Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four
By: George Orwell
[Fulfilled ‘A Classic’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2023 Reading Challenge]
“We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
Somehow I never read this one in high school.
It’s a hard book to read because there is torture and brainwashing and it’s just overall a depressing and hopeless book.
There are probably endless places to get a literary review of the book in terms of why Orwell wrote the book, the political context of when it was written, the symbolism, etc. You won’t find that here- there are others far more qualified than me to do that.
If I was reading this for a class I would be more interested in learning and studying all of that. In the ‘centennial’ version of the book I read there is a foreword and an afterword that offers some of that analysis.
But I’m not here to delve into all of that. I’m more interested in looking at the similarities of what I read in 1984 and what I’m seeing in the United States today.
You don’t really read 1984 for the ‘story’ or plot or characters. You read it because you want to see the observations Orwell makes about a controlling government and what it will do to maintain that control for no other reason than just the power.
Even if you haven’t read this book you’ve more than likely heard of Big Brother. The reality TV show of the same name adapts the concept of 24-hour surveillance as depicted in this book.
Big Brother could be Hitler or Stalin or any sort of Communist or dictatorship type of government. America isn’t in a totalitarian government (as of now) and yet we still see overlap with what Winston, our main character, goes through in this book.
The afterword in the book says that 1984 explores this question:
“Can human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love—that is to say, can man forget that he is human?”
The most jarring takeaway I got from reading this book is that Orwell has depicted (whether intentional or not) what a world looks like when God is taken out of the picture. It’s a dark, helpless, and hopeless place in Oceania.
The government can do whatever it wants. It can rewrite history, it can kill at will, the proles (the “dumb masses”) could rise up and revolt but they won’t and no one could ever lead them because Big Brother, with their surveillance, would get to them first. There is torture, there is brainwashing. Objective reality and objective truth does not exist. If you are caught, they will break you. What more could there be to live for to resist their will? Compliance is the only path.
And if you read this book as an atheist I can only imagine what kind of feeling you are sitting with. But God exists. He is real, living, and working, and that makes all the difference. Once God is in the picture, there is hope. Because no man, government, system, or weapon could thwart his plans and his will to protect his people and his name.
All of a sudden there is reason to resist. There is reason to believe that history cannot be rewritten. There is objective truth. There is reality. Joy cannot be taken. Peace and comfort can be had. Our inner thoughts are meaningful. People are important and worth sacrificing for. And all along the way you know that God is in control and nothing is outside his ability to know or stop or change.
God created us with eternity in our hearts. Human nature cannot be altered so much as to extinguish the flame of the image of God, the One we were created from and for. There are ways we can lose parts of our humanity but when God is in the picture, we have souls connected to an eternal Creator and nothing can completely sever that bond or torture it out you.
[If you wonder why I can believe that, check out one of these books: Why Believe? by Neil Shenvi or Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin or Is Easter Unbelievable by Rebecca McLaughlin or Taking God at His Word by Kevin DeYoung or Surviving Religion 101 by Michael J. Kruger or Why God Makes Sense in a World that Doesn’t by Gavin Ortlund]
Now to look at some of the features of 1984 and see what stuck out to me:
The Ministries
The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts but told lies and created propaganda.
The Ministry of Love maintained law and order but tortured and brainwashed in order to force people into a universal viewpoint.
“The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.”
The Ministry of Peace concerned itself with war which in this book meant to always be at war as a means to control.
“The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”
The Ministry of Plenty was responsible for economic affairs and made sure people were starving and in need.
“It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.”
The first two of these are what hit me the most. Today we are in a culture where it is now proper to say ‘my truth’ instead of ‘the truth.’ We are in a place where ‘fake news’ and ‘misinformation’ are common phrases. Just because something says it’s true, doesn’t make it so. The idea of an objective truth or an objective reality is eroding in America today. People’s critical thinking skills are eroding.
Just because something doesn’t feel like love, doesn’t mean it’s not. Everyone agreeing on everything does not make love abound. D.A. Carson explores the change in the word ‘tolerance’ in his book The Intolerance of Tolerance.
Of course, I believe my beliefs are right and I want others to believe them, but if free speech is eliminated and we are not allowed diversity in our thinking, we are in trouble. We would be that much closer to living in Oceania.
If you’re wondering how freedom of speech is deteriorating read this insightful book: The Coddling of the American Mind which I think should be more required reading than 1984.
