There's two directions I could take this post. There's the one where I take an objective view of Nineteen Eighty-Four and look at the book in a vacuum, digging into the narrative and the writing style and not much else.
That direction is boring.
There's also the direction where I take a very much subjective view of the book, look at the politics and messages in the text and the warnings that are present here, and dig into the relevance that the book has to the modern world.
That direction is uncomfortable and could potentially put all of my own political and sociological views on display if I'm not careful.
That direction is also the one I have to go in, because this book was an uncomfortable read and I need to unpack things a bit before I move on to my next read. There was never any other option, I was always going to go down this path in writing this piece.
So, we really have to start with the general idea of what this book is. The phrase 'Big Brother is watching you' has entered the popular consciousness, to the point that there's a whole global long-running franchise of reality shows called Big Brother. This comes from a partial understanding of the nature of Big Brother and the general form of the police state that is Oceania and more specifically London under the control of Ingsoc. Yes, it's a surveillance state; nothing can be done that isn't potentially being watched. But there's a lot more to it than just the surveillance.
The central idea that is at work in Ingsoc London is so much worse than merely being a surveillance state, though. For one, this is where the idea of "thought police" comes from. Any ideas that are a deviation from the party line, even memories, are considered to be thoughtcrime and are understood to be a crime that carries the death penalty. This isn't entirely accurate, but it's very close. There is no evidence allowed to exist that supports the idea of there being an objective reality other than what the Party wants the population to believe there to be. This is so ingrained into everyone that at one point in the book, during a vast celebration of patriotic xenophobia that includes posters and banners stating that the foe of Oceania is Eurasia, the foe changes abruptly to Eastasia in the middle of a speech and the whole population spontaneously remembers that they've always been at war with Eastasia, so clearly all these posters vilifying their ally Eurasia were placed by rebellious agitators who want to destroy Ingsoc and thus everything needs to be pulled down and destroyed.
It's that abrupt. The orator changes the direction of his speech in response to a note handed to him, without even missing a beat, and the whole population just turns on a dime.
A big part of this is because of the nature of the society in question. Ingsoc is a shortened form of 'English Socialism', though in practice it's precisely as much of a socialist party as the National Socialists in Germany were; indeed, this is what Orwell, a socialist himself, was trying to illustrate. The most insidious part of Ingsoc is not the surveillance state, or even the organized rewriting of the past to fit the present (an act which is the job of protagonist Winston Smith). It's how language itself is used as a weapon, wielded like a scalpel to shape thoughts themselves.
A useful thought experiment comes in the form of considering how one generates their words when writing. If you're thinking about an object that can be described in concrete terms (say, an elephant), you first picture an image of the object, then find the words that match it. If you think about the feel of the elephant's skin, you have to picture the texture before you can attach the word 'rough'. But if you're thinking about an abstract concept, such as 'democracy', what image can you attach that properly serves as a base? You have to start from the words.
Ingsoc is actively working to create a new version of the language, called Newspeak, that will eventually replace modern English, referred to as Oldspeak. One of the hallmarks of Newspeak is that vocabulary is very precisely defined, so that most basic words have a single meaning; additionally, when two words are opposites, one can be removed and replaced with the other, just with an 'un-' prefix added. Doubleplus ungood if you're a fan of language, though equally an incredibly insidious way of controlling thought. One can't think about freedom if the definition of 'free' only allows for its use in the sense of 'sugar-free'. One can't think about general equality of people as a whole when 'equal' is defined as 'precisely the same', so that all people being equal would require that everyone be, essentially, clones. If you don't have the words for complex abstract thought that goes against the Party because all such concepts have been imprecisely bodged together into the single term 'crimethink', well... I'm sure the implications are clear.
