Europe is Learning to Love Big Brother

It is a peculiar feature of the age that the most intelligent people are often the most incapable of seeing the contradictions that govern their lives. The European citizen of 2025 does not live under tyranny in the traditional sense. He possesses bank accounts, passports, and broadband access. He may travel freely, vote regularly, and express opinions within established limits. Yet it is precisely within these limits that the condition of his unfreedom is revealed. For he believes that he is free, even as every mechanism of his civilization is designed to condition his behavior, narrow his vocabulary, and discourage his thought.

This is the triumph of doublethink.

Doublethink, properly understood, is not mere hypocrisy. It is not the act of lying, nor even the act of knowing one lies. It is the cultivated ability to believe two contradictory things simultaneously, and to believe both with equal conviction. It is to say, “I support free speech,” and to mean, “I support the regulation of speech I consider harmful.” It is to assert, “There are no forbidden ideas,” and to follow that statement with, “except those ideas which challenge the moral consensus.” The function of doublethink is not to deceive but to stabilize. In an unstable world, the lie that is believed by all becomes more comforting than the truth that shatters the narrative.

Europe today is governed by consensus rather than coercion. The postwar regimes constructed themselves not upon loyalty to a flag or a crown but upon allegiance to an idea: that liberal democracy, protected by supranational institutions and bureaucratic safeguards, must prevail against the forces of nationalism, tradition, or skepticism. To question the postwar idea is not treason in legal terms; it is heresy in cultural ones. And heresy in a secular age is punished not by burning but by exclusion, marginalization, and, when necessary, prosecution. The punishments are bureaucratic. The outcome is conformity.

Nowhere is doublethink more visible than in the management of speech. The European Charter of Fundamental Rights guarantees the “freedom of expression,” and yet every major state in Europe maintains legal exceptions so broad they swallow the rule. In Germany, Section 130 of the Criminal Code criminalizes “incitement of the people,” a term flexible enough to apply to a tweet, a pamphlet, or a historical argument. In France, the Gayssot Act prohibits denial of certain historical events but not others, creating a hierarchy of memory enforced by the judiciary. In Britain, there are “non-crime hate incidents” — entries on a citizen’s record for statements that break no law but offend a policy. And throughout the EU, the Digital Services Act now empowers platforms to remove speech flagged as dangerous by “trusted experts.” These experts are appointed, not elected. They speak the language of “integrity, resilience, and safety.” No one asks who trained them, who funds them, or who defines the categories they enforce. This is the method of modern censorship: to outsource control, avoid fingerprints, and deny that control exists at all.

The person that practices doublethink accepts this contradiction because he believes it is necessary. He believes that speech must be free, and he believes that speech must be controlled. He believes that misinformation is dangerous, and he believes that dissent is essential. He believes that democracy requires debate, and he believes that certain topics must never be debated. He believes all these things not because he is stupid but because he is trained. He has learned to obey with the dignity of a volunteer.

What separates the European of today from the subject of a past tyranny is not the level of repression but the internalization of the regime. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston feared the Thought Police; in Brussels, Berlin, and Paris, the citizen becomes the Thought Police. He flags posts, reports colleagues, and corrects his own children. He does this not out of fear but out of imagined “virtue.” He believes that to suppress the dangerous idea is to preserve the good society. He has learned the lesson that freedom is a burden best borne by those with correct opinions. The others must be guided, quietly, firmly, and, if needed, legally.

This is not despotism in the old form, yet the shape is familiar. The knock still comes early, before coffee, when the hallway is silent and the curtains are drawn. Police in body armor, bearing warrants issued in the name of “tolerance,” enter apartments to seize laptops, phones, and notebooks. They search for memes, messages, and associations. No one disappears, exactly. They are processed, photographed, and released with restrictions, or held for trial under codes meant to “guard democracy.” The language is soft: “community standards,” “combating extremism,” “ensuring societal cohesion.” The mechanisms are clean: algorithmic reports, Network Enforcement flags, and surveillance logs from transnational platforms. The soul of the regime is managerial and hygienic. The mask smiles. Beneath it, the will to uniformity moves with quiet precision. Thoughtcrime, in its modern European form, wears a legal robe and speaks with academic inflection. The citizen is conditioned to say: “This is freedom.”

Doublethink is not merely a symptom. It is the system. The more contradictions it absorbs, the stronger it becomes. A society that praises pluralism and demands uniformity, that celebrates rebellion and punishes dissidence, that advertises tolerance and prosecutes blasphemy — such a society does not fail from within. It calcifies. It forgets how to question because it forgets what the questions were. It believes the Party line not because it is true, but because the alternative would mean thinking alone.

The future of Europe is not likely to be jackboots and barbed wire. It is more likely to be moderated timelines, supervised discussion, and curated thought. The citizen will speak freely, so long as he says the right thing. He will think critically, so long as he does not ask forbidden questions. He will live in freedom, so long as he believes that freedom means obedience.

And when he no longer remembers what it was like to be free, he will not miss it. That is the final triumph of doublethink.

https://www.eurosiberia.net/p/europe-is-learning-to-love-big-brother