Reviewing 1984 in 2021
Looking back at the collectivized oligarchy of George Orwell's 1984 thirty-seven years after its predicted arrival.
“Orwellian” is a popular adjective in 2021. It is often used to describe instances where governments or organizations engage in overbearing technological surveillance. The widespread use of smartphones, for example, has been described as Orwellian by some social observers because smartphones are used by corporations and governments to collect a wide spectrum of data suitable for many types of surveillance operations. In the dystopia of 1984, there are many mandatory bidirectional telescreens, which are like always-on TVs fixed to a single state-sponsored station that receives and transmits both audio and video, and microphones hidden throughout the environment, but citizens do not carry devices that spy on them, nor do they blast their thoughts and personal activities to the world through the digital megaphone known as social media. While technological surveillance is a major concern of 2021 and a prominent motif of Orwell’s dystopia, it may be asked if intrusive technological surveillance is the prevailing motif deserving of being synonymous with “Orwellian.” This review will show that another theme is central to the work and thus deserving of the association and related popularity in common discourse: oligarchic collectivism.
If you like this review, please subscribe for free. You will get reviews like this sent directly to your inbox. Learn more about this publication.
Review
The story begins in the midst of a dreary war-torn life. Winston Smith is a dissatisfied bureaucrat assigned to a lowly position in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in the official language of Oceania called Newspeak. He is one of the many agents responsible for correcting history. One does not alter history in the Ministry of Truth, one corrects history because all evidence of alteration is fed into slots nicknamed memory holes. Newspapers, books, films… the entire spectrum of media is continuously corrected by Winston and his comrades to support the present position of the Party (Ingsoc) and to reflect the most recent changes to Newspeak – changes which always reduce the expressive potential of the language in order to reduce the range of thought and consciousness of the slave masses. The mission of the ministry is expressed by its slogan:
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Unbeknownst to Winston and his comrades, the dominant political party called Ingsoc — Newspeak for “English Socialism—” has collectivized Oceania under false pretenses: instead of ushering in a socialist state as promised, Ingsoc has installed an oligarchy that seeks to possess pure power over the people — forever. The social hierarchy implemented by the oligarchy is a clear betrayal of the liberal ideals of the socialist revolution which brought Oceania into being, but the oligarchy maintains the air of being the stewards of a socialist state by speaking in the language of socialism and using socialist imagery while they underhandedly practice a severe form of totalitarianism. Collectivization is ultimately a control laundering scheme of the tyrannical oligarchy. In private, the will of the oligarchy is the will of the Party. In public, the will of the Party is the will of a benevolent socialist leader called Big Brother.
If one speaks out against the Party, one is truly speaking out against the oligarchy that rules Oceania with an iron fist, but by the magic of collectivization, all attacks on the Party are framed as attacks on the people. Thus, it is an act of madness to rebel against the Party because it has claimed the right to represent the will of the people: an attack on the Party is an attack on yourself – that’s madness! Every rebel is eventually cured and some are allowed to sincerely confess their sins to the public through a telescreen broadcast. Winston is tormented by life under Party rule, he suspects something is wrong, but he cannot intellectually grasp the nature and aims of the Party because he is mentally crippled by his station in society. He belongs to the Outer Party: a group of functionaries whose reality is controlled by the Inner Party.
The capstone of Oceania’s social pyramid is the deified mustachioed leader of Ingsoc, affectionately known to his devoted followers as Big Brother or B-B. His imperial image looms over the population, conditioning them to believe that his will is the will of Oceania, but B-B is merely the fictional figurehead of the secret oligarchy known as the Inner Party. The subservient Outer Party mainly consists of government bureaucrats who are closely monitored by the Inner Party’s Thought Police. Beneath them all is the proletariat, i.e., the much-reviled apolitical working people. The Thought Police does not monitor the proletariat because the thoughts of the proles are believed to be nothing more than a harmless mixture of dissociated facts and petty concerns. “The proles are not human beings,” they say.
The Ministry of Truth’s continuous alteration of the past is only one pillar of the reality control imposed on citizens by the oligarchic elite. The wars waged by the Ministry of Peace suppress the Middle and Low populations by the various pressures of perpetual warfare: violence, stress, sacrifice, fear, the ecstasy of victory, wartime patriotic propaganda, etc. The Ministry of Love sniffs out all potential traitors with its Thought Police. Enemies of the state are regularly hung and children are among some of the most enthusiastic spectators. The Ministry of Plenty also shapes reality with spells of deprivation: food and supply shortages are responsible for the dreary lives of most citizens. These four state ministries work together to manufacture the psychological and physical reality of the citizens of Oceania.
