On Residency, Definitions, and the Gradual Improvement of a Town

We met in a room that wanted to be a pub but had been converted into something else — a community centre, I think, though the sign outside said CIVIC ENGAGEMENT HUB, which is what you call a community centre after you’ve fired the people who ran it and replaced them with a laminated poster about values. There was a trestle table. There were folding chairs, the metal kind that punish you for sitting in them. Someone had left a jug of water and three glasses, two of which were clean.

Swift took the dirty one before I could warn him, examined it, held it up to the fluorescent light.

“Splendid,” he said. “A watermark. From actual water. I shall treasure it.” He set the glass down and did not drink from it. He was wearing a coat that belonged to a different century and an expression that belonged to a different species — something patient and predatory, a heron waiting in shallow water. He’d been quiet on the walk over, which I’d learned meant he was composing something in his head that would arrive later, fully formed and barbed.

Orwell had arrived before either of us and positioned himself near the door, as though planning an escape or guarding the exit — with him, it was difficult to tell. He was making notes in a small lined notebook. His handwriting was careful, almost cramped. He looked up when we sat down.

“I’ve been reading your premise,” he said to me. “The town council minutes.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s half-right. The idea of documenting exclusion through bureaucratic minutes is sound. The danger is that you’ll make it too clever.”

“Too clever,” Swift repeated, as if tasting the phrase. “An unusual concern.”

“Not unusual at all. Satire fails most often through cleverness. The writer is so pleased with their escalation, their logical trap, their gotcha, that they forget the reader needs to believe it. The minutes of a town council redefining ‘resident’ — that works because it sounds real. The moment it sounds like a writer’s exercise, you’ve lost everything.”

I nodded. “So the constraint is that every individual revision has to feel defensible.”

“Not defensible. Reasonable.” Orwell closed his notebook with a snap that suggested he’d already written the word and was annoyed to have to say it aloud. “Each step has to be the kind of thing a reasonable person, sitting in that meeting, could nod along with. Not because they’re evil. Not because they’re stupid. Because the step, taken in isolation, is small.”

“Each step is nothing,” Swift said. “That’s the principle. The Irish were not starved by a single act of malice. They were starved by a thousand acts of administration, each of which was nothing. A tariff adjustment. A land survey. A legal clarification. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and then a million people are dead and nobody has done anything wrong.”

The room got quieter after that. Even the fluorescent light seemed to buzz at a lower frequency.

“Yes,” Orwell said. “But there’s a difference in how we’d write it. You would make the language beautiful. You’d give the council members eloquence, wit, rhetorical sophistication. Your modest proposer is a brilliant man — that’s what makes the proposal so devastating. He argues better than anyone who would oppose him.”

“And you would make the language ugly,” Swift said. It wasn’t an accusation. He said it the way you’d note a structural feature of a building.

“Not ugly. Deadened. The language of the council minutes should be the language of committees everywhere — passive voice, nominalised verbs, abstract nouns. ‘It was felt that a review of the criteria was timely.’ ‘The committee noted concerns regarding the implementation timeline.’ Nobody says anything. Things are noted. Concerns are raised. Decisions emerge from the minutes like condensation — you can’t point to the moment they formed.”

Swift leaned forward. “I disagree. Not with your observation — the language of committees is dead, certainly. But dead language on the page is dead language for the reader. You must give me some life in it. Some spark. Even if the spark is monstrous.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Orwell said. “The spark makes it a performance. It makes the reader admire the writer instead of recognising the process. I want the reader to recognise the process. I want them to think: I have sat in this meeting. I have nodded along with this.”

I interjected, feeling the two positions pulling in opposite directions and trying to find the ground between them. “What if both registers are present? The minutes themselves are in Orwell’s dead language — passive, procedural, everything leached of agency. But the council members, when they actually speak in the meetings, have Swift’s rhetorical sophistication. So the minutes flatten and sanitise what was said, and the reader can feel the gap between the living argument and the dead record.”

They both looked at me. This is a thing that happens in these meetings — I propose something, and there’s a beat where I can’t tell if I’ve said something useful or something idiotic.

“No,” Swift said.

“No,” Orwell said.

