In his disturbing novel 1984, George Orwell famously took readers into a blood-chilling, futuristic nation where the totalitarian government of Big Brother controlled every life, policing not just people’s actions, but even their thoughts.
It was a government that demanded absolute fealty, where the job of the “minister of truth” was to rewrite history and the “minister of peace” ran the military.
The novel, published in 1949, was so effective that “Orwellian” and “Big Brother” are now woven into the fabric of our language.
The story introduced “Newspeak,” a restrictive, manufactured national language that made it hard to express dissent.
Then there was the plot’s terrifying “unperson.” When an opinion or action clashed with those of the state, a disappearance followed – not only of the citizen, but of any record that the person ever existed.
Obvious fact met similar obliteration. One character asks, “…how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable?”
The pitiless hand of unchecked oligarchy is the spooky focus of this novel, whose protagonist insists early on that indeed, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” But in the end, crushed by brutality and brainwashing, he scrawls, “2 + 2 = 5.”
It’s strictly a coincidence that according to Big Brother, the most dangerous man alive in 1984 was a dissident named Goldstein. His truth was, “The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”
I’m no equal to that Goldstein, who was clever enough to escape a death sentence and start an opposition party.
It’s instructive to contemplate one passage from 1984 in which a government lackey explains:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power…
“We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing… All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
“They pretended…that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.
“We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.”
And here’s George Orwell at his prescient best: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.”
Of his enduring novel, Orwell once said, “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will necessarily arrive… but I believe that something resembling it could arrive.”
By George, the guy was onto something.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.