George Orwell: smart or subtle?

Cafe Society
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You know, since we are talking about entertainment of many forms, I’d like to start a discussion on the book 1984. I have read it within the year and have enjoyed it quite extensively. There is a motherload of discussion material so let’s get going.
1st of all: Is 1984 happening right now?
2nd: Are we living in the age of the telescreens…the two way telescreen mentality? What did those represent to you?
3rd: The ending is quite disappointing for those who love happily ever afters. I’d like to see some different viewpoints on room 101, and betrayal and overthrowing the mind. Can this sort of stuff happen. Does it to this extent now?
4th: Are we headed in this direction?

5th: How does sex play a part in the story? What does it mean?
I will have more questions later when i think of them…

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Nope, though “1984” and “Big Brother” do get tossed around an awful lot. Though some argue the constant surveillance that corporations and law-enforcement agencies use to track us (internet tools, computer databases, cheap security video cameras, etc) are modern Orwell, the constant element of low-level fear, frustration and paranoia is absent in most Westernized countries. Truly ruthless totalitarian states do exist, but they’re ultimately less efficient that liberal democracies.

There will come a time when an individual’s choice of entertainment and information content will be recorded (wait until everyone gets their television via the internet, for example) but this doesn’t quite match up with Orwell’s telescreens that cannot be switched off and whose content is government-mandated.

Well, it did sort-of happen during the Soviet era, where dissent could be labeled as a form of mental illness and dissidents were hospitalized/imprisoned in the name of “curing” them. Certainly people are still “programming” their children with racist attitudes. Orwell’s “Room 101” was to demonstrate: (A) O’Brien had been watching Winston long enough to figure out Winston’s crucial weakness and (B) an organized and patient attempt to break a man will ultimately succeed.

Screw happy endings. The 1956 film version screwed around with the ending to make it “happy”, and Orwell’s Animal Farm has been similarly butchered in at least two film versions.

Who’s “we” ? The United States? I rather doubt it. The Ministry of Truth in 1984 worked on the strict principle that (A) most of the Proles were illiterate and (B) all available information was under governmental control and subject to retroactive alteration. I don’t see illiteracy rates rising in the U.S. or other western democracies, and the free exchange of information has been helped along immensely by the internet, which actively resists government control.

Sex means pretty much what the text says: it’s a major instinct bottled down as a means of oppression and control. Sex, typically, is private and the Party was driving toward a world where privacy didn’t exist.

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Incidentally, Orwell was smart and subtle.

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Interesting way to look at it. I have been told a few times by a few people that the book speaks for the times, but i can’t see it. Animal farm was about a time ago, but 1984 still has depth. Do you seriously think that the U.S. couldn’t head in that direction?

We are getting to a point now where they can insert chips into our wrists that can be scanned and work as identification and act as credit card of sorts…

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“They?”

What “they” are you referring to? Chip implants are potentially interesting, but I don’t see them being put in American adults without their consent.

The U.S. could head in that direction. It could be wiped out by a giant comet, too. I’m not betting on either.

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That would be damn handy and I’ll get one as soon as they are available! It would be nice if it could also be used as a form of ID for other transactions, and if they could figure out a way to track them (which would require more than a chip, you need an antennae to send radiowaves of the frequency that can carry) it would virtually put an end to kidnapping, missing persons, etc.

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I can’t argue with most of what’s been said above (although I hope beyond hope that Maru’s tongue was in his cheek because that’s just psycho).

However, I’ve always thought the more “realistic” future totalitarian novel, not to mention the better written one, was Huxley’s Brave New World. C’mon, keeping people under control by giving them huge amounts of entertainment and recreation and an oligarchy-based class structure? Although Huxley later disavowed much of what he wrote (Brave New World Revisited) the refutation read to me like someone was holding a pistol to his head.

If you’ve not read BNW, treat yourself.

