In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell (1949)
When you think of 1984 you probably think of Big Brother.
Depending on how long it has been since someone assigned it to you in high school, Big Brother may be all you remember. But perhaps you remember other features of the story, too. Maybe Newspeak rings a double-plus-ungood bell in your memory as the novel's invented language of efficiency and political control. Perhaps you recall Room 101, a personalized torture chamber in which the state subjects its victims to their darkest, most private fears. Even if you don't remember the role they played in 1984, you probably remember the thousand derivative dystopian stories they spawned. The irony, I think, is that none of these features of Oceania's system of authoritarian control alone is necessary, much less sufficient to explain what it is that makes 1984's imaginary state so powerful and stable. Indeed, there is only one indispensable practice, only one tool upon which Ingsoc's stability depends:
The Two-Minute Hate.
Men can, after all, resist the image of an all-powerful leader like Big Brother. I mean, of course they can - these are some of our best stories! There are real stories, like Spartacus, the Decembrists (St. Petersburg, not Portland), the American Revolution, or the French Revolution. There are also made up stories, where in many cases this human resolve in the face of an all-powerful antagonist is an even greater force! Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Katniss Everdeen, Antigone, Prometheus - they all poke the gods of our world in the eye without a care for what happens to them.
Men can find freedom within the confines of restricted language like Newspeak, too. Shostakovich's great Fifth Symphony ends with a hollow triumph, a plausibly deniable send-up of forced patriotic joy. The Island escaped the heavily censored confines of Apartheid South Africa by means of deep symbolism and simple subterfuge. Bei Dao and the Misty Poets rebelled against the oppression of the Cultural Revolution with both hidden meanings and hidden activities, penning their verses in the secret places of the countryside.
Neither is it certain that men will be cowed by the threats of violence and deep, dark fears of a Room 101 alone. Solzhenitsyn and many others kept forbidden ideas and thoughts alive through Samizdat. Burmese juntas could never fully suppress subversive back-room thangyat performances. Many of Paul's most famous epistles were penned from a prison cell. MLK's too. There is Luther, who could do no other. There is Bruno, who was in less fear upon learning that he would be burned alive than those who pronounced his sentence. And there is Jan Hus, who died singing the words that condemned him.
No, the thing that makes Ingsoc work, the thing that makes any control over what is allowed in any society work, is the transformation of external compliance into internal conviction.
Men cannot be controlled by mere violence, oppression, or tyranny. We must be compelled by our very nature to rush to the defense of those who would control us.
I witnessed this control by letting my contractor and his electrician choose the TV channel one morning last week. They eagerly switched on Newsmax, a slice of media I had never tuned into. I don’t consume CNN, MSNBC, or FOX either. While the content I do see has the nudges ET has helped me look out for, this assault was other-worldly.
First, both men are hard working, blue collar Boomers; spiritual, charitable, entrepreneurial, far from retirement at 63 and 67, and in committed relationships. Both have willingly shared their extensive knowledge of the building trades, construction methods, and their tools for my use during a months-long project. The remote location is more than a 2 hour drive for them so I have opened my second home to their overnights and offer them coffee, dinner, use of the pool, and access to the beer fridge and wine collection. We have become friends in the process.
But, after watching Newsmax with them I understood the genesis of so many talking points that would come up over dinner or while co-installing some aspect of the build. They are simply relieved that their side has regained control and are enthusiastic to see their talking points get traction again. It frustrates me that they uncritically believe that millions of US citizens are getting Social Security benefits at ages between 130-200 years of age. But, I’ve decided to let that go. I know there are beliefs I hold that I am unwilling to think too critically about too.
I think it’s really helpful to seek out these kinds of interactions for precisely this reason. We’d like to think that they will happen organically, and sometimes they will, but increasingly I think it is very easy to isolate ourselves entirely from reminders that our delusions are devilishly tricky to self-diagnose.
Beyond the Two-Minute Hate: Reclaiming Feeling from Manipulation
In George Orwell’s 1984, the most powerful tool of the Party is not Big Brother, Newspeak, or even Room 101. It is the Two-Minute Hate, a ritual in which citizens are conditioned to express their deepest fears and rage against an external enemy. This practice transforms external compliance into internal conviction—a process by which people do not simply obey power, but come to love their own oppression.