The naming of the ministries in opposition to their true functions is an apparent exercise in doublethink: “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” In modern psychology, doublethink is called cognitive dissonance. It is one of the many weapons used by the oligarchy of Oceania to disorient and confuse its citizens. Doublethink is the annihilation of rational thought and resulting schizophrenic consciousness. The centrality of doublethink to the reign of the oligarchy is represented by the doublethink slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
As Winston wrestles with his state-imposed cognitive dissonance and tries to feebly stitch bits and pieces of observation and feeling together to form an understanding of his world, we are shown the inner workings of a traumatized mind straining to make sense of an insane environment. Without even knowing as much as the correct date, he starts keeping a diary to help him order his thoughts and resolve the paradoxes which imprison his mind, but the act itself terrifies him – he is committing thoughtcrime, the crime that contains all other crimes. He hides from the telescreen in a little corner of his room when he writes, but he knows the Thought Police will eventually capture and torture him – they always get their man.
Winston is not strong enough to overthrow the Party, nor is he capable of understanding its true nature and aims. He’s a lonely sufferer under the boot of the system; he knows he’s trapped like a rat and he has no hope of being saved, but his hatred of Big Brother motivates him to rebel. It is in this desperate condition that O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party attached to Winston’s unit in the Ministry of Truth, attracts Winston’s attention during one of the daily Party rituals called Two Minutes Hate. Amid the frantic yelling of Party members gathered to cast their hatred onto the image of the fictional arch-traitor and bogeyman of Oceania, Emmanuel Goldstein and his fanatical armies captured by the spell of his book –the book, – Winston believes he detects a sympathetic air of discontent when he makes eye contact with O’Brien. From this subtle exchange onwards, O’Brien is a symbol of hope for Winston: maybe he knows how to fight Big Brother, maybe he is a member of the underground Brotherhood of Goldstein followers, or maybe he is just a fellow rebel that can reassure him in his sanity by saying “I am with you.”
Anyone can be a secret agent of Goldstein’s Brotherhood. Every member of the Outer Party is trained from an early age to maintain a constant suspicion of everyone – even one’s parents. Parents are terrified of their children because children often report their parents for real and imagined crimes against the Party. There are no laws, but people disappear regularly – they are vaporized, i.e., the Ministry of Truth unpersons them by removing their names from all records and the Ministry of Love breaks their minds before shooting them in the back of the head. In a collectivized society, where people are supposed to embrace each other with communal love, Winston is alienated by his discontent because even something as innocuous as a stray frown could cause his peers to report him for thoughtcrime. There is no room for debate: the will of the Party is the will of Big Brother and B-B is god.
During his struggle to find an expression of his discontent, Winston takes notice of a younger woman named Julia. He initially hates her because her apparent youthful devotion to the Party is a perverted case of beauty feeding ugliness. The orthodoxy of Ingsoc has declared eroticism to be the enemy of the people and women pledge themselves to the Party and Big Brother like Christian nuns wed themselves to Jesus Christ. Julia seems to show some interest in him after the manner of a cat: she regularly places herself near Winston. He begins to interpret her interest as surveillance tactics – she must be a member of the Thought Police! – but then she collides with him in a hallway and passes him a note as he helps her up. The note simply says: “I love you.” It takes Winston some effort to safely read the note in private because Big Brother is always watching you through the telescreens and every loyal Party member is a spy. There are no laws against love affairs of course –there are no laws in Oceania, – but there is one unwritten rule concerning thoughtcrime: unorthodox thought must be squashed because the Party is pure orthodoxy. Through a haze of confusion, a ray of clarity lights upon Winston and he writes in his diary:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Julia and Winston go through great lengths to conceal their love affair, but they both know they cannot escape the Thought Police. Their attempt to escape the inescapable, their attempt to create a little dream of a life together in a nightmare, is symptomatic of doublethink. An erotic love affair shouldn’t be emotionally possible in such an environment; yet, their schizophrenic-like minds find a way to distort reality as the critical step in feeling an expression of their instincts which so desperately yearn to be expressed. Winston even feels rejuvenated by the relationship: it gives his dreary life meaning and their rebellious rendezvous become a much-needed measure of his days.
The proletariat occupies a large portion of Winston’s intellectual life. “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” is a prominent mantra of his. It is described by Orwell in his narration as “[a] statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.” The proletariat vastly outnumbers the members of the Outer Party and Inner Party, but the proletariat is unorganized and “they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives” – as the book says. In modern terminology, we may say that the proletariat lacks class consciousness. Winston believes that the reign of the party is too strong to be challenged from the inside; thus, if there is any hope of bringing down Big Brother, it lies with the proles because they do not belong to the Party… but the proles are inherently unfit for the task and hence the absurdity of the mantra.