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i’ll have to check out that book like you mentioned…

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One of the most interesting people in the world to listen speak is Christopher Hitchens who wrote “Why Orwell Matters.” He says that the #1 thing Orwell was really about was portraying the world as it really is and not as you want it to look like. So I dont think we are at the stage of 1984. There might be some media forms of “control” as suggested by Bowling for Columbine, but I dont think 1984 is realistic. To get to that level of consolidation, especially in our society, requires too much planning, too many things to go right for the planners, too much could go wrong, and too many vested interests for it not to happen. But who knows. I dont think Orwell thought it was a plausible sequence of events, but more a stage for him to discuss his view to refuse yourself all propoganda and see the world as it really is no matter how insanely controlling it is.

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i am also curious as to how the homeland security could play into this for the US. We are trying to get all those FBI type organizations under one roof and we are worried about peace and protection and security…couldn’t this be close?

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Not in the sense that Orwell was describing, but in certain ways, yes. When you reflect on how much power American corporations have over supposedly free citizens, doesn’t it scare the hell out of you?

Consider that in order to live, you have to work. In order to work, you have to convince an employer to give you a job. And in order to convince them to give you (or let you keep) a job they can investigate your personal history for decades, obtain and evaluate your credit history, compel you to provide samples of your urine or blood or hair for chemical analysis, determine whether you or anyone in your family should receive medical care and to what degree they should receive it, open your mail, compel you to use a computer and then monitor every keystroke you make, listen to and record your telephone calls and use anything you say against you, arbitrarily change your employment classification so they can force you to work extra hours or days without pay, conduct a physical search of your person or work area without warrant, rewrite your job description in order to give you additional responsibilities without an increase in pay, dictate how you live by fixing the wage for your position across the industry, dictate where you live through involuntary transfer, sever your employment at any time for any reason or no reason, force you to devote a portion of your retirement savings to the purchase of company stock, make you sign a contract stipulating that any original idea occurring to you during the course of your employment belongs to them, and of course, prohibit you from ‘competing against’ them by working in your field of expertise for several years should you suddenly decide to quit.

Don’t like those terms? You’re welcome to work for another employer legally entitled to treat you the same.

I know that every time I use a credit card I’m revealing my identity and social status before the transaction, and my shopping habits, brand preferences and estimated income afterwards. I know the information is jealously scrutinized, tabulated and resold to third parties who use that information to bring demographically targeted ‘special offers’ to my attention. I know that telemarketers know far more about me than just my name and phone number. I know that cash, for all of its inconveniences, is the only anonymous payment method at my disposal and even that can reveal information about me.

So really who needs a telescreen? They can read your Visa statement to find out what you’ve been up to.

It was a happily ever after, both for the Party and for Smith. I believe that’s why it’s ultimately regarded as satire rather than horror, kind of like Swift’s Modest Proposal in which he suggested that if Ireland had too many babies and not enough potatos it should be obvious which one to eat.

I think it was the right book at the right time. The end of WWII, the mind-fuck of finding out what was going on in Germany and Poland, the invention of the atom bomb, Stalinist Russia, the advent of radar, guided missiles and even television… the future looked very bleak in 1949. But the decades of the 50s through the 80s, the world in which most of us grew up, was much more stable and pleasant than anyone would have anticipated then. That makes me generally optimistic about our own future, though it wouldn’t hurt us to have an attitude adjustment of Orwellian magnitude along the way.

It’s almost beside the point. Orwell wasn’t satisfied to tattle on the marxists by exposing the true motivation for revolution, he also narced on the church by laying bare the mechanics of deism. He scored a few bonus points like the observation that religion hates nothing more than a good shag because it uses up energy that could otherwise be channeled into zealotry, but there wasn’t alot of sentimentality involved in the relationship as a plot device. Orwell was idealistic in his way, but not particularly romantic.

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I think his “always need an enemy” concept can be applied to the US military industrial complex. I think his double speak concept can be applied to many US politicians and thier bills past and present.

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I agree on the adjustment, but i think we should look into our future. There were subtleties in the book, as well as blatant statements. Remember “3 MINUTE HATE”? It was pure propoganda and it controlled everyone. Now days we are controlled by what we see on Television. We see an ad for toothpaste and buy it because the commercial said so (Quite a general assumption but work with me here). In the same thread, couldn’t we have been slowly evolving toward this point?

