George Orwell's 1984 depict a dystopia with his use of a futuristic setting while incorporating the fear of technology. A dystopian society often connotes a society where people lead dehumanized and fearful lives. These technological trends have contributed to a corrupted or degraded state of deprivation and oppression, governmental tyranny and an exploitation of the people. The thought Police in Oceania often monitors the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania ensuring that they will not disobey the big brother. Even If it is the case as I have argued, Huxley’s brave world also stands as a guide to our dystopian present like the brutal and barren world of Orwell's 1984.
The West has been evolving in a decidedly Orwellian direction. This has been the case under George Bush, and perhaps even more so under President Obama. This reality has proven highly upsetting to civil libertarians of all stripes, who helped sweep Obama Into office in the hopes that he would end some of the worst practices of Bush's administration. Nigeria cannot be left out especially in the recent military past and more so under the civilian regime.
It would sound interesting, If we take a deeper thought of Orwell's opinion as we were taught In high school or college, and see how Orwell's warnings lines up with reality In our world today. He drew our attention to features of state power; and that proves that power within a context Is perhaps more relevant today for political, technological, and economic reasons than at any time since the end of the cold war.
1984 Is a story of Winston Smith, a 'middle-class' member of the outer party of Oceania that works In the Ministry of Truth His job is to doctor and destroy documents based upon constantly shifting whims of the party which rules Oceania, which declares to be the "truth". Oceania is a totalitarian state that would make even monsters like Stalin and Hitler green with envy. Oceania which includes what was formerly Great Britain(now called Air-strip One, on which Winston lives), the United States, Canada and Australasia is covered with tele-screens which are a kind of two way television that projects propaganda In, and can also watch for subversive activities , and microphones that monitors citizens almost anywhere 24/7. Whereas the mass of citizens, the 'proles' are left unmolested by the party largely because of their ignorance and Inability to organize the outer party, especially in constantly monitored for 'thought-crime' (even having a thought that challenges the orthodoxy of the party by the thought police who are housed In the Ministry of Love).
Orwell's dystopia in a literal sense is a world where everything is really its dark opposite. The Ministry of Truth Is really an organization for creating lies. In our world today, particularly in the governmental sectors of some countries, 'lies' are prevailing over the 'truth'. Everyone wants to eat the 'national cake', therefore an opportunity to be there would be a means to sign the checks or pervert Justice; even the so called 'Ministry of Justice'. The 'Ministry of Love' is a hell-house of torture, the 'Ministry of Plenty' a bureaucracy that administers deprivation and the 'Ministry of Peace' an Institution of War. One of the ultimate goals of the party is to destroy the meaning of language itself to fully institute the use of 'Newspeak' so that all reference with the past and the truth has been destroyed. The party then becomes the sole arbiters of what is real and what is fiction. The defiant act against the party that would ultimately lead to Winston's doom was when he started a diary. It is an act that declared what the party found totally unacceptable that a person could think for himself. Later under the most brutal form of torture, Winston would find himself compelled to deny the very sanity of trying to think outside of the iron grip of the party.
The party of Oceania takes relativism, social construction, and collective solipsism to their logical extremes. It does not merely reflect a certain view of the world, It Is the world- and can create and destroy the 'truth' as it sees fit. Facts and the past are nothing but memory, so by controlling memory, both individual and collective facts and history becomes whatever the party wants them to be. Even logical, self-evident truths are capable of being overthrown, even ideas such as 2+2=4. Under the proper pressure and manipulation, even mathematics and science bend before the will of the party.
Orwell's Oceania will not countenance divided loyalties and passion, especially the kind of loyalties and passion that grows out of love and sex. Unlike Plato, the party has not ended the family, but has turned it into a nest of spies where children betray their parents at any hint of unorthodoxy. The sexual instinct especially for women is channeled into the love of Big-brother and hatred of the traitorous Goldstein, both of whose no doubt imaginary images are plastered everywhere. The emotions of the masses are constantly kept at a fever pitch of hate against Oceania's geo-political enemies: Eurasia and East Asia. These two great powers live under similar totalitarian system as that In Oceania. Eurasia combines essentially the former Soviet Union and Europe, East Asia, China, Japan, the Koreas and nearby territories. The three great powers struggled with one another for what is left of the globe-essentially the Middle East and India.
In terms of war, Orwell has some very interesting and prescient things to say both for the cold war period that followed his novel; and even more so, for today. The international environment in which Oceania exists is one constant low-level or outright phony war between the big powers. Orwell in the act of the imaginary Goldstein muses that "war becoming continuous has fundamentally changed its character". The Orwellian state imagined in 1984 is a sadistic-state, the likes of which have never been seen. What makes it so horrendous even In light of its very real world rivals In this regard is its concept of power as a self-justifying force, as Orwell puts in the mouth of Winston's torturer O' Brien. Progress in our civilization would mean progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice, ours is founded on hatred, in our recent past and even more so now in the world. In our world today there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self abasement, everything else is destroyed.
The scenes Orwell depicts are that of Winston's imprisonment and torture which are gut wrenching and horrifying. They starve him until he becomes skeletal and loses his hair, break most of his bones, smash his teeth, and burn his insides with electrical shocks. I just imagined a once dignified man reduced to groveling bargaining and betrayal. In the real sense, it is not the physical abuse that so much reduces Winston as the psychological. They slapped his face, wrung his ear, pulled his hair, and made him stand on one leg, refused to let him urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water. The aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning. Their real weapon was their relentless questioning that went an hour after hour, tripping him up, laying trap for him, convicting him at every step of lies and contradictions, until he began weeping as much from shame as nervous fatigue. Today in our world, oppression and imprisonment often befall those who stand and speak for their rights. A popular figure is Nelson Mandela who won at last after a 27 year prison incarceration on defending the rights of the blacks in his country.
The ultimate psychological torture comes at the end of the novel when Winston, whose greatest fear is rats, has a cage of starved rats attached to his face. Under the extremest of fear, he betrays Julia not in the sense of turning her in, but in asking that she put in his place. It is a real and feigned request, and with It Winston lost his mind and his soul to the evil of the party.
I think it'll be wrong to see Orwell engaged in a sort of political phantasy, that his thought was completely implausible. Rather, 1984, is a kind of warning that given the continuation of certain trends this might be the world we ended up with.
The political Ideology which Orwell Imagined dominated his Oceania-Ingsoc, was foreshadowed by the Nazi and Soviet Totalitarian movement, who stripped of their Utopian veneer In his imagined Ideologies and became mere will to power. The class which gave rise to Orwell's ruling party, and had been brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. Their totalitarian order he thought would likely be enabled by new technologies of surveillance and control. Technologies such as aforementioned telescreens, microphones, but also neuro-pharmacology, and a mechanism such as novel writing machines. Indeed because it aimed to destroy Independent thought and empirical science.
Orwell's dystopia is a world of technological decline and endemic scarcity; the only area In which It excels being that of manipulation and control. 1984 gives us a lot to think about and not as something abstract, applied to some far off dystopia, but right here and now. He brings to our attention the issue of technological surveillance, torture, continuous low level war and propaganda and the abuse of language, along with question about history up to the present inequality and its origin.
As a literary political fiction and dystopian science-fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classical novel in content, plot and style. Many of Its term and concepts such as Big Brother, double think, thought crime, Newspeak, Room 101, tele-screen, 2+2=5 and memory hole, have entered everyday use since Its publication In 1949.
It would sound interesting, If we take a deeper thought of Orwell's opinion as we were taught In high school or college, and see how Orwell's warnings lines up with reality In our world today. He drew our attention to features of state power; and that proves that power within a context Is perhaps more relevant today for political, technological, and economic reasons than at any time since the end of the cold war.
1984 Is a story of Winston Smith, a 'middle-class' member of the outer party of Oceania that works In the Ministry of Truth His job is to doctor and destroy documents based upon constantly shifting whims of the party which rules Oceania, which declares to be the "truth". Oceania is a totalitarian state that would make even monsters like Stalin and Hitler green with envy. Oceania which includes what was formerly Great Britain(now called Air-strip One, on which Winston lives), the United States, Canada and Australasia is covered with tele-screens which are a kind of two way television that projects propaganda In, and can also watch for subversive activities , and microphones that monitors citizens almost anywhere 24/7. Whereas the mass of citizens, the 'proles' are left unmolested by the party largely because of their ignorance and Inability to organize the outer party, especially in constantly monitored for 'thought-crime' (even having a thought that challenges the orthodoxy of the party by the thought police who are housed In the Ministry of Love).
Orwell's dystopia in a literal sense is a world where everything is really its dark opposite. The Ministry of Truth Is really an organization for creating lies. In our world today, particularly in the governmental sectors of some countries, 'lies' are prevailing over the 'truth'. Everyone wants to eat the 'national cake', therefore an opportunity to be there would be a means to sign the checks or pervert Justice; even the so called 'Ministry of Justice'. The 'Ministry of Love' is a hell-house of torture, the 'Ministry of Plenty' a bureaucracy that administers deprivation and the 'Ministry of Peace' an Institution of War. One of the ultimate goals of the party is to destroy the meaning of language itself to fully institute the use of 'Newspeak' so that all reference with the past and the truth has been destroyed. The party then becomes the sole arbiters of what is real and what is fiction. The defiant act against the party that would ultimately lead to Winston's doom was when he started a diary. It is an act that declared what the party found totally unacceptable that a person could think for himself. Later under the most brutal form of torture, Winston would find himself compelled to deny the very sanity of trying to think outside of the iron grip of the party.
The party of Oceania takes relativism, social construction, and collective solipsism to their logical extremes. It does not merely reflect a certain view of the world, It Is the world- and can create and destroy the 'truth' as it sees fit. Facts and the past are nothing but memory, so by controlling memory, both individual and collective facts and history becomes whatever the party wants them to be. Even logical, self-evident truths are capable of being overthrown, even ideas such as 2+2=4. Under the proper pressure and manipulation, even mathematics and science bend before the will of the party.
Orwell's Oceania will not countenance divided loyalties and passion, especially the kind of loyalties and passion that grows out of love and sex. Unlike Plato, the party has not ended the family, but has turned it into a nest of spies where children betray their parents at any hint of unorthodoxy. The sexual instinct especially for women is channeled into the love of Big-brother and hatred of the traitorous Goldstein, both of whose no doubt imaginary images are plastered everywhere. The emotions of the masses are constantly kept at a fever pitch of hate against Oceania's geo-political enemies: Eurasia and East Asia. These two great powers live under similar totalitarian system as that In Oceania. Eurasia combines essentially the former Soviet Union and Europe, East Asia, China, Japan, the Koreas and nearby territories. The three great powers struggled with one another for what is left of the globe-essentially the Middle East and India.
In terms of war, Orwell has some very interesting and prescient things to say both for the cold war period that followed his novel; and even more so, for today. The international environment in which Oceania exists is one constant low-level or outright phony war between the big powers. Orwell in the act of the imaginary Goldstein muses that "war becoming continuous has fundamentally changed its character". The Orwellian state imagined in 1984 is a sadistic-state, the likes of which have never been seen. What makes it so horrendous even In light of its very real world rivals In this regard is its concept of power as a self-justifying force, as Orwell puts in the mouth of Winston's torturer O' Brien. Progress in our civilization would mean progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice, ours is founded on hatred, in our recent past and even more so now in the world. In our world today there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self abasement, everything else is destroyed.
The scenes Orwell depicts are that of Winston's imprisonment and torture which are gut wrenching and horrifying. They starve him until he becomes skeletal and loses his hair, break most of his bones, smash his teeth, and burn his insides with electrical shocks. I just imagined a once dignified man reduced to groveling bargaining and betrayal. In the real sense, it is not the physical abuse that so much reduces Winston as the psychological. They slapped his face, wrung his ear, pulled his hair, and made him stand on one leg, refused to let him urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water. The aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning. Their real weapon was their relentless questioning that went an hour after hour, tripping him up, laying trap for him, convicting him at every step of lies and contradictions, until he began weeping as much from shame as nervous fatigue. Today in our world, oppression and imprisonment often befall those who stand and speak for their rights. A popular figure is Nelson Mandela who won at last after a 27 year prison incarceration on defending the rights of the blacks in his country.
The ultimate psychological torture comes at the end of the novel when Winston, whose greatest fear is rats, has a cage of starved rats attached to his face. Under the extremest of fear, he betrays Julia not in the sense of turning her in, but in asking that she put in his place. It is a real and feigned request, and with It Winston lost his mind and his soul to the evil of the party.
I think it'll be wrong to see Orwell engaged in a sort of political phantasy, that his thought was completely implausible. Rather, 1984, is a kind of warning that given the continuation of certain trends this might be the world we ended up with.
The political Ideology which Orwell Imagined dominated his Oceania-Ingsoc, was foreshadowed by the Nazi and Soviet Totalitarian movement, who stripped of their Utopian veneer In his imagined Ideologies and became mere will to power. The class which gave rise to Orwell's ruling party, and had been brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. Their totalitarian order he thought would likely be enabled by new technologies of surveillance and control. Technologies such as aforementioned telescreens, microphones, but also neuro-pharmacology, and a mechanism such as novel writing machines. Indeed because it aimed to destroy Independent thought and empirical science.
Orwell's dystopia is a world of technological decline and endemic scarcity; the only area In which It excels being that of manipulation and control. 1984 gives us a lot to think about and not as something abstract, applied to some far off dystopia, but right here and now. He brings to our attention the issue of technological surveillance, torture, continuous low level war and propaganda and the abuse of language, along with question about history up to the present inequality and its origin.
As a literary political fiction and dystopian science-fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classical novel in content, plot and style. Many of Its term and concepts such as Big Brother, double think, thought crime, Newspeak, Room 101, tele-screen, 2+2=5 and memory hole, have entered everyday use since Its publication In 1949.
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