Overview: Important Read!
George Orwells 1984, is a seminal work depicting a modern dystopia. In this totalitarian regime neither our body, nor our mind and feelings or our relationships with others are beyond the control of the state.Orwell is profoundly adept at weaving together the relationship between the role and control of the state with our psychological relationships with ourselves and those we love.
1984 is a portrait of a dystopia, a place where no one is friends, where everyone is trained to be enemies, and genuine love and intimacy are forbidden. They are made impossible by the state. This should remind us of the divide and conquer strategies of the Persian tyranny described by Pausanias, and the actions of tyrant Zeus described by Aristophanes in the Symposium.
By dividing us we are weak, when we are weak we are dependent, and when we are dependent we can be controlled. If we are controlled we are not free, not even to love who we want in the way we want.
At the heart of this novel is an attempted love story between the central characters Winston and Julia. Against all odds they are lovers in a regime that only promotes division and hatred amongst its subjects. In fact they do not even have the proper terms and concepts to either feel or to express love as hatred and fear are the primary emotions cultivated by the regime in the members of its society.
The setting of 1984 is foreign, and yet also strangely familiar. Written shortly after World War II, it was first published in 1949. It’s author, George Orwell, was a novelist, journalist and truth seeker. Depicted is a totalitarian regime, a form of government that attempts to assert total control over its subjects through force, fear, propaganda, disinformation and fake news, technological power, surveillance, and mind control techniques. The regime is engaged in mass psychological warfare against its citizens.
Oddly this regime looks in many ways like Stalins Soviet Union yet is set in a place called Airstrip One which is part of an empire called Oceania. Airstrip One turns out of course to be Great Britain. Why would Orwell, shortly after the great victory of free nations over tyranny in WWII, depict a nation that helped defeat Nazism as itself a totalitarian regime?
Oceania is a society ostensibly lead by a charismatic leader, Big Brother. They are currently at war, so media tells them, with Eurasia which includes Russia and China. Sound familiar? The political ideology of the regime is INGSOC or English Socialism. This ideology is effectively a totalitarian form of Communism later labelled as Oligarchic Colllectivism, a more apt name. Like Stalinist Russia and Communist China of today this nation is run by a single political faction known simply as The Party. There is an Inner Party of which OBrien is a member, and the Outer Party of which Winston is part through a large technocratic administrative bureaucracy. Below them are a class called the proles, the majority of the peoplewho live a squalid but free existence.
Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, a government bureaucracy where he changes facts from past news stories. He edits and rewrites the past in order to make it conform to the current propaganda needs of The Party.This they call “reality control.” Here, perception is reality. He who controls the present controls the past. And he who controls the past controls the future.
Perhaps the most diabolical form of control the regime exerts on its subjects is mind control. This is achieved through the use of fear and the threat of office along with the control of the daily narrative, the control of history, and ultimately through the control of language and logic itself. It is this aspect of the regime which makes it comprehensively totalitarian.They have their own version of political correctness call “Newspeak”, a language that attempts to make it impossible to think thoughts the Party does not approve of. “Love” is hate, and “peace” is war.
Orwell’s novel paints this dystopian regime in vivid technicolor. The book perhaps lacks the subtlety and art of a great novel. However it gives a vivid and historically accurate portrait of how total political and psychological control is and can be achieved. If we look at some of these techniques we find them strikingly similar to elements of our own times and even our own society.
In 1935 the famous American novelist Sinclair Lewis wrote a book called It Cant Happen Here about the rise of fascist socialism in the United States of America. Could it happen here? And, what would it actually look like if it did?
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|