When George Orwell penned his now-famous dystopian novel, “1984” — released 67 years ago in June 1949 — it was intended as fiction. The futuristic setting is more than three decades in our rearview mirror, but many aspects of the book have come eerily true today.
The novel tells of a socially stratified post-nuclear war world ruled by three superstates — Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia.
Fortunately, there’s been no global nuclear war — mostly because Donald Trump hasn’t won the election yet — and Russia hasn’t annexed all of Europe, but here’s a look at some parts of the novel that have come to pass:
Endless War
In Orwell’s masterpiece, the world is always at war. The enemy changes, but the war never ends. At one point, during a “Hate Week” rally, the nation’s alliances abruptly change and the speaker seamlessly shifts mid-sentence from denouncing one enemy to denouncing another. The battleground is never clear — it’s always someplace far away — but the supposed fighting keeps the country in a permanent wartime economy and creates a common enemy, other than the repressive government of Big Brother.
Today, we have the War on Terror, a battle with an unclear battleground and no end in sight.
The Surveillance State
One of the most defining characteristics of Orwell’s novel is the extent of Big Brother’s surveillance state. In fact, the entire concept of Big Brother has become so synonymous with omnipresent surveillance that it sparked a reality show of the same name in which the contestants are under constant surveillance.
The book features telescreens that are dual-purpose devices — they both play a steady stream of televised propaganda and record everything going on. Telescreens are present in upper- and middle-class homes, but not in the “prole” homes, because the government doesn’t really care what the poor people are doing anyway.
Today, we have our own little two-way devices we carry around everywhere — cell phones. They’ve created a world where it’s safest to assume everything is recorded, always. Like telescreens, they can even be used for government surveillance — as the FBI proved in 2006 when they used an alleged mobster’s phone as a “roving bug,” hacking in to turn the mic on and record.
Aside from roving bugs, though, there are spy programs for phone metadata collection, internet use monitoring and warrantless wiretapping controversies. Maybe 1984 isn’t such a thing of the past.
Newspeak
Created by the crazy totalitarian state, Newspeak is a truncated version of English, where words are strung together and abbreviated to create new words. In other words, it’s basically how we text, amirite?
True, Newspeak is far more sinister in its purpose than text slang — although presumably grammar nerds may find them similarly deplorable. In “1984,” Newspeak is a deliberately limiting language, intended to make revolutionary thought impossible by scrubbing the words for it from the common vocabulary. Text slang, on the other hand, is more about convenience and autocorrect. The net results of the two have a lot of similarities, though.
Doublethink
Doublethink is an inherently contradictory part of Newspeak and 1984 Party politics. According to the novel, doublethink is, “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.”
In other words, it’s pretty much the basis of Donald Trump’s campaign.
The Placated Proles
The Proles — the lower-class people who make up the majority of Oceania’s population — are largely ignored by the government. They don’t face the same kind of indoctrination that the Inner and Outer Party members do and for the most part they’re kept under control by rumors spread by the Thought Police and easy access to various vices.
“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds,” Orwell wrote. They’re also placated with easy access to Party-produced porn and certain crimes — including prostitution, drug-dealing and racketeering — go pretty much unchecked in the prole portions of town. Basically, the idea is to keep the proles placated and distracted, so that they don’t pay any attention to the political machinations moving the world around them.
Today, in a world where a naked Kardashian selfie can attract more attention than the State of the Union, it’s not hard to see some parallels.
