People are constantly arguing online over who was more right when they predicted the future, George Orwell in 1984 or Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. In his novel The Last Crime, John Domatilla (pen name for British author Ian Kennedy Martin) argues that both Orwell and Huxley were correct.
Unifying Visions
The Last Crime is set in a near future dystopian England ruled by an elite of political oligarchs who maintain their power through the use of omnipresent technology that tracks and observes everything people do. All forms of democracy, republicanism, parliamentarianism, indeed any form of limitations on the State at all, were all lost when the tyrannical Kabinet seized controlled, outlawed all rival political groups, and murdered anyone who opposed them. (pgs. 115-116) Those who challenge those in power end up as ashes in the Thames River. The computer, the Univac-R, tracks everyone and keeps records of everything they do at all times. Everyone around the main characters may be traitors and it is impossible to truly trust anyone as everyone may be an agent of the government’s secret police. This is very reminiscent of The Party in 1984 and the role it plays in human society and how it operates. And the main action of the story involves the main character, Harold Acteon, organizing a group to destroy the Univac and free society from technocratic rule.
At the same time, unlike 1984 where government tries to control human desires, here all human passions are completely unhinged. Sex is offered on every corner and in every building, freely by anyone. For example, at one point Acteon is taking a monorail and as he sits down he sees two twelve year old’s who progress quickly from kissing, to “fingering each other’s private parts,” (pg. 10) to having full on sex in front of him on the floor of the train car. Distressed, he regretfully reminds himself, “Everyone was screwing in public nowadays, in banks, ice fields, parks and churches, the continuing thrust and slaps, a motion machine of heaving people.” (pg. 11) Later, a random woman, Mary, wanders up to Acteon and whispers in his ear that she can give him a “quality sex massage” if he can wait ten minutes. (pg.17)
Their constant indulging in lust strips them of their ability to love, burning them out in the same way that setting a house on fire will produce a bright blaze and great amounts of heat, but leave nothing behind except the ruined remains of what used to be. The people of Martin’s dystopic England have so indulged themselves in titillations and sex that they have become numb to anything that isn’t extreme and perverse. They have burned out their ability to love and make love, exchanging the emotion of love for the hollowness of lust. In the final analysis, Acteon describes these husks as having, “fiber faces, so primitive the visages, void of any suggestion or feeling, “(pg. 80) which is to say more machine than man. Drugs and drugs use are ubiquitous and for every problem there is a pill or drug to solve your problems. (see pgs. 12-16 for an example) In the end, it destroys their ability to be human. These elements are highly reminiscent of Huxley’s Brave New World where the availability of sex and drugs makes people want to be enslaved and causes them to see freedom as a foul, stupid ideal.
While people debate Orwell vs. Huxley, it seems clear that Martin’s world is the one that has most correctly predicted the modern world. The governments of the United States and the United kingdom spy on their own citizens, track their movements, record their phone calls, copy their text messages, and monitor every aspect of their lives – all without warrants or concerns for privacy. Government powers have expanded in tyrannical fashions with the United States claiming the authority to murder its own citizens by assassination and without trial. In response to Covid-19, even the façade of limited government was abandoned as governments all over the world threw the law out the window and seized control over every aspect of society through brute force. Drug use has skyrocketed in the last decade, even among the elderly. All of these elements found either in Orwell or Huxley are both fully present in Martin’s dystopia.
Explaining Subservience
But The Last Crime has more to give the reader than merely integrating the warnings of Orwell and Huxley into a single story. Woven throughout the novel are the threads of society that explain how such a totalitarian regime could have ultimately come to power and why it is able to maintain its power. It isn’t ultimately because of the brute military and policing force available to those in power, nor is it the use of drugs to inebriate the public into subservience using the velvet lined chains of addiction. The truth that Martin exposes in his story, the reason why such a monster is available to rule, is because the people simply do not want to be bothered with liberty – they want to be slaves to the State. In other words, they have an attitude of servitude. And it, not brutality or seduction, is the foundation of tyranny.
