1984

In 1949, George Orwell's book, 1984, came off the press. Today, 57 years after it first came out, the book continues to be a marvel for its depiction of life in a totalitarian society that controls the thoughts and behavior of its citizens. Political events early this year had caused citizens to worry that 1984 was about to become a reality, with their freedom of speech and expression on the brink of being cut off, and with government dictating how they should think and write and speak and behave without question. As we read, or reread, Orwell's book, we realize that we are indeed on the precipice of destruction if we allow not simply governments, but technological progress, to take full control of our lives.

The year is 1984, and the scene is London, center of Airstrip One, which has the largest population in the country of Oceania. Oceania is one of three countries into which the world is divided, the others being Eurasia and Eastasia. The book, written in 1949 (a year before the author Orwell dies), creates a "dyastopia" 35 years from thence, that is, in 1984. A dyastopia is a society where people lead dehumanized and fearful lives, thereby living in a corrupted and depressed state of depreciation and oppression. Government, led by Big Brother (whose giant poster-photographs are everywhere, his eyes looking down on citizens) monitors the movements (through telescreens installed in the homes and throughout the city) and with the Thought Police able to read the thoughts of citizens and the suspects are simply made to disappear by a process of evaporation.

Orwell created a whole vocabulary of words concerning totalitarian control – Newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrime. Newspeak is the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English socialism. Doublethink, curiously, is the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them; what Big Brother says, of course, is the accepted truth, and no one dares question that.

As N. Akuat of Argentina put it: "Orwell tried to depict a totalitarian state, where the truth didn't exist as such, but was merely what the Big Brother said it was. Freedom was only total obedience to the Party, and love an alien concept, unless it was love for the Party."

The main character in the novel is Winston Smith, a functionary at the Ministry of Truth whose work involved the "correction" of all records each time the Big Brother decided that the truth had changed. The Party slogan said that "who controls the past controls the future, which controls the present controls the past." Other slogans state incongruous concepts: "War Is Peace," "Freedom Is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Strength."

Little by little Winston begins to realize that things are not right, and he and his girlfriend (a relationship not allowed by the Party which holds that sex is not to be enjoyed but performed simply for procreation), falls into a trap of befriending and confessing their desire to an intra-party member (a fact they did not realize until too late) to join a rebel Brotherhood that could turn things around. They are turned in, and physically and mentally tortured, and in the end, Winston is given to drinking gin after work at the Ministry of Love, "with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody . . . But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

Readers have associated the totalitarian society Orwell projects with communism. But control over the human mind is imposed as well by the progress in communications and other technologies, a critic on the Internet (Google) observes. "Governments and business today have moral power than ever to monitor and influence what we buy, where we go, what we watch or read, and what we believe."

The same observer notes that the recent terrorist attacks in the US (most notably the destruction of the twin World Trade Towers in New York and the Pentagon, and the delivery of Anthrax spores to public officials and the media in the US) have made most citizens "more willing than ever to give up more individual freedoms and privacy in exchange for the promise of greater security."

"Long denied the right to violate basic individual rights and freedom and privacy, the law enforcement and surveillance communities and their governments are seizing the day, and making rapid steps to pass relatively permanent legislation giving the government powers which – prior to the acts of September 11, 2001 – would have been considered by the general populace to be powers properly unleashed only for temporary periods of national emergency.

"In the process, questions are being raised as to whether the surrender of individual freedom will actually result in greater security, or whether we, in giving up freedom for security, are satisfying the aim of the terrorists to begin with: to undermine freedom of choice, equality under the law, and the dignity of every individual."

Orwell, writes an observer, produced the first book — to which we have turned for a vivid picture of a government that has used war to justify infringement on freedom; that has used speech codes to limit everyone's ability to understand higher concepts or concepts that favor human individuality; that uses powerful media to build unwarranted consensus and rewrite history; and that has used technology to nip political opposition and individualist or eccentric processes in the bud."

But, far from being a caricature, 1984 "insightfully characterizes the tendencies and motivations of unlimited government power, and the horrifying, hopeless result of such government; humanity denied its freedom to think, to be rational, and to dissent . . . its freedom to be human."

Erich Fromm, in the afterword of 1984, writes that Orwell is "simply implying that the new form of managerial industrialism, in which man builds machines which act like men and develops men who act like machines, is conducive to an era of dehumanization and complete alienation, in which men are transformed into things and become appendices to the process of production and consumption." Orwell, like other creators of Utopias implies that "this danger exists not only in communism of the Russian or Chinese versions, but that it is a danger inherent in the modern mode of production and relatively independent of the various ideologies."

But Orwell writes Fromm "is not a prophet of disaster. He wants to warn and to awaken us. . . His hope is a desperate one. The hope can be realized only by recognizing, so 1984 teaches us, the danger with which all men are confronted today, the danger of a society of automatons who will have lost every trace of individuality, of love, of critical thought, and yet who will not be aware of it because of ‘doublethink.’ Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings. And it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too."

George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Blair (1903-50). He was born in Bengal and educated at Eton. Her served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then returned to Europe to earn his living by writing novels and essays. Another work that brought him fame is Animal Farm. Notations in the Signet Classic, note that he was essentially "a man of intense feelings and fierce hates . . . He was critical of communism, but considered himself a socialist. He hated intellectuals, although he was a literary critic. He despised cant, lying, and cruelty in life and in literature. Upon his death, he left behind a growing reputation for greatness and a substantial body of work that bore out his conviction that modern man was inadequate to cope with the demands of his history."

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