“The minutes are the piece,” Orwell continued. “That’s the whole conceit. We never hear what was actually said in the meetings. We only have the record. The official version. And the official version is always reasonable.”

Swift nodded slowly. “He’s right, and it pains me to say so. The piece should be the minutes and nothing else. No exterior perspective. No wink to the reader. The document is the document. If the reader cannot see the horror inside the reasonableness, we have failed. We do not point at it.”

“But then where does the Swiftian escalation live?” I asked. “If the language is all flat committee prose —”

“The escalation lives in the definitions,” Swift said, and something changed in his voice — a sharpening, as though he’d found the thing he’d been composing on the walk over. “Each meeting’s minutes include a revised definition of ‘resident.’ The first revision is genuinely reasonable. Perhaps it addresses a real loophole — seasonal workers, or people with post office boxes but no permanent address. The second is slightly less reasonable but still defensible. The third introduces a condition that is odd but not outrageous. By the seventh or eighth revision, the definition of ‘resident’ has been narrowed to the point where only the council members themselves qualify, but — and this is essential — each individual step was small enough to nod along with.”

“That’s the Animal Farm structure,” I said. “The commandments on the barn wall. Each change is minor. The cumulative effect is total reversal.”

“Don’t invoke the title like a password,” Orwell said, more sharply than I expected. “The structure of that book — the thing people remember about it — is not that the commandments changed. It’s that the other animals saw the commandments change and could not quite articulate what was wrong. They had a feeling. A nagging sense. But the language had been arranged so that the feeling had nowhere to land. That’s what language does when it’s been captured by power — it doesn’t lie to you. It removes the vocabulary you’d need to object.”

“Newspeak,” I said.

“Don’t say Newspeak either.” He rubbed his forehead. “Every time someone says Newspeak they mean censorship. That isn’t what I was writing about. I was writing about the narrowing of thought through the narrowing of language. If you remove the word ‘freedom,’ you don’t make people unfree. You make the concept of freedom harder to think. The council minutes should do something similar. Each redefinition of ‘resident’ doesn’t just exclude more people — it makes the exclusion harder to articulate. The people being excluded lack the procedural vocabulary to object.”

Swift was watching Orwell with what I can only describe as collegial appetite — the look of a craftsman watching another craftsman work with a tool he hasn’t tried. “So the minutes should include a passage,” he said, “in which a resident objects to the redefinition, and the objection is noted in the minutes in language that neutralises it. ‘A member of the public raised a concern, which the committee considered and addressed.’”

“‘Addressed,’” Orwell repeated. “Not ‘resolved.’ Not ‘answered.’ Addressed. The most beautiful word in bureaucratic English. It means ‘we acknowledged the existence of your objection and then continued doing what we were doing.’ It is the verbal equivalent of making eye contact with someone while closing a door in their face.”

I was writing fast. “So the piece is structured as — what, six meetings? Eight? Each one incrementally tightening the definition.”

“More than eight would test the reader’s patience,” Swift said. “Fewer than six would not allow the escalation its proper arc. I should think seven meetings. Seven is a theological number — the days of creation, the deadly sins. There’s something right about a community being unmade in seven sessions.”

“But the minutes should not be uniform in length,” Orwell said. “The first meetings are brief. Routine business, one or two action items, a minor definitional adjustment in item four or five on the agenda. As the definition narrows, the minutes get longer — more items, more subcommittees, more references to previous resolutions. The bureaucracy grows in proportion to the injustice it’s administering. It has to. Every new exclusion requires new paperwork.”

“And new language,” Swift added. “New categories. I want a passage where the council creates a distinction between ‘residents,’ ‘occupants,’ ‘domiciled individuals,’ and ‘persons of ongoing presence.’ Each category with different rights. Each defined with enough precision to be technically unassailable and enough vagueness to be applied however the council wishes.”

Orwell almost smiled. Almost. “Persons of ongoing presence. That’s very good. It sounds like something a government would actually say.”

“It sounds like something your government did say,” Swift replied. “About the Irish. About the Indians. About anyone whose presence was ongoing but inconvenient.”