All of this leads into:
Two Minutes of Hate
In the book Big Brother instituted a daily ritual called Two Minutes of Hate where they would put on all the screens (which were everywhere) the face of ‘the enemy.’ In this case a ‘rebel’ named Goldstein. And then for two minutes everyone would yell and growl and spew hateful things and overall just be enraged at this man.
This feels a lot like Twitter and cancel culture to me. Mob rage at its finest.
And I’m not going to try and defend Trump, but I’m pretty sure there is two minutes of hate for that man on the daily online and on almost every news station. There’s definitely reasons to talk about him, but the amount of outright, consistent, and constant Trump-hate, it really does start to feel like propaganda.
If we want to unite our country, the way to do it is not by creating a common enemy we can all hate together.
I think it is wise to again, use critical thinking, and steer clear of participating in any sort of mob mentality.
Doublethink
This is the term used in the book to describe when someone believes two contradicting beliefs— cognitive dissonance.
“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient…”
There is a lot of this going around. I think the most prominent example in my mind is when people say killing is immoral but abortion is not only moral, but a necessary right that can’t be taken away. They genuinely believe both of these things and yet don’t see the doublethink required to hold both of these beliefs.
Which leads me to…
Controlling Language
A major marker of totalitarian governments is the controlling of language. Reinventing words, changing meanings, etc.
“You think our job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it. We’re destroying words—scores of them!”
In the book they created Newspeak in an effort to pare down vocabulary and control what people say. They eliminate synonyms and antonyms. One concern of this, among many, is the elimination of nuance which hinders the truth from being known.
One way I see this today is again, revolving around abortion and LGBTQ topics. Abortion is now termed ‘reproductive health’ or ‘reproductive rights’ which puts a positive spin on the killing of an infant in the womb.
Anyone who disagrees with their viewpoints on either of these are labeled as bigots, hateful, misogynists and more.
If you don’t think language is powerful, you may find Amanda Montell’s book Cultish insightful. By controlling the language in this way it perpetuates an ‘us vs them’ mentality which is a feature of cults. There’s actually some overlap in cults and totalitarian-esque governments or groups.
Another telling thing is what Rod Dreher shares in his book Live Not By Lies which was written after interviewing people who lived in Communist countries but now reside in the US and the ways they are seeing things happen here in America that happened in their country before things got really bad.
“What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice. Further, these utopian progressives are constantly changing the standards of thought, speech, and behavior.”
As Dreher warns- “Language creates reality.”
You can see the grouping he talks about at work in the ideology of intersectionality.
Another relevant and insightful book that looks at Marxist thought (which is directly relevant to 1984) and intersectionality, etc: Cynical Theories.
Rewriting History
Related to controlling language is controlling the past.
In 1984 one of the Party’s slogans is: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
It is a little harder for this one to be prominent today because of our access to the internet. Banning/burning books or limiting access to information for the general public would be a huge red flag. If we lose access to information we will become unable to combat lies of history. Although deciphering truth from lie online is no easy task.
I know there is a big push to ‘correct’ history because it is claimed that history is only written by the victors. I can see places where that makes sense, but I’ve also seen people rewriting history in a way that groups people and uses labels of good and bad. This is a means to control the past and thus the future. It makes it easier to paint groups as enemies, change the language surrounding that group, and then reinforcing hatred for that group with regular and consistent ‘hate.’
In Dreher’s book he says:
“According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is.”
If rewriting history involves a lot of destroying of traditions and institutions, we should view that as a red flag. We need to use our critical thinking and be wary of this. I’m sure we can find a tradition that is okay to eliminate, but the more we eliminate, the easier it is to eliminate all of them and that’s a problem.
We know that these changes are made GRADUALLY. They don’t want to jar us out of our comfort. We won’t take big leaps from this belief to that belief, but we’re more than willing to make little compromises for the sake of ‘peace’ until we’ve traveled from point A to point B without even knowing it.
Objective Truth
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.”
“How do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is in changeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”
Orwell describes for us what happens when truth and morality is not objective but determined by fallible human beings. When it is decided by the people in power or even by the masses.
What happens? It changes. It changes to suit their needs. Objective truth has to exist, morality has to exist— outside of ourselves. Again, when God is in the picture, it all makes sense. There is order, there is an unchanging standard that we can trust.
“Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
You may find yourself ‘on the right side’ now in terms of what is culturally right and wrong or what you believe to be true. But the reality is, at some point you’re going to find yourself on the wrong side because ‘progress’ never stops. Then what? The basis for truth, reality, and morality has to be external or we have no leg to stand on.
In Cynical Theories they comment, “The progressive left has aligned itself not with Modernity but with postmodernism, which rejects objective truth as a fantasy dreamed up by naive and/or arrogantly bigoted Englightenment thinkers who underestimated the collateral consequences of Modernity’s progress.”
One aspect of absolute truth is math. In 1984 Big Brother prides itself on the ability to convince people that 2+2=5. Why? Because they said so. But we know that math is real and it exists outside our desires.
Yet, even that is currently under attack. In some places the idea that 2+2=4 is seen as a product of white supremacy. Probably because they rewrote history where only white people used math? You’ll find this viewpoint in a study of Post-Colonial Theory.
In Cyncial Theories they say, “Arguments have been made that mathematics is intrinsically sexist and racist because of its focus on objectivity and proof and because of disparate outcomes in mathematics education across racial groups.”
Honestly, I couldn’t explain this to you if I tried because it’s insane, but they assert this claim with passion. Is that not a problem?
Read 1984 if you want to see what happens when objective truth does not exist. It will drive you to lunacy if there is no way to know if there is truth or how to find truth. Postmodernism says there is no way to know. But the implications of that claim are far-reaching and quite problematic.
“It is one of the most characteristic and destructive developments of our own society that man, becoming more and more of an instrument, transforms reality more and more into something relative to his own interests and functions. Truth is proven by the consensus of millions.” (The Afterword)
Relative truth is destructive.
Turning Children Against Parents
“The children were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations.”
It was common in Oceania for children to report their parents to the authorities where the parents would be arrested by the Thought Police and would typically vanish and be erased from existence. Not only did the Party try to sever loyalties between parents and children but between friends and between lovers. Love was a bond they couldn’t afford to exist.
Loyalties were something the Party were unable to control if they became too deep.
I see this today in some respects, but most prominently when it comes to LGBTQ topics. Children are taught to see their parents as the bad guys, as people who don’t really love them unless they agree with their feelings or support their choices. Whether physically or just emotionally, there is a separation that is forced.
Abigail Shrier highlights this in her book Irreversible Damage. Youtubers teach kids how to lie to their parents and what to say to their schools or their counselors so that others view their parents as ‘hostile’ towards the child thus making a way for kids to ‘get what they want’ because their parents are now lableled ‘unsafe.’
A public school teacher told Shrier, “their parental right ended when those children were enrolled in public school.”
Schools in California are allowing children to get hormone shots without parental consent.
Someone who transitioned as a teenager but is no longer trans shared some of her experience with Shrier: “When she complained online about her parents, queer adults often coached her on running away from her family. At the time, she believed that these adults—not her parents—had her best interest in mind, and that they were generally helping her to escape mentally and physically from a tumultuous home. But she no longer sees it that way. They were ‘weaponizing it against me to kind of draw me into their community more, and draw me away from anyone who would give me rational ways of thinking about my life.’”
Study after study shows the stability and benefits (both indivudally and communally) of the nuclear/natural family. But the nuclear family is a threat to a government or group that wants to acquire and maintain control. Isolation of people from support, loyalty, and unconditional love is essential to keep people loyal to their authority.
As you can see, the observations Orwell made all those years ago are still relevant today and it’s worth your time to consider them.
Recommendation
I don’t have to give a star rating here on my website, which I like, because especially with a classic it’s hard to give a rating. It’s a popular book and it has stood the test of time. It offers a lot of interesting and insightful observations and it gives us a glimpse into the political climate of when Orwell originally wrote it.
But it’s not necessarily a book you will enjoy reading or come away feeling invigorated. You’re not really going to like the characters or the ending and it’s hard to read about torture.
I’m not big into classics. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because somehow this book and Wuthering Heights are both considered classics and that doesn’t make sense to me. They are definitely on different levels. What makes a book a classic and why should I want to read them? I’d have to do some pondering on that.
I would say in this case there is more reason to read 1984 than there is not to. Let it inspire your critical thinking skills and let yourself ponder our current culture. See what overlap you see.
But remember,
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
[Content Advisory: Minimal (if any) swearing- I somehow can’t remember; some sexual content and comments; torture and brainwashing]
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