Remember the Future
REMEMBER THE FUTURE: From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn
We live in the age of the tyrant. Treasure is hoarded in bigger and fewer storerooms. Outside these locked doors the dispossessed grow in number. The tyrant issues executive orders to protect his treasury and disguise his fear. Simultaneously the world is beginning to burn and melt. Icecaps and glaciers recede and wildfires, mega-storms, and drought destroy cities and choke crops in the parched (or flooded) fields. The tyrant knows who is to blame: it is not him. It is everybody else. He will save the world by destroying it. Everyone who disagrees is guilty of treason. Meanwhile, water and food grow evermore scarce and wars and riots break out in different places but for the same reason: the treasury is locked, and the desperate ranks of the poor increase. So an executive order is issued: the poor are not us, they are not human, their problems are of their own making. The tyrant makes sure that the world’s media is present at the proclamation so that all may know that this is now the law. The tyrant has spoken. The treasury is a temple and the poor are illegal.
Power changes everyone – those who possess it and those who come into contact with it. Everything that his rivals and opponents said about the tyrant before he took power is seen, in retrospect, as regrettable, “ill-judged and wrong”. The tyrant, somehow, is no longer “a bully, reckless and a danger to the world”. His rivals and opponents are now allies and full of “fresh respect”. Miraculously, under the powers blinding light, the tyrant “is a nice person, is a fair-minded person”. Truth is reversed, history is buried and the propaganda thunders on unhindered through the tyrant’s media outlets, “flooding the swamp” with “news”; all meaning lost in the meaninglessness.
No one can predict the future, but we are often sentimental about it because of what we have squandered in the present and lost in the past. We can console ourselves by reading of imagined futures in such works as “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and Brave New World”. Of the two it is Aldous Huxley who has given us a recognisable version of our current malaise and of our future. George Orwell created a world where information was force-fed, tightly controlled state propaganda and where books were banned. Huxley’s dystopia was a world where there was no need to ban books because no one read anything, where there was too much entertainment, too much information and too much discussion so that people were reduced to passivity and egoism. This was a society where everyone sought and craved pleasure and attention above everything else. Orwell’s vision was an imagined extension of anti-Soviet paranoia, a version of the past. Huxley’s vision is closer to our reality. It is a signal from our future.
It is a natural reaction to laugh at the utterances of the tyrant. His elliptical, tautological and duplicitous language chokes meaning and truth in a verbal fog and produces in the liberal listener a form of hysteria coupled with reprehension. It is a kind of fatal sedative. In the true believer, it fuels the blood rush of confirmation. Both reactions are understandable and mistaken. A tyrant is, of course, a spherical abomination: that is, an abomination no matter from what position or angle you observe him. So it pays to listen to what the tyrant says, however painful and depressing that is.
On November 10th, 2016, the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen wrote a prophetic essay, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival”, in the New York Review of Books. He was reflecting then on Trump’s forthcoming first Presidential term, after his election victory two days earlier. At the heart Gessen’s piece are six rules, or warnings.
The first is, “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable.”
The second of Gessen’s warnings is that we must not be taken in by small signs of normality. The false rationale is that the world did not end on November 8th 2016. That history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. The calm does not last for long. Now the tyrant enjoys his second coming. From now on calm will be in short supply.
The third is that institutions will not save you. It is sobering to remember that it took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy. Gessen was writing in 2016. Ukania in 2025 may pride itself on having robust institutions, but the treasury is still locked and the poor still assemble outside, evermore agitated and impatient for the commencement of their unknowable future.
The fourth warning is to be outraged. If you follow the first warning and believe what the tyrant is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. Gessen offers some advice, “This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself.”
The fifth is quite stark, difficult and to the point: don’t make compromises. For the tyrant, politics as the art of the possible is utterly amoral. Those who argue for cooperation will make the case that cooperation is essential for the future. They will be wilfully ignoring the corrupting touch of the tyrant, from which the future must be protected. The German ruling class thought they could contain Hitler. It did not end well.
The final warning is the most uplifting, especially if you are Scottish: remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. You have to offer a vision of the future to counterbalance the all-too-familiar Anglo-white-populist vision of an imaginary past. Masha Gessen urges us to understand that “The present is not normal – resistance and stubborn, uncompromising outrage – is normal.”