This attitude is exposed again and again in the novel. For example, as Acteon is taking a cab drive through the suburbs at night he observes, “Here were the antennae of people whose lives were entirely motivated by permissions.” (pg.16) And isn’t that the truth? The great masses of people, especially those with enough time and money invested in a decent job and a comfortable living as those living in the suburbs do, aren’t just not motivated to confront those in power over their abuses, they actively have every reason not to do so. They profit from the current regime and upsetting the way things work may change that and make their lives more difficult.
For these it is better to have another beer and grumble about things while doing nothing, better to simply comply and get permission to do that which should be a basic right of existence. Worse, these actively convince themselves that the State’s domination of their lives is necessary and actively support their own oppression. They would rather buy a license for everything – marriage, driving, owning guns, hunting, businesses, etc. – instead of asking why complete strangers get to tell them who they can or cannot marry or why they should have to pay strangers to be able to engage in basic trade with others. They are content to grovel for permission instead of daring to live like human beings.
Near the end of his cab ride, during which he gets angry at his cab driver, he thinks, “It was hard to blame the race of drivers. Most people were content to to take their pensions and sit at home and watch the video. These mugs belonged to that two per cent of humanity who always had to work.” (pg. 18) Not only does this reiterate the previous truths of human apathy about doing something to fix their society, it also explains why the people are so apathetic. People are entertaining themselves into slavery. They don’t have to work a great deal, if at all. Their needs are seen to by the technocratic welfare state which uses the powers of the Univac computer to provide the masses with their basic needs. They have been pacified into carnal security (2 Nephi 28:19-23), all their normal instincts to revolt and resist have been lulled away by the ease in which they live. They may be slaves, but at least their chains are lined with velvet and what kind of fool would demand anything else if it meant life became more complex and difficult? The society seen in The Last Crime is the kind of so-called scientific Socialism that Socialists have championed for over a century now. So the masses do as little as possible and settle into subservience, happy to trade liberty for obedience if it makes their lives easier and everything is managed for them by those “experts who know better” than the ignorant public.
The Dangers of Technocracy
In these critiques Martin reveals a fear that I, myself share with him. If our attachment to liberty is purely for economic purposes, then what happens when capitalism advances economic and technological development to the point that the vast majority of labor is done by machines and people no longer have to work to survive? If freedom is merely a means to an economic end and not an end unto itself then what happens when that end is achieved? Martin’s answer, and the one I fear is most true, is that once ease is achieved we become content to be slaves as long as that slavery is pleasurable. In the final analysis, unless we love liberty for liberty’s own sake and not merely as a way to make our lives more enjoyable, then autocracy is inevitable as soon as technology makes labor unnecessary to secure the necessities and pleasures of life.
Martin understood that unless we value liberty and humanity in their own right as their own ends then the only outcome of the development of technology will be dehumanization and slaughter:
Life is a search for clues, clues to why the crime that is killing life is happening. And who is doing it. Needless to say the clues, like those in all cheap detective tales, are there. But can they be spotted?
Did we spot for instance that every senseless an d violent act we, the race, participated in, a fast example, fighting that Seventies war in Vietnam, would diminish our humanity to the point where it could be delivered into the hands of machines?
The race was beaten down in the end by its own violence, leading to a confrontation with its own guilt, resulting in the loss of its belief in itself which gave it its main identity.
In the first Renaissance whilst Da Vince, M Angelo, Raphael, Pope painted and fondled gentleboys, man suffered conceptual revision from the belief that the human form made us the lowest of the angels, to the idea that we were the highest of the animals. The second chip renaissance demoted us to sub-machine level.
There will be no third renaissance.