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rural rage?

“Get the Hell outta that pasture you damn horse!”

:wink: Just kidding.

I agree with you.

Whenever I see television (not much) they always show the face of public enemy #1, that’s right folks, OBL.
The way I see it is as if they are saying, “See this guy? Yeah, him. This is the guy you’re supposed to hate.”

Don’t interpret this post as a pro OBL post, because it’s not. I just dislike how oafish the whole business is. They do the same thing with murderers, child molesters, and so forth.

Another thing I feel rarely gets noticed or talked about regarding 1984 is the people themselves, and how they are.
The Big Brother Administration (read:Government) is always what people want to point out. What I found interesting was how neighbors would rat you out in Oceana. Repression didn’t generate a sense of shared suffering, but quite the opposite.
Sometimes I think people are the way they were in the novel.
Great book. Visionary.
I think Orwell had a truth to reveal, but I don’t let it get me down.

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Actually, it was the Two-minutes hate (50% less hateful) and its goal was to give the people a chance to express a lot of violent emotion, since they were otherwise completely oppressed and locked down with no natural outlets like hobbies, sex or sports.

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Remember where Orwell was coming from : he had a serious love-affair with marxism/leninsm as a young man, and both 1984 and Animal Farm were written to come to terms with his own disillusionment, more than as as predictions.

To answer the main question of the thread, Orwell was an extremely intelligent and insightful writer. He left an enormous body of commentary on the pre and post WW2 situations, travelled extensively and had a great pen.

FallenAngel has a good point - read Brave New World. It comes much closer to the current world. In many ways, its frightening how much Huxley foresaw, especially in the light of things like cloning that are only now becoming issues.

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Smart or subtle?
How can that book be seen as subtle?
About as subtle as a kick in the gut.

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I wonder why almost no one’s saying that no, it isn’t. In no meaningful way, IMHO. What’s more, it wasn’t happening in 1984 in the Soviet Union, either.

Thing is, most people in the Soviet Union pretty much hated the regime there (hence the regime collapsed), so the whole idea of “1984” was pretty much wrong.

In fact, I don’t think “1984” is even theoretically possible. For example, just who would be inventing/building/maintaining those telescreens if everyone is so stupid/illiterate/crazy? And that’s not a minor detail. The problem with “1984” is that technological advancement requires at least some sort of intellectual freedom. And technological advancement is necessary in order not to be conquered by the other states. So, there you have it - if Oceania were to exist, it wouldn’t be for long.

Sure, totalitarian systems do exists; but they are based on constatnt physical(not mental) repression of the opposition.

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Well, I don’t think anyone should approach 1984 as prophetic in some way. Would you do that with The Illuminatus! Trilogy? (Good heavens!) Animal Farm was told from the perspective of literal farm animals; we don’t ask if pigs are communist (or whatever, I don’t recall the role the different animals played—hated that book). Similarly, 1984 was told from the perspective of extreme oppression; we shouldn’t ask if this is “really” happening. It isn’t in any literal way (that should be obvious).

But I think it serves fine as an anolgy to many things. Chastity programs and the Junior Anti-Sex League? Easy comparison there. The media reports still shockingly sound like government releases on all sorts of matters; shortages of this, surpluses of that, yet another great bubble, and so on. The permeation of propaganda was more in line for comparison than what the propaganda was about, though I think Orwell more or less engaged in hyperbole rather than out-and-out fiction.

To me, it is like he said to himself. “People say these things, and have one time or another wanted something like it; what if they were carried out to their end conclusion?”

I would have never thought that a genocide program would happen in modern times, I still wonder how the Inquisition happened, I can’t fathom the rise of empires… a lot of human history is pretty much not something that could be predicted in any significant way. One should never feel safe because “people just wouldn’t do that.” They have. Time and time again. So I don’t care if Orwell’s story is about it all happening at once or not—the plausibility of the discrete elements is there, IMO.

A history book should be all the low-grade paranoia one needs, but the news is happy to provide more for us.

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Stellablue wrote:

Shoudn’t that read “a boot stamping on a human face–for ever.”