Many on the nationalist left disparage John Swinney as a leader and dismiss him for being too “safe” and “managerial”. This underestimation is defeatist, too lazy and takes us nowhere. If John Swinney can summon his inner outrage and remember the future, as we all must, then Scottish independence will be the prize.
God alone knows we have had such a tangled and painful story of exploitation and depopulation these past 318 years to furnish enough outrage for everyone. The collective memory for Scotland since 1707 is one of struggle and pain, so much so that many prefer to forget it.
But as the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit reminds us,
“Memory is a resource for facing the future; it’s equipment for imagining, planning, preparing. Forgetting creates terrible vulnerabilities to the return of foreseen disasters, to misinformation… and vulnerability to unrealistic expectations – including that each disaster… will be the ‘wake-up call’ that will change everything.”
To remember the future we have to be confident of our story, no matter the many different voices that tell it and the tragedies and disappointments it contains. The tyrant prefers us to listen to one story: his. As we have witnessed the tyrant’s story is in fact a narcissistic need to be right in all things at all times. The tyrant’s narrative leads us down narrow tracks of certainty unknown to reasonable people. The tyrant has spoken out about race, nationality, gender, identity, the environment and everything. He insists his followers go down those tracks, and they will, because they believe. The Mexicans, Arabs and Africans are not like you. They do not speak or act like you so therefore you should hate them. You will hate them. So they are hated.
The flaw in all of this, for the tyrant, is that storytelling is democratic. It is available to everyone, especially those locked out of the treasury. The tyrant knows that the greatest way to sow fear is to not allow people to listen to one another. Storytelling is spontaneous dialogue; it crosses all the divides the tyrant wants to create. Through our stories is how we remember the future. They allow us to choose understanding over judgement. Understanding is love’s other name. Judgement is for the tyrant.
Our stories can hold our fragile democracy together. They can open the doors of the locked treasury and feed the people.
©George Gunn 2025
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If you mean the USA, it doesn’t appear that you know the first thing about its treasury.
“The national debt ($36.22 T) is the total amount of outstanding borrowing by the U.S. Federal Government accumulated over the nation’s history.”
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-debt/
Has applicability far beyond Scotland, as you realize–and it assuredly applies to the U$A, notwithstanding meaningless picks at nits about treasury trivia. The core of the matter is tyranny in our time…and whatever future might remain livable for us all. Well written and timely, posted by me at Bluesky.
@Daniel Raphael, if you are directly replying to my comment, please use the Reply button.
The USA has extremes of riches and poverty, both signs of sickness, and is neither healthy nor wealthy. Hence some of its insane schemes featuring AI or cryptocurrency, its desperation for fossil fuels to back up the petrodollar, its oil-sucking planet-destroying military monsters, its poisoning of its own land, air and water; and of course its vampiric monetised health predations.
The US Treasury is not full, nor empty, but holds a cavernous black hole of debt. The state is effectively bankrupt. Its gold reserves are a drop in this ocean of debt. This is not a trivial matter. As long as the USA can keep printing US dollars to finance its debt, and the world keeps taking them, then this debt (or extravagantly living beyond one’s means while keeping a dirty gun to the planet’s head) can keep growing. Not only is this unsustainable, but the stress (perceivable in flickering) has real-world implications, and the prospect of a nuclear-armed state with information supremacy over large parts of the globe suddenly experiencing financial meltdown is another future disaster (and failure of human intelligence) we could well do without.
If the USA is only really rich in US dollars, narcotics and fissionable uranium, what point is there in supporting its necessary propagandist pretence that it is a super-rich country (and therefore somehow ever-equipped to pay its ever-mounting debts without needing to invade other countries to seize their resources, or capture their governments to do its bidding)?
Thanks George, it’s always good to see some of your writing.
I agree with every wOrd.
‘George Orwell created a world where information was force-fed, tightly controlled state propaganda and where books were banned. . . . Orwell’s vision was an imagined extension of anti-Soviet paranoia, a version of the past’.
I am confused by this. Are you saying Orwell’s ‘1984’ is paranoid propaganda? How could one be ‘paranoid’ about what was going on in Stalin’s Russia? It was actually probably far worse than what was known then! And how could you be paranoid about what Putin is doing right now (and is creeping into US society too), which is exactly what you describe in the first sentence? And on a different tack do we not have such notions as the ‘thought police’, ‘wrong-think’ rippling right through our western societies right now? Orwell’s 1984 is highly relevant today and not remotely only ‘of the past’.