Winston rented a room above an old antique shop in the proletariat sector that served as a hideout and love nest for him and Julia. One day he hears a prole woman singing a song written by a versificator machine. He looked out the window and saw her bound to her drudgery, as all proles are, but she was imbuing the machine-authored song with such depth of human feeling that it inspired him to say: “The proles are human beings. We are not human.” Despite their lack of awareness and feeble minds, Winston appreciates the apolitical proletariat because they are precisely unlike members of the Party. Members of the Party are concerned with being a part of history, but the proletariat is not historically conscious. They live as if their birth is the beginning of history and their death marks its end. In other words, their consciousness is circumscribed by their lives, not by history. This makes them susceptible to those who live within the stream of history, but living within the stream of life makes them more human.
With Julia in his life, Winston achieved a low state of equilibrium: life isn’t great, but it’s bearable. The looming threat of the Thought Police had settled in the depths of their unconscious minds along with other inescapable dooms such as certain death. As death draws ever nearer, most of us do not die daily by the proxies of anxiety and depression; likewise, they are not crippled by doom as the Thought Police silently comes upon them. We have invited death into our lives by living and they have invited it into their lives by committing thoughtcrime; we the living are the dead, but this doesn’t stop us from doublethinking ourselves alive. It is in this stream of paradoxical life that O’Brien and Winston become confluent once more.
O’Brien casually encountered Winston and made a vague reference to a recently vaporized colleague as he invites Winston to retrieve a new edition of the Newspeak Dictionary from his home. Winston immediately interprets this encounter as the fulfillment of the prophecies born of his hope earlier on. He’s convinced that O’Brien is with him in the secret chant of his heart, confided previously in his diary:
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
Winston takes Julia with him to meet O’Brien at his house. O’Brien lives in a high-class area reserved for Inner Party members. Winston is shocked by the opulence enjoyed by this privileged group – the clandestine oligarchy. His life has been one of deprivation and sacrifice, but these people seem to live in a world of their own. Oceania is leaky ceilings and hungry bellies. How can he still be in Oceania when he is surrounded by such surplus? O’Brien does not seem pleased with Winston’s arrival, but he is welcomed along with Julia. After treating them to fine wine and cigarettes unavailable to members of the servile classes, O’Brien claims that he is a member of the Brotherhood and tries to recruit Winston. Winston accepts and pledges his loyalty to the Brotherhood. The meeting is concluded by O’Brien explaining how the book will be delivered to Winston.
There is no plan. Winston is not directed in his rebellion. He is not an adherent of a well-formulated ideology that refutes the principles of Ingsoc, nor is he aware of any other societies that illuminate Oceania by contrast, he only has “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” ringing on his every breath. He idly passes the time by complying with the demands of his station until the book is finally delivered to him, its secret title revealed: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Winston is reassured by reading the book because it is “the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden.” He finally has the words that shape the amorphous feelings that have haunted him; he knew something was dreadfully wrong with Oceania, but now he knows what it is: Oceania is ruled by a tyrannical oligarchy, not by a benevolent socialist leader.
Julia shows no interest in the book. This prompts Winston to say to her: “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards.” This exchange highlights the difference between them. Winston is an intellectual rebel, but Julia is an instinctual rebel. Julia belongs to the Outer Party, but she aspires to be a member of the proletariat. Winston also belongs to the Outer Party, but desires to have more control over his mind and thus he aspires to be a member of the Inner Party. In other words, within Julia is the seed of the Low, within Winston is the seed of the High, but they are both rebels because they are equally ill-suited for their station in society. Regardless of their diverging potentials, they would shortly meet the same fate – what they knew must come had come.
They were in their hideout when it finally happened. Suddenly a metallic voice rang out from behind a picture frame and it soon became clear that there was a concealed telescreen behind it. Julia and Winston’s little love nest was a Thought Police trap all along. Agents barge into the room and they are separately taken into custody. Winston endures the harsh conditions of a group holding cell where many men are waiting to be whisked away to Room 101. No one has told him what is done to people in the room, but men around him frantically plead not to be taken there.
