in vain. I’ll bet if I mentioned any of these names to the undergrads here, all I’d get would be blank stares.
“The undergrads!” A desperate hope flared in the scientist’s imagination, as he remembered how students in the 1960s (his generation!) had risen up in protest against a far less toxic Establishment than what was now in place, and had changed the course of history – choosing to forget for the moment that he was now living out the consequences of that change, but his soul needed something, anything, to which to cling.
Then he remembered the conversation that unfolded in the staff room, among the instructors that had been leading the field expedition the week prior … and how their students had complained bitterly about having to eat the same kinds of sandwiches in their prepared lunches two days in a row. The scientist’s hopes collapsed, with the realization that he and his colleagues could expect no more help from students or ‘ordinary’ citizens than Winston Smith got from the proles. If anything, the ‘proles’ of his day could be counted on to back Big Brother, not fight him.
“Down tools”, he thought. Then again, a silent scream. “Down tools!!” He looked over his work station, full of experiments and stocks that had been years in the gathering, full of things that proved, once and for all, that he was a lunatic, a minority of one, and would remain so unless and until he finished the work, published the studies, and gave others the chance to decide just how whack he was. He had a black-and-red-tinged vision of himself sweeping everything into autoclave bags, cooking them, throwing the residue off the laboratory dock, and stalking out, never to return, never again to think about, never mind do, science. Then his shoulders slumped as he realized that, even if he had had any hope whatsoever that his actions would have a useful effect, he lacked the simple courage to do them. He knew what needed to happen, but was unwilling to go to jail, or to exile, or to bankruptcy, or to the grave to make it so. That made him a bystander, a collaborator, and there was bugger all that he was willing to do about it. He passed sentence. “You suck, asshole.”
His phone pinged. His wife texted him to ask if he was on his way to the grocery store yet, and if he remembered that she needed the car for her evening meeting. He packed up the lab and departed, taking care that nothing that he had worked for was lost.
For the next several weeks, he dutifully appeared in his laboratory, doing just enough to keep things alive and keep his colleagues and the lab director off his back, most of the time. But every day at noon, he walked onto the laboratory pier with a dozen white roses, and threw them into the ocean.
No one asked why.
This made me appreciate Orwell a little more. I read the book in high school when I knew nothing. He requires rereading. He has become smarter.