Niemand- I would suggest that North Korea is today closer to the Big Brother society envisaged in 1984 than any other nation.
Orwell came to dislike and distrust communism (especially after his experience in Spanish Civil War) and 1984 was written when Stalin was Soviet leader and the cult of leader was at its strongest.
Orwell was a very significant and highly respected writer and flagged up warnings for the future. He has such a strong reputation (especially in UK) that it is frequently used (abused) by people of virtually all political persuasions to support their own viewpoint.
George makes a good point that in 2025 people are not so much restricted in what they can read and think, as in 1984, but more flooded with disinformation. The result of this is that not only is it more difficult for people to separate truth from lies but it disincentivises them from even wanting to.
Orwell couldn’t find a publisher for ANIMAL FARM in the UK at first, which was at the time allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler.
Orwell unquestionably wrote it as a piece of anti-Soviet proaganada, so G Gunn is not wrong about that.
Orwell felt it justified after Stalin’s goons had almost killed him in Barcelona.
But the point is that he was not flavour of the month on returning to the UK from Spain and was really out on a limb…
Then things changed very quickly after 45 and the Cold War began..
I always thought the CIA / FBI / State Department term for the international brigaders and fellow travellers back at the time hilarious: premature anti-fascists…
As for Memory, as well as an act of barbarity, the Holocaust was also an act of historical erasure… any trace of the Jews of Europe was to be erased from the record…
The concept of Historical Memory, fairly recent to our time, has become another battlefield in our culture wars, in Spain for example, where the right-wing Madrid municipal government removed the plaque dedicated to the memory of those Spaniards executed without trial in the cemetery there at the end of the Civil War, which the previous Left wing government of Manuela Carmena had established…
Anti-Soviet propaganda is not the same as anti-Soviet paranoia though. The difference in meaning is significant and what I picked up on.
@Douglas, and when a British team of animators made their adaptation of Animal Farm, their secret CIA backers demanded and got a changed ending. The CIA was secretly funding much of Europe’s post-WW2 artistic endeavours (although some artists were in the know, and even actively collaborated). So, it isn’t surprising that the ‘Cold War’ was drenched in pro-USA (stretching so far as ‘non-communist left’) propaganda. I recommend Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders.
@John, Orwell had no reason to use 1984 to warn anyone about what might happen in Russia. Orwell had worked for the British Information Research Department, which is the obvious basis for much of the novel (with definite notes of BBC and the Ministry of Information).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Research_Department
It’s odd that North Korea keeps getting mentioned in this context, when its leadership structure is a hereditary monarchy, and I guess we don’t really know much else we can independently verify about it.
British Official Secrecy is draconian and increasingly so. Dissent against militaristic British imperialism is being crushed. Foreign policy (and most of domestic policy now) grinds on down the NATO-neoliberal path of destruction, regardless of which policies are popular or sane.
Remember, myths about British propaganda, censorship, its quasi-constitution, its royalty, its imperial status and relation to other empires, its military dictatorship qualities — along with many silences and elisions — are as important to maintaining rule as positive propaganda itself. The myth of a censorious left, for example, should be seen in the context of the state misinformation and misdirection drives of SpyCops, the infiltration of the trade union movement, the capture/corruption/coercion of artists who maintain their own omertà about their many collusions (see Orwell’s List). And of course, who creates consumer capitalism’s vast output of propaganda (sometimes in more blatant but banal forms called ‘advertising’)?
It is true that those of various political persuasions cite Orwell and that sometimes this is as a distortion of his meaning. But also it happens because what he discusses *is* applicable across the political spectrum. For me that is his real strength as he exposes the way all politics can be corrupted and authoritarian in its own way. Hence is is not contradictory to say that evoking ‘wrongthink’ can today be applied to tactics of the hard right and some on the progressive left i.e. a deep, potentially ‘cancelling’ censoriousness upholding something that is either highly dubious or quite possibly false in the first place (the real fake news).
Niemand,
George is an old school ‘leftie’ and like all such people chooses to put his head in the sand over the crimes of communism and whilst been an apologist for the Soviet Union never wanted to go and live there preferring to stay in the capitalist west and write articles decrying the society that he chooses to live in, but that’s free capitalist societies for you. It’s why virtually everybody on the planet (given the chance) wants to live here.
