As Tolkien understands, nothing is harder to parse than visible anonymity. By contrast, Sauron, like the NSA, has no such luxury. Orwell imagines the proles-85 percent of Oceania-to be politically neutered and not worth watching. Huxley lops off “eight ninths” of the populace through eugenics. Most dystopian authors cheat their way around this problem, ignoring huge swathes of the population to get the volume of information down to garden-hose levels. The Louder the Noise, the Fainter the SignalĪs a common saying in the intelligence community would have it, processing raw intel is like drinking from a fire hose. This is the sequence in which Frodo and Sam slip past “Homeland Security,” as it were, and evade the vast security apparatus on the borders of Mordor.ģ. In this respect, the most interesting sections of LOTR are the final chapter of Book IV and the first of Book VI. Quite the opposite: He was every bit as repelled by the KGB and the Gestapo as Orwell or Arthur Koestler. This isn’t to say, however, that Tolkien was naive about the very real abuses of totalitarian power. In The Lord of the Rings, determined individuals (Frodo, Gandalf) with an adequate understanding of the enemy’s blind spots are able to rebel in plain sight. Every act of surveillance entails a struggle over meaning, narrative, and plot, with the infiltrator often creating the story in a way that exploits the surveillance mechanism’s weaknesses.

For all our justifiable fears of the “ watchers,” the advantage is often on the side of the watched. Intelligence professionals try to anticipate and counter the actions of their opponents this leaves them on the defensive. Tolkien’s second lesson for us: Surveillance is typically reactive. And in Sauron, Tolkien is able to imagine a figure of godlike power and seemingly infinite resources, but crippling interpretive fallibility. But for a believer like Tolkien, only God can know everything. In Orwell’s work (as well as that of other dystopian writers like Aldous Huxley and Yevgeny Zamyatin) those two terms are nearly synonymous: The Thought Police always know what Winston Smith is up to. The most important of them was the distinction between omnipotence and omniscience. That’s why The Lord of the Rings has been dismissed, as Edmund Wilson put it soon after the book’s publication in 1954, as “a children’s book which has some how got out of hand.” Yet the world he created allowed Tolkien to address problems that conventional realism had seemingly abandoned. The most salient fact about Tolkien is not that he was a fantasist, but that he was Catholic: His Christian beliefs drove him out of realism and into a world of orcs, ents, and Dark Lords.

Best surveillance state novels