Just Finished Reading George Orwell's 1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four. which I just finished reading, was probably English writer George Orwell's most well-known novel, with many of its concepts and sayings in common use today ("Big brother is watching you", "Thought police", "War is peace", etc.).  It was first published in 1948, just a couple of years before its author's death.  Orwell was strongly aware of his era's rise of totalitarian governments and studied the tactics of political control used over the people in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.   And much of the material in the book, about the future totalitarian society of the mega-nation Oceania, appears to come straight out of these regimes' policies...as expressed through the words and actions of the "Party" that dominate every aspect of life.  But Nineteen Eighty-Four goes much further to display a society that has refined its totalitarianism to the point that even facial expressions are captured and analyzed through pervasive surveillance, even in people's homes.  People who diverge from the Party line in any way are subject to arrest, disappearance, and then any vestige of them ever having existed erased from the records. And those who personally knew anyone so eliminated must also speak and act as well as if they had never existed, lest they themselves be subject to "discipline".

Nineteen Eighty-Four's protagonist is Winston Smith, a low-level Party functionary employed in the Ministry of Truth, which like many other departments performs work in direct contradiction to its title.  His job is to take whatever the Party position currently is on any matter, be it war, economics...or the "disappeared", and revise all historical records and books to reflect that change...retroactively.  So Oceania, which had recently been allied with mega-nation Eurasia, is suddenly at war against it and Winston has to work feverishly with his colleagues to revise all records to show that Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia.  For to reveal any change in policy would mean that the Party was fallible, and that wouldn't do.

Nineteen Eighty-Four introduces several concepts pertaining to the Party's all-oppressive control of society, including Newspeak, doublethink, and thoughtcrime.  The language is continually being revised in order to reduce the number of words needed for expression...along with any usage that could express criminalized concepts like "liberty", "equality", or "democracy".   Winston's journey through this story is based on his doubts about the society he lives in and his desire to find others sharing his skepticism who are willing to oppose it.  To this end he meets and forms a romantic relationship with a young woman named Julia and comes under the leadership of a higher Party member named O'Brien.  It is the interplay between these three characters that drives the book's story to its rather sobering end...

There are many elements to Nineteen Eighty-Four that I could discuss: a couple of them, the rewriting of history to suit the Party's current position and the selective framing of narratives, accepting only the information that supports their policies and eliminating any that runs against them, demonstrate the Party line that truth is not objective, based on facts, but rather subjective, originating in the mind...and that the only valid truth is in the Party's mind.  Today we don't live here in a totalitarian society, but it struck me as I was reading Nineteen Eighty-Four that in the past few decades, many people have freely come to embrace this subjective outlook on reality...especially when you see the different social, political and religious camps out there, each with their own "facts" and histories. Unlike with Nineteen Eighty-Four, you're free to join up with whichever group you choose, but once you're in you're expected to embrace their "reality"...