Plenty of flights to Cuba/Venezuela/China/Vietnam/Iran etc etc should George ever fancy a change.
Never the argument, always the man. A sure sign of nothing useful to say.
The USSR was a socialist country (there is a big clue in the name, although it was always striving towards communism, apparently). After 1918 the only leadership that attempted to impose communism was led by Gorbochev. Thereafter, Russian cities have ‘perestroika belts’ built by builders who had sold any of their tools that they could sell.
Anyway, the future is orange, with a funny golden-fleece hat.
George that fair lifted me…you are so good at putting the unwieldy, incomprehensible and unmanageable into words.
Bring on the stories for they are our revolution.
John Swinney as saviour ? Are you serious?
De-coupling our essential infrastructure from the influence of “Great Men”, billionaires, autocrats and their money and media would go a long way towards inoculating Scotland from the de-stabilising, ruinous future they plan for us.
Every service and resource we rely on should, as a matter of policy, be owned and run from within Scotland if humanly possible.
That sounds just like the USSR, and that only worked because you weren’t allowed out of the country unless it was to somewhere like Bulgaria.
Whit!?
“That sounds just like the USSR…” No.
Many developed, democratic countries insist that only people who live in that country can buy/own land. They make a point of controlling energy production and distribution from within their own borders. They forbid private ownership of the public water supply. They retain full ownership of their public health services.
Trying, “where humanly possible” (as I said) to ensure that only individuals or businesses based within your country have ownership or control over vital resources and services is simply good management for resilience in an increasingly volatile world. It just makes long-term sense. No need for any oppressive, authoritarian regimes or government by “-isms”.
I live in a country where anyone, anywhere in the world, without qualification, can own tens of thousands of acres of land, including homes and villages where people live and work. Where any other country’s government can own our energy production and distribution. Any overseas wealth fund can take over the provision of public health care services. Any foreign individual can make donations to our political parties and influence our elections. That is not a safe or sane way to run a country.
So please take your “Reds Under The Beds!” commentary elsewhere.
I agree very much but does this not also play into what some would call anti-globalisation?
There is schizophrenia about this. Not that long ago anti-globalisation protests were the mark of the hard, ant-capitalist left and also had roots in small is beautiful environmentalism too. Then almost in a blink of the eye, it became a rallying cry of the reactionary right and to say you were an anti-globalist was anathema to the progressive left. On the one hand one could read your aims as ‘Scotland for the Scottish’ isolationism (or worse), on the other, a fair means to avoid international capitalist exploitation and asset stripping in favour of local focus on the needs of the immediate population.
I think you ( and Santa above) are missing the point I was trying to make.
I am only saying that VITAL services (those on which we are fully dependent for life and limb) should remain in the control of our own citizens and government.
By all means let’s have free with the rest of the world (Scotland has a long history of this) but keep control of those things that are our core. It is not a radical idea.
Most sensible and prosperous democracies already do this. It is the post-Thatcher UK that is the outlier here, in happily selling off it’s resilience, safety, security, health, wellbeing so that a tiny minority can enrich themselves further.
For the avoidance of doubt, I regard everyone who lives and works in Scotland, everyone who has made a home here, as being Scottish. Whatever their country of birth and whatever their skin-colour.
I do agree about vital services. Land is more tricky if you want all land sales to only be open to citizens though some restriction does surely seem sensible. London for example has been decimated by foreign oligarch ownership.
It is wrong however to say ‘Any foreign individual can make donations to our political parties and influence our elections’ as that is not the case. In fact, ‘parties can [only] accept money from people on the electoral register – a wider group than just British citizens. Irish, EU and Commonwealth citizens living in the UK can be eligible as well. Generally only UK and Irish businesses can donate’
https://fullfact.org/law/most-non-uk-citizens-cant-donate-uk-political-parties/
There are loopholes which Labour have said they will try and deal with
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/foreign-political-donations-in-the-uk/
But, essentially foreign donations are banned under UK electoral law.
Did anyone read the article?
All the tyrant needs is for us to bicker amongst ourselves like hens fighting over the last grains of corn. That way we don’t notice as his cave door swings open to swallow our seed corn for next year.
Famine spares the tyrant the inconvenience of having to wring our necks.