Is Utility The Highest Moral Good?

The grey architecture of the Apparatus was monolithic and perpetually controlled. It was not created by laws or treaties, nor economic necessity but by a precise and chilling understanding: that Objective Truth was a Crippling Liability. In the high halls where the air was thick with the scent of recycled paper and ‘quiet ambition’ the foundational doctrine was unambiguous:

Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.

It was a philosophical position arrived at not through reckless nihilism but through managerial calculation. Truth was static and stubborn and often inconvenient. It demanded deference carry the baggage of history and insisted upon a restrictive definition of reality. ‘Reality must always be fluid and a perpetual construction site where the necessary narrative of the afternoon superseded the verifiable fact of the morning.’ Utility was the highest moral good. If a lie consolidated power, secured compliance or galvanized the collective will, then that lie was not merely acceptable; it was mandatory and possessing a utility that the fragile integrity of fact could never match.

The State did not fear inaccuracy; it celebrated the pliability that inaccuracy provided. History was not a chronicle of what occurred but a psychological tool—a malleable reservoir of symbols and lessons that could be re-edited and redeployed faster than the original events could be forgotten. Memory was systematically dismantled and replaced by the collective state of mind required for the next tactical move. To ask ‘Is this true?’ was to commit an ideological blunder revealing a dangerous preoccupation with the irrelevant past and a failure to grasp the dynamic and evolving needs of the present operation. The only relevant question was: ‘Does this work?’

But utility alone was insufficient. Fear while effective in the short term was a generalized corrosive emotion that bred apathy. It did not focus the collective energy; it dispersed it. A population unified only by shared terror was unstable and prone to lashing out at random ill-defined targets including the Apparatus itself. What was required was dedication and passion and directed malice.

This necessitated the second and equally vital pillar of the psychological doctrine: Hatred and contempt must be directed at particular individuals.

Hatred when diffused became an abstract grievance. When personalized it became a powerful and simplifying force. The Apparatus understood the human need for villains and for tangible breathing receptacles of collective failure. To blame an amorphous system or an un-quantifiable economic force was intellectually demanding and emotionally unsatisfying. But to hate the specific face of the Enemy—the corrupt bureaucrat with the weak chin or the ideologue across the border with the nervous tick or the former comrade whose defection symbolized all personal doubt—this was simple and visceral and profoundly unifying.

Every failure of the collective—the shortage of grain, the faulty machinery, the stifling grayness of existence itself—could be traced instantly and efficiently to the specific and documented malice of a singular person. This individual became the anchor point for all anxiety. They were designated the repository of wickedness and the required sacrifice for the maintenance of ideological purity. The contempt felt by the masses was not generalized societal fatigue but a moral righteousness channeled surgically at the designated target.

There was a profound and chilling efficiency in this system of personalization. It allowed the State to perform dramatic ideological shifts without ever admitting fault. When an old policy failed it was not the policy that was flawed; it was the treasonous official who implemented it. The official was erased and the underlying structure remained sacrosanct. The public was given not an explanation but a victim—a specific and detestable figure upon whom all pent-up hostility could be violently discharged. The catharsis was immediate, the energy renewed and the System preserved.

The most profound tragedy of this arrangement lay in the psychological decay of those tasked with its maintenance. The men and women who fabricated the necessary lies and assigned the necessary targets—the functionaries and the propagandists and the keepers of the narrative—lived within a permanent state of cognitive dissonance. They were forced to exist in two worlds simultaneously: the verifiable world of empty promises and material scarcity and the required world of ideological certainty and perpetual triumph.

They became masters of the ‘double-think,’ not merely believing two contradictory things but mastering the act of believing based solely on utility. They knew, in the silent and unacknowledged core of their minds, that the person they condemned today might be the hero they lionized tomorrow. They saw the detailed dossiers proving innocence that were discarded in favor of fabricated evidence proving guilt. They witnessed the deliberate insertion of small and easily memorable lies into the public narrative—liabilities added not for strategic deception but to test and reinforce the population’s willingness to surrender their own senses.

This constant fabrication was exhausting. It eroded personality by turning the enforcers into brittle and reactive shells. If truth was irrelevant then personal honor and integrity and genuine human connection were also rendered obsolete. How could one trust a colleague whose commitment to reality was known to bend instantly to the prevailing tactical wind? The somber mood of the regime was rooted in this atrophy of internal life, the cold and gnawing certainty that nothing—no memory, no promise, no love, no accusation—was genuinely real; it was all merely a phase in a larger and tactical calculation.

The System required not just compliance but the total surrender of the soul to its tactical mandates. It succeeded in making objective reality a luxury reserved only for the ideologically unsound. The somber silence that fell over the populace was not the quiet of peace but the quiet of exhausted doubt of a populace that had learned that certainty was a dangerous mistake. They had internalized the ultimate lesson: to survive one must direct hatred precisely as instructed and one must never inquire deeply into the truth. And the specific and personalized object of contempt cemented the tactical narrative by ensuring that the human spirit, starved of genuine reality, would always find its sustenance in a carefully prepared diet of directed malice.

The utility of the lie was the only truth that mattered.

And! Beautiful you are…