The Last Crime, pgs. 29-30
One can only kill another human if that human is not a human, is not a person. This is why all forms of killing, from abortion to war, necessitates dehumanization and is based on the argument that the human being killed is, in some way, not a real person. The danger in this, beyond the depredations and brutalities of murder, is that the more we do this, the more we as a society develop justifications for why other people aren’t really people, the more we convince ourselves that we aren’t really people, the more justifications we construct for why our humanity – our liberty – doesn’t really matter and why it therefore can be stripped from us at no great loss. When you couple that with the increase in technology that does everything we do, but better, the end result is the formation of a society where humans are largely obsolete and discardable.
Terrifyingly enough, most people aren’t simply okay with this, they actively want it. As is discussed above, they are more than willing to trade their humanity for ease. And when that happens, human progress grinds to a halt and Marx will be proven right, for it it will be the end of history. The vast majority of so-called economic exploitation will cease as the great majority of all people (98% in The Last Crime) will be of the same economic and social class and technology will do most of the labor. There are, effectively, no haves and have-nots. Socialism is triumphant. But, as The Last Crime testifies, history will not end in Utopia. It will end in Hell. Because, in the end, once achieved, scientific Socialism doesn’t lead to paradise, but the technocratic God-State.
The Basis of the State
Martin, is far more willing than most to tell the truth about how the State (the political form of all modern governments) really functions. While people today tell themselves all the myths they can about the function and purpose of government, deceive themselves with the myths of state benevolence, and react violently when the cloak of their lies is ripped off, Martin spoke of how the government functions with barefaced honesty. This truth telling begins when Acteon and his crew of malcontents and criminals are discussing what will happen when they use a stolen missile to blow up the Univac’s memory banks which are powered by a nuclear power plant using plutonium fuel rods. This exchange not only reveals how wars acquire their own horrific reasoning (you can’t call it actual logic), it also reveals the foundations of the government itself:
Quet was biting his lip, forehead puckered in line graphs on concentration. “There would be a fine file of gone absolutes if fire touched that powerstation. A horrorshow. Plutonium at non-artificial critical temperatures is dirty. Yes, the heat would melt the whole block, powerstation, memory bank building, maybe a barbecue of deathwatch beetle as far away as Parliament Museum and Pau’s Cathedral, but dirty. There would be a drift cloud.
…Suppose a hundred thousand die, suppose two? …Are you prepared to write off the term, ‘Londoners?”
Acteon nodded quickly as if it was not a difficult calculation.
…”Would it work?” Parmitty snapped at Quet.
Quet nodded. “But millions may die. Thousands will die.” Then he turned to Menac. “What d’you think?”
…”You ask what price to pay to destroy their system? The price is the gamble with the gift of every life on the gotterdamerung golf ball of a planet. …Now either we talk about it for the rest of our lives or we go war party. Who says, ‘No?'”
There was silence.
The Last Crime, pgs. 118-119
What lies at the foundation of the State? What is the basis for modern governments? Bones. The bones of all those who been slaughtered as sacrifices for its sustaining and for the increase/maintenance of the power of those who rule. It doesn’t matter if you’re a dictatorship or a democracy, the only way you gain and/or keep power is through violence and killing. And those who would be king must be comfortable with murder on such a massive scale that there is no word in English to actually describe it. In the final measure, all those who seek for the reins of power become no better than those who they seek to replace. Whatever their words, no matter how benevolent their rule, they still mean to rule and to rule means the use of violence, oppression, and killing to maintain power.
The State is founded on murder and murder is the only way to maintain it. This too, Martin makes clear in his book. When Acteon and his people hesitate to use their nuclear missile to blow up the nuclear power plant that would melt the Univac’s memory banks because there are civilians workers inside the plant, their hesitation causes them to be captured. It turns out that even though they knew the damage their actions would cause, it was still difficult for them to actively look at people and murder them. The agent interrogating Acteon after his capture tells him:
Had I been in your shoes, I would have pushed to use them as the human kindling of such an event. A bit of blonde burning would hardly have bloodied the pages of the kind of history you were trying to make. You gotta go full psychopath. There isn’t a successful revolutionary in history who wasn’t. Don’t you know that?