Nineteen Eighty-Four goes farther, though, than simply explicating these ideas in a narrative form, however. It goes so far as to show just how such a ruling class will go about maintaining that power, and how they 'fix' anyone whose thoughts are unable to conform. Winston Smith spends the last part of the book being tortured and systematically stripped of his ability to maintain his badthinking ways, training him in the art of doublethink, having two contradictory thoughts simultaneously in his head and believing only the one that is suitable, so that he can be a productive, obedient and goodthinking member of society. This begins with a sequence that was absolutely being referenced when Star Trek: The Next Generation did their torture episode, where Smith is told that when a man holds up four fingers in front of him, he is supposed to know instinctively, to truly believe that there are five fingers being held up. By the end of the book, he genuinely does, willing and eager to accept without a moment's hesitation or doubt that if the party says 2+2=5, then 2+2 couldn't possibly be 4.
This may be the one thing that's the most chilling about this book, in fact: there is absolutely no hope on display here. This is possibly the most pessimistic dystopia I've ever encountered; through the whole book, Smith is telling himself repeatedly that he knows exactly how the road he's traveling ends. He knows that his doubt of Big Brother's benevolence and the Party's rightness will inevitably lead him to the torture chambers of the Ministry of Love, and from there, eventually, to execution. We don't see this last part in the book, but even in his newfound place as a truly obedient Party member, he knows it's eventually going to come. That's the point; Ingsoc doesn't just kill dissidents; it re-educates them until they've truly repented and can't do anything less than go perfectly with the Party line, before eventually killing them when it's the most appropriate timing.
For a long time, I've seen a bumper sticker on cars now and then, which reads "The answer to 1984 is 1776." To me, this indicates that the person who has that sticker on their car hasn't ever actually read the book. Leaving aside that the appendix on the methods of Newspeak explicitly spells out how the words of Jefferson could never survive the work of those like Smith who rewrite everything to match Party thought, let alone be translated to Newspeak, the book goes out of its way to lay out exactly how Oceanic society has been stratified, how the education system is designed to turn children into good little agents of the Party who are eager to turn in even their own parents for thoughtcrimes, how even the most minor indiscretion will get even the most enthusiastic Party member turned in. The masses are kept uneducated, the Party members are caught up in infectious hyper-patriotism, and all dissent is rapidly dealt with. The constant state of war means that even with mechanized production, goods are kept rationed and everyone is left in a state of want, because everything can be sent off to the battle fronts, effectively removing resources and keeping everything in a permanent state of rationing and austerity. The Party is even going so far as to ensure that future generations will be ever less able to effectively resist, by stripping them of the very words they would need in order to build a resistance, by changing the meaning of words to mean different things than they used to mean... In short, by building a society designed around the sole purpose of keeping those in power, well... in power. Objective reality ceases to exist, replaced by the world that the Party and its mouthpieces want those who are subject to its power to believe exists.
Replaced by the world where 2+2=5.
I'm going to be honest here... I look at the world today and it makes me feel decidedly less than optimistic. An awful lot of people seem to have forgotten that freedom has responsibilities attached, and are more than eager to believe whatever their demagogues of choice spout out, regardless of how those beliefs reflect objective reality. Words get twisted, so that 'socialism' has over the decades become a political buzzword for 'whatever the political Right doesn't like at the moment, even if they liked it a whole lot just a couple of years ago', and some kind of ridiculous doublethink has people claiming the Newspeak-esque term 'Antifa' (short for anti-fascist) indicates that someone is, in fact, a fascist. Critical Race Theory, an educational concept that rarely appears outside of post-grad law school, has somehow become something that is taught in Kindergarten, at least if one listens to the mouthpieces. And far be it for anyone to even suggest that slavery was a problem outside of the American South in the time of the Civil War (which wasn't about slavery, it was state rights! to have legal slavery) and that racism isn't inherently baked into everything that European culture has ever touched.
This book messed me up. I can't honestly look at Ingsoc and its methods and think of anything other than what I've watched the political landscape turn into over the last decade. Populism, isolationism, militarism, blind patriotism, the last administration's attempts at a willful rewriting of history to make it reflect what they wanted rather than objective reality, the resulting uncontained crazy that was the January 6th insurrection...
I would have gotten something totally different out of this if I'd read it 20 years ago when I was in high school instead of now. It probably wouldn't have hit me nearly as hard. But then, the world was different then.
For one, people generally agreed about objective reality.
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