Today, we may lack a singular authoritarian regime, but the mechanisms of the Two-Minute Hate persist. In contemporary political discourse, ideological battles are framed in ways that demand not just attention, but emotional submission. We are expected to engage in ritualized outrage, not as an act of individual moral reckoning, but as part of a scripted performance dictated by the narratives of our time.
These narratives often take the form of Goldstein Machines—perpetual enemies that are both too dangerous to tolerate and too entrenched to ever fully defeat. Whether it is Systemic Racism or the Deep State, these ideas are presented as inescapable forces and unforgivable transgressions, requiring constant vigilance, constant outrage, and constant emotional investment.
The result? A society locked in a cycle of performative emotion. But what if there was another way? What if the way out of this cycle is not through thinking harder, but through feeling differently?
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The Two-Minute Hate and the Hijacking of Thinking and Feeling
The Two-Minute Hate works because it short-circuits our natural thinking process, overriding independent reflection and hijacking feeling itself.
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow provides a useful lens to understand this phenomenon. He describes two modes of thought:
• System 1: Fast, automatic, emotional, and intuitive.
• This is the brain’s default mode, reacting instantly to stimuli, often using mental shortcuts (heuristics).
• It is highly susceptible to emotional manipulation because it reacts before reason can intervene.
• System 2: Slow, deliberate, rational, and effortful.
• This system engages when we carefully analyze a problem, check our assumptions, or resist impulsive reactions.
• However, it requires effort and is easily fatigued, meaning that under stress or cognitive overload, people default to System 1’s fast, emotional reactions.
The Two-Minute Hate is effective because it fully engages System 1 while shutting down System 2:
• It creates an immediate emotional response—fear, anger, tribal loyalty—before critical thinking can intervene.
• It encourages cognitive ease—by giving a single, clear enemy (Goldstein, the Deep State, Systemic Racism), it removes the discomfort of complexity.
• It hijacks pattern recognition—associating certain images or phrases with danger or evil, priming people to react instinctively.
• It discourages doubt—System 1 doesn’t like uncertainty, so it seeks quick, emotionally satisfying answers.
The result? A population conditioned to react, not to reflect. This is where reclaiming true feeling—the feeling that exists before ideological conditioning—becomes essential.
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Reclaiming Feeling by Engaging System 2
If the Two-Minute Hate locks people into System 1, the way out is to activate System 2 before the reaction takes hold. However, as Kahneman shows, System 2 is easily overwhelmed and cannot sustain prolonged effort. Instead, we must cultivate moments of pause, reflection, and emotional detachment.
This aligns with something I have long reflected on:
• Thinking was given to me, but feeling is my own.
• At birth, I did not have a structured “I”—my feeling was raw and unmediated.
• Language and ideology came later, shaping the way I was taught to interpret my feelings.
To resist the Two-Minute Hate, we must return to this unmediated state, separating true feeling from conditioned reaction.
Step 1: Recognizing When Feeling is Hijacked
Before reacting to an emotionally charged narrative, pause and ask:
• Is this feeling mine, or was it given to me?
• Does this outrage arise from direct experience, or from a mediated script?
• Am I feeling something real, or am I being conditioned to react?
This moment of recognition is the first step toward autonomy.
Step 2: Returning to Pre-Linguistic Feeling
Before words define an experience, there is the feeling itself. This is the state of awe and wonder that exists before ideology—the feeling of a child staring at the vastness of the sky, or of an old man looking back on life with the simplicity of a beginner’s mind.
This is the feeling that must be protected from the machinery of mass manipulation.
It is not the rage of the Two-Minute Hate, nor the fear that fuels it.
It is the feeling of being alive in the present, unclouded by external narratives.
Step 3: Using Thinking as a Tool, Not a Master
Once we reconnect with raw feeling, we can reintroduce thinking as a tool for understanding, not as a reactionary reflex.
Instead of using thinking to justify our conditioned emotions, we use it to observe them with clarity.
This is where humor, poetry, and paradox become essential.
• Humor disrupts the rigidity of ideological conditioning, making us see the absurdity of being forced to feel a certain way.
• Poetry bypasses logic and ideology, returning us to direct experience.
• Paradox reminds us that the world is more complex than any single story can capture, breaking the binary nature of tribal conflict.