The Last Crime, pg.135
The agent here recognizes the contradiction in Acteon’s logic. He is fully willing to slaughter hundreds of thousands if not millions of people en masse, but when he has to look them in the eye and do it to specific individuals? He can’t do it. He still has some hesitancy, some moral qualms holding him back. But, the only way he can actually beat the State at its own game is by becoming it, by abandoning all ethics and going full psychopath and slaughtering with hesitancy or remorse, to even feel justified in his evils and necessary and serving the ultimate “common good.” This is something Acteon accepts as being true, saying:
The true laissez faire of democracy must in the final analysis be defined by murder. That is the rub, the paradox, the vicious vector. Freedom threatened must be answered by robbing the threateners of freedom – by murder. Murder is the stalwart of freedom. Freedom is the freedom to murder. …A man who will crucify another for the freedom not to have his mind enslaved and polluted with flim-flam must also learn further, must learn the justifiable logic of brutalist overkill.
The Last Crime, pgs.147-148
The problem with the State is that it depends on the power of those at its head to be able to force the noncompliant into obedience. The way it does this is through focused violence and the constant low level terror that inspires in the populace. When people say they don’t want to do something because they’ll go to jail what they’re really saying is that they’re terrified strangers in black paramilitary uniforms, guns, and shiny badges will show up, kidnap them, and lock them in a cage of concrete and steel or, worse yet, will shoot them. There is no law so trivial that the government will not murder you to enforce.
As Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter explains, violence is the very fundamental basis of how the law functions:
“Every law is violent. We try not to think about this, but we should. On the first day of law school, I tell my Contracts students never to argue for invoking the power of law except in a cause for which they are willing to kill…even a breach of contract requires a judicial remedy; and if the breacher will not pay damages, the sheriff will sequester his house and goods; and if he resists the forced sale of his property, the sheriff might have to shoot him.”
In every modern government, murder is the basis for rule and he who will not murder cannot rule.
Final Thoughts
If its prose is a bit mediocre, nevertheless The Last Crime does a magnificent job at revealing the true nature of modern governments and the dangers of their increasing stranglehold over the lives of individuals. And it reveals the ultimate outcome of the State and statism (“state-ism”). No matter what your form of government – democracy, republics, parliament, etc. – the ultimate outcome of the State is dictatorship and oligarchy. For some forms of government it make take longer to get there, for others it may happen more quickly, but the outcome is inevitable. Though all talk of freedom, though all justify their actions by invoking freedom, the final result of the State is deterministic in nature. Bureaucratic, faceless, procedural totalitarianism is the ultimate product of rule by force and if we do not stop it then it will be the end of us all:
The last crime will be a killing involving the last two men on earth. They will be two members of a committee. One the chairman, the other an ordinary member. The chairman will kill the ordinary member because the member wants changes in the constitution of the committee. The chairman will justify his killing as an act necessary to preserve freedom, for no one.
The Last Crime, pg.155
Blessedly, there is another way – Voluntaryism – a society where all relationships, including political ones, are based solely on the desire of people to voluntarily and consensually be part of them or not as they choose of their own free will and choice without compulsion. Unlike the utopian dream and dystopian reality of modern governments – and who could not describe the belief that giving people the power to force others to obey them, to kill them when they do not, and extort the wealth of the masses at will would produce safety, equality, liberty and peace as anything other than utopian? – voluntaryist societies are grounded in reality and the actual nature of the human species.
Humans given power self-destruct, therefore the only way to create a society of peace, liberality, and prosperity is to strip from people all power so that no one has power over he people. Instead every person is honored and treated as an individual being with power over his or her life and the ability to create and join the kind of societies necessary to provide for and solve his or her problems without the need of political overlords directing and commanding his or her actions.
The Last Crime is a warning about the imminent outcome of continuing to follow the State and a clarion call desperately asking for something better before it is too late. Voluntaryism is the answer to that plea.