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ABSTRACT
This article examines the connections between social perfectibility and individual identity through George Orwell's famous non-place "Oceania" in 1984 (1949). It is argued that "Ingsoc" Party members see reality filtered through "collective solipsism," which is a mirage that is superimposed upon the material state of affairs in individual perception by the augmentation of every individual's environment with constant feedback from the social superstructure. Thus, perceptions, memories, and possibly even personalities are constructed situationally as fit for the superstructure. Due to the constantly intensifying regress of cognitive and material enabling factors, this "collective delusion" will detach itself from the material realm completely in 2050 when individual consciousness fully dissolves into Big Brother's super-mind. 1984 thus depicts a dystopian-utopian, "blackwhite" society on the "event horizon" to a "singularity," which will emerge when the state or collective becomes an absolute and no traces of private life remain.

In the present article I display the ideological foundations of the current system of representative democracy and question the liberal core beliefs that it is per definitionem superior to other political systems and that material causation will lead to a world of liberal democracies (or to a liberal democratic world state) because of this. The argument is developed in three steps. First, the creative power of ideas and ideologies is displayed. Secondly, an analysis of the historical growth of the liberal democracy regime is employed. Lastly, internal contradictions and problems are extracted from the structure displayed. The paper ultimately derives three conclusions. First, the foundations of the liberal-democratic system are ideological and thus relative. There have been alternative forms of public participation in political decision-making processes. Secondly, the system is bound by its ideological roots to turn imperialist but will fail in contexts that do not share its historical development. Thirdly, the nearer future will see an increasing tension between the old elites of the system and forces for change driven by advances in ICT. Instead of the liberal world state, the liberal order might thus evolve internally into a new mode of knowledge production and rule administration based on mass participation rather than on the election of representatives. Article visualizations: