The Meaning of 1984

Hello readers,

Welcome to my final post about George Orwell's 1984. I know that the news that this will be my last post saddens you immensely, and for that I am sorry. In this blog post, I will be discussing the overall meaning of 1984, and how it carries over into our lives today.

As I discussed in my last post, 1984, similarly to Brave New World and The Handmaids Tale, serves mainly as a warning against all-controlling government systems. This is seen in nearly every single aspect of the society of Oceania, and is a defining feature of the novel. The constant usage of Big Brother as a role model and a leader keeps people in line, and causes them to follow his values very closely, primarily because they don't know any better. He appears to be a very dictator-like figure, and is able to use lies and fear tactics to impose his will on others.

In Oceania, there is also no sense of privacy. The Thought Police have the ability to arrest people because of their thoughts, which to me just seems wrong due to their personal nature. This is luckily a tool that has never been used (to my knowledge) in our world today, but it is definitely shown as an effective and terrible way to regulate society in 1984. Telescreens are another tool used by the government to spy on people in Oceania, and this has more of a translation to today's world in the form of artificial intelligence. There have been many controversial cases lately about things such as Siri and Alexa "always listening" to people's private conversations, and this is essentially how telescreens operate. This demonstrates the power that the internet could (and already does, to a degree) have, but beyond the extent that we have seen so far, such as through the usage of "cookies" to pick which advertisement to show someone on their device. Technology is definitely a large part of Oceania and how they manage to control people even when they think they are in the privacy of their own home.

One major theme that stuck out to me in 1984 was how powerful language really is. In Oceania, nobody reads because they simply do not have any reason to. This results in very few accounts of past news, which allows the government to literally rewrite history until "the chosen lie [passes] into the permanent records and [becomes] truth" (41). Because of the lack of written accounts, the government has total power as to what the general public knows and doesn't know.

Another example of this is through the usage of Newspeak. The aim of Newspeak is to "narrow the range of thought" until "thoughtcrime [is] literally impossible, because there [are] no words in which to express it" (46). The vocabulary is eventually narrowed down until fewer words are used, and therefore cannot be used against Big Brother. I found this very similar to the way that the society of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale took away the true names of Handmaids and essentially made it so that there were no words to be read by lower members of society. By regulating how much information people were capable of having, both societies gave more power to the government.

I think that the teachings of 1984 are still relevant today, because it warns against the government having too much control. Already we see younger generations with shorter attention spans and a decrease in the demand for written documents as things become more digital, and governments who are able to find out people's personal information by hacking into their devices. The disastrous results seen in novels like 1984 show people what can happen when the government has too much control, and is definitely applicable to current events.