George Orwell — mastermind of dystopian fiction or enlightened prophet?
It seems the latter may be the truer answer.
If you haven’t read the classic “1984,” the novel is a cautionary tale that follows a futuristic society dominated by a surveillance state that aims to redefine truth through rigid thought control.
Sound familiar?
While Orwell’s “1984” is technically categorized as fiction, a recent article, HERE, from The Federalist by Monroe Harless poses the argument that the book contains a disturbingly high number of “descriptors of reality.”
- “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
- “They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”
- “Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution … children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.”
- “I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
- “… one knows the news is all lies anyway.”
- “The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.”
- “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.”
- “Power is not a means; it is an end … The object of persecution is persecution.”
- “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?“ Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said. “Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?”
- “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
- “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”
- “DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
- “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”
- “We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.”
- “The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies — more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity.”
They covered shrinkflation at the grocery store, too, and every time I see it, I’m reminded of this from the book:
For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
Number 15; Every time a member of the administration opens their mouth about “Bidenomics” telling us how much better off we are now then when Trump was in office. The “Ministry of Truth” AKA the Mainstream Media echoes the claims [lies] of the administration.
I have a copy of 1984 and Animal Farm. I periodically give them to someone who has never read them.
From Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” So true!
Indeed. Says so right there on the barn wall. Paint should be dry in an hour or so.
Hey Old NFO;
You see soo much of that in the communist countries where the kids “narc” on the parents because the state is “mother, the state is Father” and the kids have more loyalty to the state that seems to promise more goodies thatn the parents can deliver guarenteeing the loyalty of the kids whereas the parents can’t because the same system destitutes them, funny that. I can see that coming here and many others, “1984 and Animal Farm” were warnings” by George Orwell, whom I believe was a socialist, but wrote books warning about an all encompassing “nanny State”….Funny that.
All- Good points, and no disagreement over here.
George Orwell was an optimist.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”
I first saw the film “1984” when I was about 7 years old, in 1959-60. It and starred Edmund O’Brian as Smith and was made in 1956 so the TV cameras and other technology looked contemporary. The film scared the Hell out of me. And I became very conscious of how society seemed to first edge, and now seems to be careening to becoming Oceania. I pray I am wrong!
Stretch- Agreed… sigh
Ed- I remember that! Yes, it was scary to watch, and even scarier to read back then.
Orwell was not a prophet. He was writing what he knew.
So, future human behavior is not necessarily predicted by the same statistical model as can be fit to past human behavior. Humans have memory.
Communists are kinda explicitly training themselves inside to not have a memory. So future communist results are probably predicted by past communist results. IE, communists now are facists by their own definition, the way they have memory holed their past fellows as facists.
Orwell had simply known the same people, because he had been one.
1984 is a novel of his insular set, and as world building is flawed, because he did not fully understand that there was a world outside his set, and that machines have their own requiremetns.
In a conversation with Whittaker Chambers, Walter Krivitsky (a Chekist and Sovidt spy who following Stalin’s purge of the Red Army’s General Staff defected to the West) said in a conversation with Whittaker Chambers that the USSR had been fascist since Lenin’s suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion in 1921.
Solzhenitsyn demonstrated in Gulag Archipelago that this sort of thing was built in to Communism.