Fear of the Unknown Theme Analysis

The One State offers extreme, mechanized rationality in place of free will as the solution to navigating the world’s unpredictable forces. Everything in the One State is governed exclusively by an adherence to rigid logic and mathematical claims, and ciphers’ daily lives are organized according to highly regulated scheduling. The One State values absolute subservience to a governing power, math and predictability as the path toward happiness, and it indoctrinates its citizens to perceive the attempts of their savage, uncivilized “Ancient” forbearers to harness control over the world as naïve, superstitious, and self-destructive. At the end of the day, however, the problems and complexities of individual people and the larger world are infinite, and it is impossible to know all. In We, Zamyatin suggests that humanity’s attempts to exercise control over a largely uncontrollable, unknown world are vain and fruitless.

The One State believes that absolute subservience and logical, rigorous structure hold the key to happiness. Ciphers are monitored constantly: they live in glass houses, and government-appointed “Guardians” watch their every move and punish anyone who deviates from the status quo. The One State uses rationality to validate its surveillance state, arguing that the “beneficial yoke of reason” will bring “mathematically infallible happiness.” On the other hand, the One State believes that imagination and unpredictability bring about only pain, suffering, and chaos. The State Gazette, the One State’s newspaper, publishes an article championing the Operation, a procedure that rids ciphers of their capacity for imagination and irrational thought. The article claims, “the beauty of a mechanism is in its steadfast, precise, and pendulum-like rhythm.” In other words, the beauty of machines is that they are rational, steady, and perfectly predictable: they leave no space for doubt and invite no threat of the unknown. The One State wants its ciphers to undergo the Operation because it will render them even more predictable and machine-like than they already are, thus assuaging the government’s fear of the unknown.

The One State regards the Ancients’ embracement of individual freedom and illogical superstition as silly, ineffective, and destructive. They use propaganda like the story of The Three Released to warn ciphers of the dangers of the freedom and the unknown. The Three Released tells the story of three ciphers who, as an experiment, were allowed to take a month off work. The “released’ ciphers didn’t know what to do with their new free time, so they “loitered around the place they usually worked and peeped inside with hungry eyes.” Eventually, they became so tormented by their jarring lack of structure and predictability that they drowned themselves in the lake. The Three Released orients freedom and the unknown as a source of fear and structure and subservience as a source of happiness and stasis.

Ultimately, logic and control cannot sufficiently grant humanity the power to understand and predict everything about the world. Despite the One State’s efforts to harness control over its citizens through mechanizing their schedules and surveilling every aspect of their lives, it cannot prevent rebel organizations like MEPHI from gaining traction. In spite of D-503’s belief that all the world can be explained and known by mathematics, I-330’s mysterious smile continues to deceive him. What irks D-503 most about I-330 is her unreadable demeanor. When he first meets her, he remarks on “the annoying X in her smile,” with “X” referring to the algebraic symbol for an unknown value or quantity. D-503 finds I-330’s unknowable demeanor “annoying” because he views it as a threat: he has no way to determine with certainty what I-330 is thinking or what her intentions are. I-330’s mysteriousness makes her unpredictable and thus, in D-503’s and the One State’s eyes, a threat. At the end of the novel, the reader learns that D-503 did have reason to see a threat in I-330’s unreadable face: the Benefactor eventually reveals to D-503 that I-330 was only interested in him because he had access to the Integral and could be of use to MEPHI in its plot to take over the Integral and overthrow the One State. I-330’s betrayal (or, at least, her dishonesty) shows that rationality cannot account for all of life’s unknown variables.

I-330’s statement to D-503 that “revolutions are infinite” also highlights the insufficiency of math to know and predict human behavior. In response to D-503’s observation that MEPHI’s revolution will be impossible because the One State’s revolution at the end of the Two-Hundred-Year-War “was the last,” I-330 offers that there can never be a “last” revolution, as, like numbers, revolutions are “infinite,” and there is thus no way to quantify which will be the last. She explains, “Revolutions are infinite. Final things are for children because infinity scares children and it is important that children sleep peacefully at night…” Her remark suggests that D-503 and the One State have only chosen to believe that their authoritarian revolution was the last because it is easier and more comforting to believe this than to accept the possibility—and inevitability—of an infinite future of subsequent revolutions. If D-503 accepts the possibility of an infinite supply of future revolutions, he must also be ready to accept that such revolutions will be infinitely unpredictable, and, subsequently, beyond his ability to control.