There was a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable but wasn’t comfortable either. The kind of silence where two people who are genuinely angry about the same thing recognise that anger in each other but express it so differently that the recognition itself is slightly awkward.

“I want the slogans,” Orwell said quietly. “The council should adopt a motto early on. Something about community. ‘For the Good of All Residents.’ And it should appear in every set of minutes. And it should never change. The definition of ‘resident’ shrinks, but the motto holds firm. ‘For the Good of All Residents.’ It’s technically true at every stage. The smaller the category of residents becomes, the easier it is to serve their good.”

“That is the Modest Proposal in miniature,” Swift said. “The reasonableness of the thing. My proposer does not hate children. He is concerned for their welfare. He has calculated. He has considered the economic implications. He is, by every metric available to him, a public servant. The monstrousness is not in the intent. The monstrousness is in the metric.”

“What about the people being excluded?” I asked. “Do they appear in the minutes at all?”

“They appear as items,” Swift said. “Agenda items. ‘Item 7: Ongoing concern regarding non-resident occupancy of residential properties.’ They are a concern. They are ongoing. They are, increasingly, a problem to be managed rather than people to be considered.”

“And then they stop appearing,” Orwell said. “That’s important. In the early minutes, the affected people are visible — they attend meetings, their concerns are noted, their names might even appear. In the later minutes, they are abstractions. Statistics. ‘The committee noted a 34% reduction in non-qualifying residency claims.’ By the final meeting, they have been defined out of the vocabulary entirely. They’re not excluded residents. They’re not even non-residents. They simply don’t appear.”

I felt something cold settle in my stomach, the way it does when a piece of writing stops being an exercise and becomes something that matters. “So the final minutes —”

“The final minutes are brief,” Swift said. “The council meets. All residents are present. Because by now, ‘all residents’ means the council. The meeting is serene. There is no old business to discuss, because the problems have been defined away. There is no public comment period, because there is no public. The council passes a motion congratulating itself on the achievement of full residential satisfaction.”

“‘Full residential satisfaction,’” Orwell said. “Write that down.”

I had already written it down.

“One thing concerns me,” I said. “The risk of the reader seeing through it too early. If the first few definitional changes are too obviously heading toward exclusion —”

“The first change should be genuinely good policy,” Orwell said firmly. “I mean that. It should be a real problem — perhaps vacant properties being counted as residences for tax purposes, or absentee landlords claiming resident status. The first change should make the reader think, ‘Yes, that’s reasonable. That needed fixing.’ The reader should agree with the council. That’s the hook in the mouth. If you start with something the reader recognises as wrong, you’ve given them distance. You’ve let them off.”

Swift straightened in his chair. “This is where we still disagree, I think. You want the reader implicated. You want them to recognise their own capacity for nodding along. I want the reader horrified. I want the reasonableness to be a mask, and I want the mask to slip — not at the end, but in the middle, in a single sentence that reveals the appetite underneath the procedure.”

“If the mask slips, the piece fails,” Orwell said. “The whole point is that the mask never slips. The language holds. The procedure holds. Everything holds. The horror is that it holds.”

Swift opened his mouth, then closed it. Then opened it again. “You may be right about that,” he said, and from the way he said it, I could tell it cost him something. “The discipline of it. Maintaining the register from first minute to last. Never breaking character. I am accustomed to the escalation that reveals — the moment when the proposer suggests eating children, and the reader’s stomach drops, and they understand that everything before was preparation for this. You’re telling me there is no such moment.”

“There is no such moment. There is only accumulation. The reader’s stomach should drop on the second reading, when they go back and see how early it started.”

Swift looked at me. “Can you do that? Can you maintain the dead register for five thousand words without a single wink?”

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly.

“Good answer,” Orwell said. “A confident yes would have worried me.”

The water jug had developed a bead of condensation that ran slowly down its side and pooled on the table. Nobody drank from it. The meeting hadn’t ended so much as reached a point where the next thing to say would have been the wrong thing — too neat, too conclusive. Swift was staring at the laminated poster about civic values on the wall behind Orwell’s head. The poster said COMMUNITY IS BUILT TOGETHER. I don’t think he was reading it. I think he was composing its seventh revision.