It occurs to me that there’s a good book waiting to be written comparing `1984 to organized religion. Goldstein is a symbol of God, the three states are three major religions fighting each other, the Party is religion punishing its members for its perceived “sins,” the whole “sex for procreation only” belief.
On the contrary. Imagine if the ONLY encyclopedia that existed was wikipedia but run by IngSoc and it didn’t have a track version function. Facts are editible, truth would be whatever you decided you wanted it to be from moment to moment. At least if you’re holding a book you can look at it from day to day and know that what it says hasn’t changed. Online, not so much.
Which is not only completely unlike the situation we have, but it’s also completely unlike anything that could arise from something like the Internet.
Realistically I find that unlikely. As Bryan Ekers said, the entire place appears to be decaying. And If nothing else, I don’t see such a society producing competent, honest scientists, so they won’t deal well with new problems as they come along. A world run along 1984 lines would probably pollute itself while telling itself that the crops had always been black and greasy, wouldn’t even figure out that global warming or acid rain existed, and in general would run itself into the ground. And Newspeak if it worked as advertised would make things even worse; they wouldn’t even be able to think about new problems much less solve them.
Or maybe just one world government faking a conflict. Or maybe Oceania is actually just a tiny isolationist society like a more successful North Korea, and there are free nations to flee too - if only the populace knew they existed.
In various essays he wrote, Orwell presages many of the themes he included in 1984. For example, the three nuclear-armed superpowers that arrive at a state of perpetual cold war in spelled out in You and the Atom Bomb. In the same essay he says
Orwell’s fear was that the democractic phase of society might turn out to be a short-lived abberation and that the world might be returning to an industrial form of steady-state society, in which the ability to cope with newness isn’t important because there would be nothing new (O’Brien says as much towards the end of the novel).
Sure; my point was that’s he’s wrong. Not that he likely realizes it; he’s the product of a culture that is utterly focused on the political and on the idea that reality is what the Party says it is. Sooner or later some natural disaster or disastrous consequence of their social system/technology will come along (which is why I mentioned pollution), and they won’t be mentally equipped to even admit the problem exists, much less solve it. For example, if they produce CFCs, they’ll keep on doing so until the ozone layer is completely destroyed; probably without even finding the cause and effect relationship. Or even seriously looking for it.
Not with the internet as we know it obviously, but in the context of the book try and imagine - IMAGINE - an internet controlled by IngSoc. That would be more ephemeral and easy to control than hard copy. We’ve come to associate the internet with empowerment and freedom through knowledge, but given how IngSoc and the party controlled everything else is it totally beyond belief that they could do the same thing with a tool like the internet? (particularly if it were state run)
Point taken!
Perhaps we should say “electronic storage of all important data” rather than the Internet. But in any case it’s difficult to imagine the sort of digital technology we take for granted being developed in a totalitarian world that didn’t already have it.
I can imagine this if the only access means were through monitored terminals and not PCs with local data storage.
Chilling, eh?
Wait… that was what we had just a few decades ago!
Hmmmmmmm:eek:
“The Brotherhood” in Nineteen Eighty-Four exists in the same fashion that “the terrorists” do in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; that is, that if they exist at all at the time of the story, they are benign, but used as a boogeyman for all manner of misdeeds and a rallying cry that outshouts any objections about infringement of personal liberties. That it is also useful as an aid in identifying potential traitors is just an additional benefit. The government in both literary creations is too reactionary and unimaginative to have come up with this on their own.
I personally find the story of Huxley’s Brave New World to be more likely and horrifying; a population so compliant and dependent upon privilege of presumed superiority that the concept of independent thought is repugnant, and those so capable need to be isolated for the greater good.
Stranger
With all due respect, that’s like saying “imagine a unicorn without a horn but with wings”. I can imagine such a thing, but it wouldn’t be a unicorn, despite the way it’s described. The Internet is more than just a really big computer network: Its defining quality is not its size, but the fact that it cannot be controlled. It’s designed from the ground up to resist damage by routing around it, and censorship is treated as damage.
I’m hijacking here but what you’re describing is what the internet has come to be known as in reality, not how it is technically defined. Technically, it is just a big network that allows communication between computers, it’s what we’ve done with that that has made it as you have described.
Well, fortunately, Orwell was wrong. It turns out it’s not possible to sustain an large industrial society indefinitely through terror alone, or at least the cracks were showing by the real-world year 1984 when the aging Patriotic War veterans were getting too old to handle the USSR. Even in the fictional version, assuming Eastasia and Eurasia actually exist as competitors to Oceania, a small advantage in innovation will translate to victory, while restraining thought will not. Orwell tries to imply that doublethink would allow technological process since the Party members can believe propaganda and fact at the same time, even if they contradict, but what happens when a scientist recites the official party line (i.e. that Big Brother invented the atom bomb and thus it is perfect) but simultaneously realizes that A-bombs need careful maintenance and are thus not perfect? If this scientists encounters a semi-educated but ambitious Party member who warmly embraces the first concept but has no understanding of the second, that scientist can get vaporised on a whim, for no other reason than a Party member accuses him, and once that scientist vanishes, so much for atom bomb maintenance and innovation in Oceania. Which of the three superstates will lose its atomic arsenal first?
Heck, it doesn’t even have to be a matter of weaponry - which of the three superstates will suffer a major pandemic first? Sooner or later, one of the states is going to have the advantage of being less unlucky or incompetent than the others. Possibly by then any semblance of industrialization will have vanished, with artifacts like railroads and airplanes being the mysterious work of ancient geniuses - though the words for “ancient genius” will no longer exist, at least officially.