Room 101 is one of the most powerful symbols in the story. It represents a place where people are mentally broken down by being exposed to their worst fears. The room is a torture chamber, classroom, hospital, and church. O’Brien is his torturer, teacher, doctor, and priest. “We are the priests of power,” O’Brien says. “God is power.” Winston learns directly from a member of the oligarchy what kind of world he is living in when O’Brien launches into an epic supervillain-esque monologue:
“Obedience is not enough. Unless [a man] is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilisations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy – everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.
O’Brien sums up the ethos of the oligarchy, which may be an allusion to Matthew 5:21-22, when he further says:
The command of the old despotisms was “Thou shalt not”. The command of the totalitarians was “Thou shalt”. Our command is “THOU ART”.
All previous tyrannies, according to O’Brien, have focused on controlling the behavior of their subjects, but the oligarchy of Oceania has brought tyranny to a new frontier: they seek to control the very being of their subjects. Winston did not commit any crime against the oligarchy, but he resisted their conditioning and became something they did not want him to be. Thoughtcrime is a symptom of divergent being and thoughtcrime is death; therefore, divergent being is death!
Winston is insane, miseducated, sick, and possessed by the devil. He is fortunate that O’Brien is skilled in all the specialties needed to restore him to a healthy state of being! Unlike his practicing peers in all these specialties, he has no use for the orbitoclast, nor the chalkboard, nor the stethoscope, nor even the cross. He only needs one tool: power. Of all things, Winston fears rats the most. O’Brien has with him a device filled with ravenous rats that are chomping at an inner gate controlled by an external lever. He attaches the device to Winston’s face and this is the ultimate expression of power: to stand between a man and his greatest fears. O’Brien has the power to save Winston or press the lever and let the rats frantically burrow their way through his eyeballs and mouth. At this moment, Winston becomes sane, a star pupil, cured, saved, and the sign of all these miraculous, simultaneous, and instantaneous transformations is his cry: “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”
In a moment of utter clarity, Winston was shown a place where there was no darkness. He was broken by the truth: he would do anything, betray anyone, to save himself. With a power so absolute reigning over him, he could be made into anything the oligarchy wanted him to be. O’Brien was right: God is power. Winston was released back into society and given a lucrative sinecure. Now that he had seen the light, he was utterly harmless. Julia was released as well, but Winston was a new man and she was a new woman – there was nothing left between them in the light.
Winston was sitting in the Chesnutt Tree, a café frequented by those who have passed through Room 101, when the final bits and pieces came together in his mind and he became a perfect citizen, i.e., the model of what the oligarchy wanted him to be. Glowing with the love of Big Brother, a bullet finally entered the back of Winston’s head – it was the ultimate expression of power, a great triumphant orgasm: to reconstruct a slave’s mind so that he loves you and then send him to the anonymous mass grave of unpersoned persons killed and erased.
Conclusion
“The whole point to a ruling class is they don't conspire: they all think alike.”
— Gore Vidal, The United States of Amnesia
Orwell’s generation witnessed the birth of fascism in Europe and the rise of communism in Asia. It was a time of crisis where mustachioed strongmen promised to save their nations from utter calamity. The ideology of the communists and fascists differed, but the governments they brought into being shared many similarities. In particular, they all imposed a type of artificial unity on their populations, which may be called collectivization, and they were ruled by small groups of megalomaniacs, i.e., they were collectivized oligarchies. The way ideology was used by these oligarchies to trick people around the world into accepting their enslavement was undoubtedly the inspiration for 1984.
What would life be like as a citizen trapped in one of these collectivized oligarchies? We are provided the answer to this question – or rather an experience of the answer – by Orwell’s seminal work. It’s a portrait of collective madness. Nobody knows the truth about the government they live and die for because the oligarchy controls their reality. The people are constantly whipped up into violent frenzies, they are told to fear an imaginary boogieman, they live under constant wartime stress, the family unit has been sabotaged by the state, and even their language has been defiled. The people have been degraded by the very people they believe to be their valiant champions. And worst of all, their great hero, Big Brother, isn’t even real – just a figment of the oligarchy’s twisted imagination. They have been fooled into pledging their undying loyalty to a man that doesn’t even exist and this is a symbol of the great Lie of Oceania.
In 2021 we may look around us at the surveillance state, perpetual wars, increasing transfer of power and wealth into the hands of the few, incredible sprawling bureaucracies, falling literacy rates, disruptions to the stability of the atomic family, militarized police, unapologetic use of propaganda, the prison–industrial complex, and ask ourselves: could 1984 ever come to a year such as 2021? And if it ever did come, would we be like the citizens of Oceania and never even know that it has come?
If you enjoyed this review, please subscribe for free. If you want to buy 1984 and support independent writing, you can buy it on amazon by clicking on this link.