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If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You Are Precipitate
The well-known phrase “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” suggests that passivity is unacceptable in the face of injustice. But there’s a more insightful variation:
“If you’re not part of the solution, you are precipitate.”
In chemistry, a precipitate is a solid that settles out of a liquid solution—something that, instead of dissolving and contributing, simply falls out and becomes a useless byproduct.
Metaphorically, it means that if you are not actively engaged in solving a problem, you are not neutral—you are settling into irrelevance.
This is the danger of ideological cynicism. If we recognize the manipulations of the Two-Minute Hate but do nothing to reclaim our own feeling and thought, we do not escape the cycle—we merely settle to the bottom, inert and disengaged.
True engagement does not mean jumping into the next outrage cycle.
It means living outside of it, fully present, fully feeling, and fully aware.
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Conclusion: Living Outside the Hate Cycle
The tragedy of the Two-Minute Hate is that it turns real human concerns into pre-scripted emotional performances. Whether it is a political outrage cycle or a cultural battle over identity, the structure remains the same:
An enemy is given. A reaction is expected. Compliance is measured by how deeply we internalize the story.
But we can step outside this.
We can reclaim feeling before it is shaped by ideology.
We can use thinking as a tool, not as a leash.
We can embrace humor, awe, and mystery as ways of seeing through the illusion of control.
Because if we are not part of the solution—
If we are not actively reclaiming our own feelings and thoughts—
Then we are simply precipitate, settling into irrelevance.
That, I believe, is the true path beyond the Two-Minute Hate.
Good stuff Jim, we all have reflections in the mirror
What comes from a billion “solutions”? War of reason, reason by force.
The word “solution” used in a social context ought never see the light of day again.
Sink it deep, locked in a lead casket or throw it into a volcano, regardless, it springs back to life, brimming with its inherent poison.
Life is not a problem to be solved by social interventionism, it is more an organism that becomes new every moment, every breathe, every blink, every sigh etc.
James, what does society mean to you? I’m curious because for me it means collective bargaining against a problem. Don’t have food? Healthcare? Security? Make a society where farmers farm food and you focus on being a nurse or a policeman.
Solution is just a word relational to a problem. Society is a solution to a problem that humans can’t face alone (in my opinion), it’s a natural consequence of being surrounded by creatures faster, stronger and maybe better adapted to an environment. Human beings through society created a solution to that problem of natural individual competition- co-operation.
so what function does society hold for you that you don’t see problems and solutions? What function does society hold at all in your world?
I live in rural England. It is mostly the State and little else is excepted from regulation. All my friends are poor or dead. I hate that fact. Being neither it is difficult to associate much.
I don’t want to be a parish councillor. Being a farmer is more a belief system than a realistic place in our society.
The power to extract is well used in Westminster. There is an archetype that wields it in England, and their reason is pitched as mandatory. It is possible to tax parts of society to death. Fixed assets are a sitting target. Complex ownership structures ultimately means owned by the regulators.
I asked you what you thought society means to you and your point seems to be that society has failed your friends and by alienation to their suffering, you also? I’ve consulted chatgpt and that seems to be the theme. Am I intrepreting it right?
However James, im not sure if you noticed, but chatgpt pointed it out to me but I think this ultimately doesn’t answer my question: what purpose does society function?
I’ve given you mine. To solve problems. Like yours, like mine. What role is society for you?
But let me work with what you have given me; your assertion that solution shouldn’t be a part of the discourse appears to be an attempt at absurdism or nihilism. Is this correct?
But here’s maybe a question that could help you- is it the outcome that matters or the action? Was the allies stance against the nazis only meaningful because of outcome? What kind of world do you want to live in?
Society does not have an instrumental purpose. It is a spontaneous effect of many individuals associating. The rhetoric of “solution” is a planners’ delusion.
Every political “solution” (because that is what we are talking about here) is indulging group fantasies. The use of the word “solution” in the political context is a pretence at a discrete answer to a billion moving and changing body problem.
But it don’t half sell.
They believed in a “solution”.
Other people believing in political “solutions” and the resultant societal biases fails my friends.
ChatGPT is a best guess language regurgitator. Its output is not a spontaneous opinion, it has no idea what I am thinking, or any ideas at all. It can only output machine-learned ideation.
I think the Pulp Fiction speech is a dramatized mis-quote of biblical wisdom.