“Those two in paradise stood before a choice:
happiness without freedom or freedom without happiness; a third
choice wasn't given. They, the blockheads, they chose freedom—and
then what? Understandably, for centuries, they longed for fetters.
For fetters—you understand?” ... “But our boot: on his
head—crunch! And there: paradise is restored. Again we are
simple-hearted innocents, like Adam and Eve. No more confusion about
good and evil: everything is very simple, heavenly, childishly
simple. The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell Jar, the
Guardians—all these are good, all these are majestic, wonderful,
noble sublime, crystal-clean. Because they guard our non-freedom—that
is, our happiness.”1
In the
introduction, Zamyatin is quoted as having divided the world into a
reductionist perspective of only two groups: “dead-alive” and
“alive-alive”. “The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act.
But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they
produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in
search, in questions, in torment!”2.
“We” identifies a well-known behavior called “Stockholm
Syndrome”, where the oppressor identifies with their oppressor,
such as Amos Rucker, a black Confederate soldier, who said after the
Civil War that he wanted to remain enslaved to the good white people
of the South. D-503 understands that “we” is more important than
“I”: “The Christians of the ancient world (our only
predecessors, as imperfect as they were) also understood this:
humility is a virtue and pride is a vice; “WE” is divine, and “I”
is satanic”.3
D-503
knew that happiness trumped freedom with mathematical certainty,
since both “Mathematics and Death: neither makes mistakes”.4
“Freedom and crime are so indissolubly connected to each other,
like... well, like the movement of the aero and its velocity. When
the velocity of the aero = 0, it doesn't move; when the freedom of a
person = 0, he doesn't commit crime. This is clear. The sole means of
ridding man of crime is to rid him of freedom”.5
“In my final moment, I will piously and gratefully kiss the
punishing hand of the Benefactor”.6
Later on in the book, D-503's natural inclinations towards freedom
had him questioning, “But who are “they”? And who am I: “they”
or “we”? How will I know?”7.
Yevgeny
Zamyatin wrote WE in 1920, after having been in the Soviet
Union during the 1917 Communist Revolution. This novel points out the
exact conflict that the peasants of the Soviet Union had to sort
through, since they would have had mixed feelings about their nation
at that time. Zamyatin saw Russian society completely altered after
witnessing three centuries of the Tsar Autocratic system collapsing,
which would have been liberating. But then those who took power,
Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky—the Bolsheviks—for “the proletariat”,
took the reins of State Power, and used it to the maximum oppressive
extent, using force to maintain their legitimacy, if necessary. When
Serensky and the Provisional Government, was forced out of the Soviet
Union, in 1917, that was when the hope of a democratic nation for the
Russian State also left, and in came in Totalitarianism, which was
more repressive than the autocratic, Duma-less Tsar Russia. Lenin had
the Soviets disbanded, which was anti-Marxist, and later on, Stalin
assassinated all the Leninists, thusly guaranteeing an autocratic,
dictatorial, totalitarian state, with deaths surpassing the deaths
caused by Nazi Germany. So the conflict between freedom and happiness
is the confusion that Zamyatin was feeling, because the end of the
Russian Tsardom meant freedom on one hand and the efficiency of the
Bolshevik Soviet Union meant “happiness” on the other hand, even
if that meant slavery.
While
D-503 understands his yearnings for freedom as a “sickness”, like
drinking alcohol, and having wild sex with some woman who wasn't
assigned to you by the Benefactor or the One State, he also offers a
glimmering moment of hope when he wonders, “What if blooming is a
sickness? What if it is painful when a bud bursts?”8
D-503 promises I-330 to follow her anywhere, no matter where she was
taking him, which meant, at one moment in the book, D-503 was willing
to follow his heart, and libido. D-503, using Mathematics, figured
out that L = f(D), that Love was a function of Death.
“That is why I am afraid of I-330, I struggle with
her, I don't want—but how can “I don't want” and “I want”
coexist in me? And the most hideous part of this is: I want
yesterday's blissful death again. The hideousness of it is that, even
now, when the logical function has been integrated, when it is
obvious that it is implicitly composed of death, I still want her, my
lips, my hands, my breast, every millimeter of me...”9
I-330 targeted D-503 because he is the Builder of the Integral, a
rocket that will subdue the entire universe, just like the One State
conquered the whole Earth, and she is MEPHI, an underground guerrilla
organization dedicated to overthrowing the One State. D-503
references the 1917 Revolution with this passage: “Revolutions
aren't possible. Because our—I am talking, not you—our revolution
was the last. And there cannot be any more revolutions... Everyone
knows that...”.10
I-330 explains to D-503 that “there isn't a final [Revolution].
Revolutions are infinite. Final things are for children because
infinity scares children and it is important that children sleep
peacefully at night...”11
I-330 also offers a
more critical theory about life, by dissecting a confluence of
emotions, after D-503 says that he hates the fog, since he's afraid
of it. I-330, a Revolutionary Martyr, says, “that means you love
it. You're afraid of it—because it is stronger than you. You hate
it—because you are afraid of it. You love it—because you can't
conquer it yourself. You see, you can only love the unconquerable”12.
Before writing this
paper, I had a love for Vladamir Lenin, since, for me, he represented
Socialism, but after this paper, I realize that any type of idolotry,
or worship, of a person sets up on fallacious foundations, since
humans are corruptible. Zamyatin's Russia shows how there was new
technology, and how science was being applied to society, trying to
make the working population more efficient (“Only the rational and
useful are beautiful: machines, boots, formulas, food, etc.”13),
but then too much Frederick Winslow Taylor efficiency can turn people
into soulless, imagineless cogs of a machine. Atheism is correct, so
that's advanced, but the problem arises when you worship a human
being, since, without oversight, it's human nature for people to
succumb to corruption. So while Vladimir Lenin had the moral appeal
of Karl Marx, Lenin, once in power, used the supposedly Marxist
ideology the same way that Hitler used Nazism, with State violence,
and lots of bloodshed of many innocent working people, and peasants.
1Yevgeny
Zamyatin, WE (New York:
Random House 2006), 55
2Natasha
Randall, introduction to WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin (New York:
Random House 2006), xi
3Zamyatin,
WE, 113
4Zamyatin,
WE, 90
5Ibid,
33
6Ibid,
101
7Ibid,
128
8Zamyatin,
WE, 115
9Ibid,
119
10Ibid,
153
11Ibid,
153
12Ibid,
64
13Zamyatin,
WE, 44
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